OREGON GAY HISTORY TIMELINE
1806
Lewis and Clark, seeking the mouth of the Willamette River, are directed by local Indians to a place where “two young men” live together, they having left the tribe to set up a home.
1811
A report is published about a woman in the Kutenai tribe in Oregon who dresses like a man and has a “wife.”
1843
A gathering of pioneers at Champoeg adopts the first code of laws for what now is Oregon. The code is adopted from the code of Iowa simply because a new arrival happened to have a copy of the Iowa code with him. Because the Iowa law didn’t outlaw sodomy, neither did Oregon.
1850
A new code of law adopted by the Oregon Territorial legislature does not include sodomy as a crime, keeping it legal.
1853
A new criminal code in Oregon makes sodomy a crime for the first time, with a penalty set a 1‑5 years in prison.
1871
A slander case in Portland leads to a jury siding with a man seeking damages for having been accused of sodomy.
1871
Judge Matthew Deady returns a group of prints from homoerotic frescoes from the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum that had been proposed as donations to the public library. “I would not have believed such pictures ever existed,” he confides to his diary.
1871
Oregon suffrage leader Abigail Scott Duniway reprints in The New Northwest a tirade against her as a “gal with a manly air.”
1884
Congress extends all the laws of Oregon to Alaska. This gives Alaska Oregon’s sodomy law.
Even though sodomy has been a crime in Oregon since 1853, it is not until this year that the first person is sent to the Oregon State Penitentiary for committing it.
1889
Twenty‑year‑old Charles Cowan is admitted to the Oregon State Penitentiary for sodomy and his record notes, “Anus opening large & scarred from plying his trade of Sodomist.”
1890
Two men enter the Oregon Penitentiary for sodomy a couple of weeks apart and the clerk entering information into the prison register writes “Sodomy !” for each, but does place an exclamation point after the crimes of manslaughter or rape.
1894
A neighbor reports a Gay male couple in Portland to the police and both are jailed.
1898
Oregon‑born itinerant laborer Hayes Perkins notes in his diary that he encountered a “homo‑sexual” traveling with his “punk” with him “constantly.” Clearly not understanding their relationship, Perkins states “they act like two sixteen‑year‑old lovers more than two friends.”
1899
The Portland Medical Society hears a paper read by a doctor concerning syphilis of the tonsil.
1901
By this year, Lownesdale Square in Downtown Portland was well‑known as a Gay cruising spot. This park was restricted to men (and Chapman Square was restricted to women) at the time.
1903
The Northwest Medical Journal reviews Havelock Ellis’s work, Analysis of the Sexual Impulse—Love and Pain—The Sexual Impulse in Women, and engages in its first discussion of homosexuality.
1907
Gay businessman Theodore Kruse purchases the Belvidere Hotel at Fourth and Alder in Portland. Inside is the Louvre Restaurant, which Kruse turns into a “bohemian” place that becomes a thriving spot for Portland’s Gay men. A separate “Gent’s Dining Room” has mirrored walls and palm trees. The restaurant is cited by newspapers for frequent liquor law violations and is called a “front” for “immoral activity.”
Openly Lesbian physician Marie Equi presents a paper to the Multnomah County Medical Society regarding her treatment of a male patient who had gonorrhea of the throat.
1911
Gay businessman Theodore Kruse is reported as missing by his wife. When another woman is suggested, his wife responds for publication, “I never knew of his having associated with another woman. I laugh at such a suggestion because I had virtually to drive him out with the young men of his acquaintance to attend banquets or other social affairs.” Kruse later is seen traveling with various other men and returns to Portland several months later. He and his wife are divorced almost immediately afterward.
1912
English military hero and Boy Scout founder Robert Baden‑Powell makes an appearance in Portland but is met by a huge, hostile crowd holding what newspapers call “ribald” banners mocking his quotes about Boy Scouts. Newspapers note he is accompanied by an entourage of “young men” and later in the year a local paper formally outs him to Portland readers.
1912
Five young Gay men, including one couple, out for a nighttime drive in what is now Lake Oswego, are accosted by a robber on the highway. Two of them men, including one of the couple, are killed by the robber, and two others are injured. During the trial of the perpetrator, the surviving half of the couple is trapped by a defense attorney into acknowledging that he and one of the deceased men were sitting intertwined on the back seat.
1912
Nell Pickerell, passing herself as Harry E. Allen, is arrested in Portland on a Mann Act charge. When it is learned that she is a woman dressed as a man, the Mann Act charge is dropped, but she is prosecuted for vagrancy. Traveling with her is Isabelle Maxwell, whom Pickerell claimed to have married. Portland policewoman Lola Baldwin comments harshly on Pickerell and Maxwell in her official records.
1912
The “Vice Clique Scandal” breaks in Portland (frequently erroneously called the “YMCA Scandal.”) After a general vice investigation in the city, 68 men are involved including a few who have some prominence in the city. The Oregon Journal coins the term “vice clique” to refer to the men, and two of the three other dailies begin using it regularly to refer to them as well. Six trials are held and four other men plead guilty to charges involving private, consensual sexual activity. Three convicted men appeal their convictions and all are freed by the Oregon Supreme Court.
Following the breaking of the “Vice Clique Scandal” in Portland, Oregon Congressman A. W. Lafferty pledges to have Congress investigate homosexuality on a nationwide basis. Nothing comes of his pledge and two Oregon newspapers ridicule his proposal as a mere cover for his own well‑known sexual interest in underage females. However, naming the Portland Scandal specifically, the U.S. Justice Department orders its agents throughout the country to turn over whatever information it has on “vice conditions” in various cities to local officials.
1913
On New Year’s Day, the body of Edwin “Sid” Ghirardelli is found in his room at the Byron Hotel in Downtown Portland. He has committed suicide by poison after being fired from his job for being Gay and being rejected by his prominent San Francisco family for the same reason. His family had sent him to Portland to keep him away from various men in San Francisco and told his Portland employer to keep an eye on him to be sure he didn’t “stray.” When Ghirardelli “strayed,” he was fired.
1913
In reaction to the Vice Clique Scandal, the Oregon legislature amends the state’s sodomy law to broaden it to cover virtually any erotic act whatsoever except the missionary position and triples the maximum penalty to 15 years in prison.
1913
Also in reaction to the Vice Clique Scandal, the Oregon legislature enacts a law authorizing the sexual sterilization of “sexual perverts” and “moral degenerates.” A referendum is launched against the new proposal and, in what can be classified accurately as this nation’s first Gay rights referendum, Oregon voters repeal the law by a 56%‑44% margin. The law is favored by a majority of voters in only four counties scattered around the state. During the campaign, a Portland man signing his name “Duncan Fraser Ph.D.” has a letter to the editor published in the Oregon Journal opposing the law and defending “homo-sexualists.” Noted social activist Emma Goldman comes to Portland to campaign for the law’s repeal as well.
1913
The national publication Physical Culture notes sex education is offered in Oregon this way: “In Oregon they post pertinent warnings coupled with an offer of private instruction, in all public toilet rooms – which is proper – but that sort of thing does not belong in the curriculum of the public schools.”
1913
William Quartier, the Oregon State Penitentiary’s pharmacist, is arrested for sodomy “under dramatic circumstances” at work, but local newspapers give no further information.
A Portland newspaper reports that “an insane moral pervert” is removed from the local YMCA.
1915
Multnomah County Juvenile Court Judge William Gatens warns parents to be way of “girl chums.”
1915
Openly Lesbian Portland physician and social activist Marie Equi adopts a girl in Oregon.
1915
Social activist Emma Goldman makes a speech in Downtown Portland defending homosexuality. Although Portland police arrested her for her speech on birth control, they did not interfere with her speech on homosexuality.
1917
Ignoring the will of the voters in the sterilization referendum of 1913, the Oregon legislature passes a new sterilization law covering “sexual perverts” and “moral degenerates.” Oregon, more than any other state in the nation, tends to use castration on male prisoners and ovariotomy on female prisoners.
1917
Just a few years after his involvement in the Vice Clique Scandal, local photographer John Moffitt begins running ads in the Portland City Directory calling himself “The Photographer of Men.”
1918
Two Oregon prisoners file a lawsuit challenging the right of the state to sterilize them sexually. One is a straight man convicted of rape, the other a Gay man convicted of sodomy. The straight man withdraws his lawsuit and allows himself to be castrated, but the Gay prisoner convinces the state not to castrate him.
1918
The Oregon Supreme Court upholds the sodomy conviction of a man of Greek ancestry, Tom Kapsalas, for consensual sex in a Columbia County lumbering camp. At his trial, the prosecution calls the jury’s attention to the “past glories of Greece.” Kapsalas enters the Oregon Penitentiary at the height of that year’s Spanish influenza pandemic and dies from the disease shortly after arrival.
1918
Lesbian physician and social activist Marie Equi is convicted in Portland of sedition for opposing U.S. involvement in the First World War. During her trial, the prosecutor refers to her as a “degenerate.”
1921
Harry Staben, who had been involved in the 1912‑1913 Vice Clique Scandal, is arrested and held briefly on a charge of murder. He is released after he gives police his alibi for the date in question – that he had gone to a Portland café and was picked up by a man for sex and was with the man at the time the murder occurred.
1921
A Marion County trial court strikes down the state’s sterilization law that had been used on 127 people.
1923
The Oregon legislature enacts a new sterilization law that both eliminates the definition of “sexual perverts,” and eliminates any need for these “perverts” to show reproductive potential in order to be sterilized.
1925
The Oregon legislature broadens the sterilization law to require anyone convicted of sodomy to be referred to the Board of Eugenics for possible sterilization.
1928
A second Gay sex scandal occurs in Portland when about 10 men are arrested for private, consensual sexual activity.
1928
The Oregon Supreme unanimously interprets the state’s broad sodomy law to include as sodomy the consensual masturbation of another person.
1935
Oregon Governor Charles Martin announces that no prisoner convicted of a sex crime will be pardoned unless sexually sterilized first. He also asks the state legislature for a broader sterilization law patterned on that of Nazi Germany. In a special session that year, Martin gets a new law that requires a list of names of all known “sexual perverts” to be turned over to the state’s Board of Eugenics for possible sterilization, whether or not these “perverts” commit a crime.
1937
A Gay sex scandal in Seaside involving 14 men is reported in the Astoria newspaper. The story is printed only after one of the arrested men commits suicide in the Clatsop County Jail.
1941
The Oregon Attorney General issues an opinion that physicians performing sterilization operations on “sexual perverts” have an absolute immunity from liability.
1941
Through the end of this year, 182 men and no women have entered the Oregon Penitentiary for sodomy‑related charges; 172 for sodomy, nine for attempted sodomy, and one for solicitation of sodomy.
1948
The Portland Police Journal runs a feature called “The City’s Sex Deviate Problem.”
1948
New York Governor Thomas Dewey, in an upset, defeats former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen in the Oregon Republican primary for President. Dewey’s campaign is managed by the large Portland advertising agency of Joseph Gerber, who had been one of the men involved in the 1912 Vice Clique Scandal in Portland. One of the features of the campaign is the introduction of the modern Presidential debate format, created by Gerber, used for the first time in Salem and broadcast nationwide on radio.
1950
The Oregon Liquor Control Commission allows the reinstatement of a Portland bar’s liquor license only with the proviso that it cease drag shows. Beginning in 1949, Portland police began undercover infiltration of bars to report on drag shows, same‑sex dancing, and sexual solicitation.
1951
A highly secretive investigation of sexual activity at the Portland YMCA occurs. It is not reported in any local newspaper, and has a single known press report in a Los Angeles monthly gossip paper.
1952
Portland Mayor Dorothy Lee, up for reelection, proposes a five‑point program aimed at ridding Portland of “sexual deviates.” The program is not enacted and voters throw Lee out of office.
1952
Psychiatrists object to the planned showing of the film Danger! Strangers in Portland public schools. The film concerns a man kidnapping a girl. One psychiatrist warns that the film is “not at all a true pattern of the homosexual.” Thus, local officials thought that Gay men were interested in girls.
1952
The book USA Confidential claims there is a “fairy club” at Portland’s Lincoln High School.
At campaign stops in Eugene and then Portland, Republican Vice‑Presidential candidate Richard Nixon speaks innuendo that Democratic Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson is Gay. Stevenson had entered into an agreement with opponent Dwight Eisenhower that Stevenson would not raise Eisenhower’s adulterous affair with Kay Summersby in return for Eisenhower’s pledge not to raise Stevenson’s homosexuality. Nixon apparently wasn’t party to the agreement.
1953
Oregon joins the parade of states enacting a “psychopathic offender” law. These laws were scientifically unfounded and operated from the premise that “sexual deviates” operated at a middle level of mental functioning, neither sane nor insane. The result in most states was a rounding up of homosexuals for “cure” in mental institutions.
1957
Oregon becomes the second state (after California) to enact a law prohibiting anyone convicted of sodomy from being a public school teacher.
1958
The Oregon Supreme Court rejects the challenge of the parents of a murdered boy to the Governor’s commutation of the death sentence of their son’s murderer. It was a sex crime in the Medford area.
1961
Lesbian Jeannace Freeman is arrested with her lover, Gertrude Jackson, for the murder of the other woman’s two children. Freeman had convinced Jackson that the children were in the way of their relationship. Upon arrest, Freeman tells reporters, “I’m the butch one.” At her trial in Madras several months later, she appears in skirts and lipstick. She is convicted and sentenced to death. She is on death row at the time of the 1964 statewide vote that abolishes the death penalty, so Governor Hatfield commutes her sentence. Freeman’s name is used by death penalty supporters as a reason to oppose abolition.
1961
A man attempting to be arrested in a Portland park restroom for sexual activity so violently resists that the arresting officer is hospitalized.
1961
The Oregon Supreme Court unanimously rules that the state’s very broad sodomy law outlaws cunnilingus.
1962
An Oregon legislative committee investigating “social problems” learns that the Oregon State Hospital recently fired several Lesbian employees.
1963
Another Gay sex scandal in Portland breaks out and is the subject of lurid headlines in news stories and headlines, including “They Prey on Boys.”
1964
Oregon Journal columnist Doug Baker states that the “Unmentionables,” his term for homosexuals, were so numerous in Portland that one local businessman promised to take “vigilante action” against them.
1964
The Portland City Council asks the Oregon Liquor Control Commission to revoke the liquor licenses of all of Portland’s Gay and Lesbian bars. The OLCC refuses, noting that the bars are operating within the law.
1965
The state’s sterilization law is amended to delete references to “sexual perverts” and “moral degenerates.”
1966
The Oregon Supreme Court upholds the sodomy convictions of a Gay male couple who had been reported to police by a neighbor.
1968
The Oregon Supreme Court finds the book Lesbian Roommate obscene. The decision later is reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
1978
The Oregon Court of Appeals overturns an action of the state’s Board of Medical Examiners dealing with a Gay physician. The Board had ordered him never to have sex, never to associate in the line of duty with any “homosexual or person with homosexual proclivities,” and never to frequent any place resorted to by such persons. The Court finds the restrictions unreasonable.