“It’s simply because gay people congregate there. “We said it’s clear that this recommendation from the city is not because of any activity going on at the bar,” Damis remembers. all activities, with no attempt to cover these activities.ĭamis and other attorneys pressed their arguments to the liquor commission. “I remember saying, ‘You can’t do that,’” Damis says, “and one commissioner saying, ‘We’re the city, we can do anything!’ Well, no.” He didn’t permit any hanky-panky.” The city’s move struck Damis, and other attorneys representing bar owners, as patently discriminatory. “The owner bought it knowing it was a gay bar,” Damis, now 82 and still practicing law, recalls. James Damis was a young attorney, representing the Tel & Tel.
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After a series of hearings in November and December, the city moved to shut down six bars, pressuring the OLCC to revoke their licenses. Schrunk and the council decided this would not stand (though one commissioner astutely noted that “these people are not going to disappear”). From then on, all activities, such as males openly kissing each other, fondling each other, with no attempt to cover these activities.” at the Harbor Club saw a huge crowd “packing it, with standing room only. Boag’s OHQ article culls some transcript gems: the police testified of women who “caress, kiss and fondle each other in public” at the Model Inn. Boag classifies Schrunk, a Democrat, as a “breadwinner liberal,” favoring benevolent big government-for traditional households and citizens only.īy ’64, Schrunk had launched a Committee for Decent Literature and Films (!), and heated rhetoric swirled in city council meetings.
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By 196 4, he had already survived a racketeering scandal that led to a US Senate investigation and a trial in which US Attorney General Robert F. Schrunk reigned as mayor for 16 years, somehow bridging the Eisenhower era, ’60s tumult, and the early ’70s. “The police and officials just left them alone-there weren’t raids or that sort of thing.” “The door would open and, whoever you were, you just walked in,” Cole says.
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The archive records Other Inn as Portland’s first leather bar, launched in ’64 on SW Alder between Second and Third. Cole notes the Dahl & Penne Tavern, on SW Second just off the Morrison Bridge the GLAPN archives memorialize a late-night scene there starting around 1962. “The bars were flourishing,” the 87-year-old stage legend recalls. Walter Cole, best known as Darcelle XV, remembers the early ’60s, a few years before he founded his now-iconic drag club in Old Town. The door would open and, whoever you were, you just walked in. The police and officials just left them alone. confirmed Lesbians.”) By the early ’60s, the scene (as surveyed by a GLAPN tour of historic sites) included the lesbian-friendly Milwaukie Tavern and the gay-male-oriented Tel & Tel on SW Oak. (Boag’s article quotes a 1949 police report: “These women were recently ousted from San Francisco for their actions and are. The Rathskeller, on SW Taylor Street, developed a reputation by the ’40s in roughly the same era, women seeking women gathered at the Buick Café, at SW 13th and Washington.
A few works of scholarship document this lost world, notably the online GLAPN archives and a 2004 Oregon Historical Quarterly essay by historian Peter Boag, readily accessible online. Some dated to the ’30s or before many flickered in and out of existence according to the usual whims of business, culture, and real estate. (Customers asked at the counter.) In the years after World War II, a small crescent of welcoming spaces evolved along our rainy streets. By the early 1960s, Rich’s Cigar Store stocked ONE and the “homophile” Mattachine Society’s Review, decorous political magazines published out of Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively. “There was no organization,” Nicola says, “and everything was very closeted.” Progress was basically subterranean. )įive decades and more ago, it was a different town. (Almost, but given certain ideologies prominent in national politics, not quite. It’s almost impossible to imagine queer Portland in the shadows. An out bisexual Portlander serves as Oregon’s governor an out Portland lesbian, as state Speaker of the House. As George Nicola, a longtime activist and historian for the Gay and Les bian Archives of the Pacific Northwest (GLAPN), notes, the local power structure embraced equality long ago: “Since Bud Clark was elected in 1984, every mayor has been gay-friendly.” The city elected its first gay mayor in 2008.
T oday, June’s Pride celebration is a decades-old civic tradition.