PeterBoag "Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?" GayCulture andActivism inthe Rose City between World War II andStonewall In the april 1972 edition of the Fountain, Portland's first gay and lesbian newspaper, George Nichols, a local activist, reflected on the recent successful political organizing done among gays and lesbians in Seattle while lamenting the lack of such progress in the Rose City. "Those who are discouraged by the difficulties of the gaymove ment" in Portland, Nichols began, "will do well to take a lesson from our neighboring Seattle." Despite its "crippling depression," he observed, Se attle "has no less than 8 groups and institutions serving the gay commu nity. ... All of them manage towork together to some extent." In conclu sion,Nichols confessed that he and other activists inPortland had spent "a lot of time trying to figure out why the gay movement isn't functioning better in our city" and called upon readers to bury their excuses and look to Seattle as amodel on how tomake things happen.1 Nichols's observations about Seattle and Portland also would have been true as early as 1959,when lesbians and gays in the Puget Sound area, at some public level, had been reaching out, organizing, and pushing for recognition and rights. Those who lived in Portland had remained, for the most part, inactive until about 1970, despite having had critical opportu nities in both the 1950s and 1960s to plead more vociferously their case Research for thisarticlewas supported by theOregon Historical Society'sDonald J. Sterling, Jr., Memorial Senior Research Fellowship. 6 OHQ VOL. IO5, NO. 1 ? 2004 Oregon Historical Society TheHarbor Club (lowerright) on Southwest First Avenue inPortlandwas one of the fewgay bars in the cityfrom the late 1940s, when thisphotograph was taken, until city officials succeeded in closing itdown in 1965. Because of its reputation, soon after it opened the U.S. Navy declared the Harbor Club offlimitstosailors. before a broad public audience. As a result, by the time of New York's Stonewall riot on June 28,1969 ? an event that historians point to as the birth of themodern gay liberation movement nationwide ? Seattle gays and lesbians had a considerable head start over those in the Rose City. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that gays and lesbians in Seattle would also realize some of their civil rights at themunicipal level at a consider ably earlier date than those in Portland did. In September 1973, for ex ample, without much hesitancy, Seattle became the firstmajor American city to ban discrimination against lesbians and gays in both municipal and private employment within the city's boundaries. Meanwhile, the Portland City Council delayed on a far less extensive measure and did not secure an ordinance that protected gays inmunicipal employment until a year later, inDecember 1974. Mayor Neil Goldschmidt and Commissioners Connie McCready and Charles Jordon passed the Portland ordinance over Boag, "Does Portland Need a Homophile Society?" the protests of Commissioners Mildred Schwab and Francis Ivancie, who had thrown up obstacles to the proposal formore than a year. Itwas not until the fall of 1991, eighteen years after Seattle's ordinance was on the books, that the Portland City Council finally extended protections to les bians and gays in the city's places of private employment.2 Some historians argue that "modern" ? that is,post-1969 ? gay rights activismdid not suddenlyspringforthfromtheStonewalluprisingbut, rather, built on the "homophile movement" that had commenced in 1951. Others stress that the lesbian and gay bar cultures that were forged in America's large cities between the 1930s and 1960s produced a political consciousness thatwas readily transformed into a broader activism out side formal homophile organizations in the socially heady times of the early 1960s, some years before the Stonewall riot. Still others maintain that the 1950s and 1960s homophile organizations depended on bar pa trons for the rank and file of their organizations.3 All three explanations can help us understand not only what happened in Portland and Seattle but also why the history of lesbian and gay rights activism in the two urban centers was so different. Unlike Seattle, Portland had no organized homophile movement in the 1950s and 1960s; and when the gay...