Oregon Queer History Collective

We’re continuing our Pride history lessons: How Pride grew during the 20th century.

One year after the uprising at Stonewall Inn, organizers marched on Christopher Street for the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March. As other cities and communities also celebrated the anniversary, it transformed into Gay Pride Day, Gay Pride Week, and Gay Pride Month.

By 1971, Portland based group the Second Foundation of Oregon celebrated Pride in a dancehall downtown. They packed 200 people into the Pythian Building (918 SW Yamhill) for a night of live music and comedy.

Pride expanded through the decades, with thousands showing up in the 1990s. The 1992 march especially drew people out during the No on 9 campaign.

Stay tuned for more history coming out next week!

We have surprises up our sleeves & need your shirts! Bring them to our General Meeting on Thursday, June 4th, at Laurelhurst! Can’t wait to see you later this week!

Pride did not begin with a parade. It was a rebellion, it was an uprising. This June, we’re exploring national Pride History and Oregon’s Q***r History, with explicit bridges connecting them. History is how we know where we’re going.

Happy Pride Month, from OQHC!

It’s Pride Momth! As mentioned in my previous post, The Burnside Bridge’s big bash missed some of important q***r history of the structure.

To start, in 1992 the Walk for Love & Justice marched across the bridge and joined Portland Pride. The walk originally started in Eugene on June 7th as an effort to “build bridges and to promote an end to oppression and hatred in all of its forms including racism, sexism, homophobia and heterosexism.”

Activist Anne Galisky proposed the plan to the Le***an Community Project, drawing on years of direct aid organizing and other social justice work.

Be sure to check out the No on 9 Remembered Project to read reflections on the walk. Photo by Linda Kliewer.

Starting tomorrow, The Sugar Hole will be playing as part of Fuse Theatre Ensemble’s Outwright Festival at Back Door Theatre (4319 SE Hawthorne Blvd).

About The Sugar Hole: A rent increase for a legendary le***an bar threatens its existence, and Darcy has a plan to save it. Is the 90’s-themed Le***an Pageant she dreams up as a fundraiser the answer? Or do the le***ans around her have different ideas about what needs to be saved? The Sugar Hole skips through time and space—real and imagined—exploring what it means to be a le***an in a le***an community, the importance of spaces for q***r people, and what makes someone feel they belong. Part zany comedy, part pageant, and fully heart-filled, The Sugar Hole speaks directly to what makes a community, a community.

The Sugar Hole was a part of Portland Center Stage’s JAW Festival last summer. And be sure to catch the staged reading on Tuesday when our president ***ry_pdx will be part of a discussion on the importance of q***r spaces!

Its primary election time q***rs! We’re taking a lil peak at the 1976 Voter Guide compiled by Portland Town Council (PTC) in reflection of our political power and to get excited about casting our ballots.

PTC formed in 1974 and was a major organizer for LGBTQ+ political rights. In 1975, they conducted the largest gay lobbying effort in Oregon’s history (up to that point!).

Branches of PTC evolved into other organizations, yet we can see its inspiration in orgs like , , .center, and others.

Be sure to check out the various voter guides compiled by local activists and other resources and get that ballot in by May 19th!

Source: Portland Town Council Voters Guide, Nedra Bagley Collection.

Tonight was so special spending it with Cherríe Moraga, courtesy of PSU’s OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, Office of the President, Department of Chicanx/Latinx Studies, Department of English, Department of History, Department of Sociology, Honors College, & . It was especially special to hear her thoughts on visibilty, allyship, courage, and intergenerational connections.

Cherríe Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, essayist and playwright whose professional life began in 1981 with her co-editorship of the groundbreaking feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. (snippets included). Her own writings are compiled in several collections, including: A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Loving in The War Years, The Last Generation and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Q***r Motherhood. Moraga is the recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship for Literature and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award, among numerous other honors. As a dramatist, her awards include an NEA, two Fund for New American Plays Awards, and the PEN West Award. In 2017, Moraga’s most recent play, Mathematics of Love, premiered at Brava Theater Center in San Francisco. In the same year, she began her tenure as a Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where with her partner, visual artist Celia Herrera Rodriguez, she instituted Las Maestras Center for Xicane Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Praxis. Her most recent memoir, Native Country of the Heart, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2019. In 2023, Haymarket Books published updated anniversary editions of Waiting in the Wings and Loving in the War Years. In 2024, Moraga became a Distinguished Professor Emerita In English, UC Santa Barbara.

PS you can get these books & more from the lovely !

Do you have a favorite old photo you’d love to share with the world? Have you always wanted to be featured on a bumper sticker? Would you like to support the Collective’s work?

We’re calling all community members to help us create bumper stickers, pins, & more featuring your piece of Oregon LGBTQIAS2+ history!

These items will be sold for a small fee to help raise funds for our work, such as:
* Sustaining our upcoming new website!
* Creating a digital and searchable archive on our new website
* Framing and preserving ephemera in professional quality materials
* Printing interpretive materials like our upcoming Pride Zine!

Although community members have donated many fabulous photos over the years, we know that being featured in an exhibit is different from being printed on a t-shirt. (And not everyone wants to see their likeness on a stranger’s waterbottle or car!)

We’re open to all kinds of photos, but are especially interested in photos that reflect pride, q***r joy, and community spirit. The gayer, the better! If your photo is selected, you will receive two free copies of whatever merch we produce (and bragging rights forever).

If you have photos you’re willing to share, please contact Cait (email: [email protected]). Please make sure to include some details about the photo, such as who is in the photo, when and where it was taken, and what it represents.