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“Every bar was a queer bar, the hub was down there,” said Belinda Carroll, a comedian and cofounder of the Portland Queer Comedy Festival. In the 1980s and 1990s, Stark Street – now Harvey Milk Street – was the closest thing to a gay district Portland has ever had. In 1970, the Portland Gay Liberation Front kicked off the broader LGBTQ+ rights movement. Since then, the landscape of Old Town has changed drastically. Now, his drag persona, Darcelle XV, is internationally known, as are the shows put on by Darcelle XV Showplace, formerly Demas Tavern. In 1969, Cole left his wife of 18 years and came out as a gay man. He hired a lesbian bartender and turned Demas into a lesbian bar, the only bar in the neighborhood to cater to anyone in the LGBTQ+ community. It was just two years later, in 1967, that Walter Cole bought Demas Tavern in the heart of Old Town. The OLCC, however, found the six businesses to be breaking no laws and renewed their licenses. Schrunk pressured the Oregon Liquor Control Commission to deny liquor licenses to six establishments known for “heavy homosexual patronage,” according to Boag’s essay.
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This allowance, however, was only in order to surveil and contain them, said Peter Boag, an author, historian and Washington State University professor.Īt the time, newspaper headlines were splashed with coverage of alleged “homosexual rings” of pedophiles, which fed into widespread public panic that gay men were threats to traditional family values and children, according to a 2004 Oregon Historical Quarterly essay by Boag. PORTLAND, 19: Mayor Terry Schrunk declared war on bars frequented by gays and lesbians following a period where the city and police allowed these establishments to operate without attempts to close them.