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As you review each source, record in your flow chart:

Where is the oppression?

How did people resist or fight back?

In what ways was justice expanded?

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Excerpt: "The Forgotten History of Gay Entrapment"  The Atlantic Magazine 2019 by George Chauncey

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Excerpt: "The Forgotten History of Gay Entrapment"  The Atlantic Magazine 2019 by George Chauncey

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In the 1940s and 1950s, police surveillance was only the linchpin of a broader social system that punished people who were discovered to be gay. While the arrests themselves left some men in tears and others furious, almost every man taken into custody feared the possible extralegal consequences more than the legal process itself. Above all, these men feared that their families or their employers would learn they were gay if word of their arrest reached them, as sometimes happened when the police or court officials contacted them or, more rarely, a newspaper published the man’s name. Both families and employers had the power to impose more intimate and exacting punishment on people who refused to conform to heterosexual norms than the law did. The courts might punish a man with a fine or 30 days in jail. As shattering as this was to some men, it was nothing compared with the threat of losing a job, a career, or a family’s love and support.

Police and court records are full of scenes depicting the abject terror felt by men at the moment they realized how dire the consequences of an arrest could be. In the fall of 1948, a Dutch Jewish immigrant, who had lost his mother to the Nazis, desperately tried to outrun the police after he made the mistake of propositioning a plainclothes officer in a Grand Central Terminal men’s room. He was afraid, he later explained to a court official, that he would lose a precious new position as an import-export clerk trainee if he were sent to jail, and he pleaded guilty to avoid a trial that might bring the charge to his employer’s attention. He had reason to worry. In 1945, a copy editor who had worked at The New York Times for 17 years lost his job when the paper learned he had been arrested for homosexual solicitation. In 1950, a cabdriver who was his mother’s sole source of support lost his taxi license after being caught making out with a man in the back seat of his cab.

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The Lavender Scare: How the federal government purged gay employees

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The Lavender Scare: How the federal government purged gay employees

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You may have heard of the "Red Scare" of the 1950s - the fear stoked by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy that Communists had infested the federal government. Accused State Department employees would be interviewed for the purpose of acquiring information concerning others. "That was the technique that was used by the government: grab one person, and then get that person to inform on other people," said filmmaker Josh Howard.

But a panic of a different shade led to a much wider purge of gay employees. "Homosexuals must not be handling top-secret material," McCarthy said. "The pervert is easy prey to the blackmailer."

The panic long outlasted McCarthy's tenure.

David K. Johnson is the author of the definitive history of what's come to be known as the "Lavender Scare." He defined it as "a fear that permeated Cold War political culture, this fear that gay people were a threat to national security, that they had infiltrated the federal government, and that they needed to be systematically removed from government service."

The rooting-out of homosexual employees became official policy with an executive order signed by newly-elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953.

"This is a guy who understood firsthand a real threat," said correspondent Mo Rocca. "I mean, he's the Supreme Allied Commander in World War II, so you would think he would understand a real threat."

"Well, I think he did," said Johnson. "I think he probably didn't see this as a real threat, but he saw that it won elections."

"That it was expedient, politically?"

"It was part of their campaign, right. 'Let's clean house.' Let's get rid of all these people."

Howard, formerly of CBS News, has produced and directed a new documentary, soon to air on PBS, about the Lavender Scare. He said there's a good reason probably you don't know about this chapter in history.

"The Lavender Scare happened in private," Howard said. "The people who were being fired didn't want to tell their closest friends and relatives why they had been fired, because they wanted to stay in the closet.

"If you were found out to be gay in those years, your life was essentially over. You were shunned by society. You were shunned in the workplace. It's the reason people were in the closet in the 1950s."

Even in private homes, gay people were not safe from investigators.

Bob Cantillion, a Navy serviceman, was told to report to the police station for interrogation. He recalled in the documentary, "At Christmastime, some friends were having a party. Somebody must have tipped them off that there was a party where gay people were going to be.

"I freely admitted that I was gay. And then they said, 'We also want five names of other people you know.' So, I searched my mind and I gave them the names of five people I thought would be least hurt. My impression was that after I named the five names, they'd let me go and nothing else would happen after that. But then we were all discharged."

Rocca asked, "Was there any due process? I mean, could you call a lawyer?"

"You could not bring in an attorney, no, wasn't allowed," said Johnson.

"You were just forced to answer yes or no, to confess?"

"Right. The security officials boasted that gay people very easily confessed and told the truth. What they don't talk about is the fact that they essentially blackmailed people. They threatened to tell their families. So, a lot of gay people quietly resigned."

Johnson estimates that between 5,000 to 10,000 people were fired or resigned, and we'll never know how many didn't pursue their dreams for fear of exposure.

Navy Captain Joan Cassidy came from a family of proud veterans. She had a shot at becoming the first female admiral. "I couldn't do it, I just couldn't do it," she said. "It was too big a chance to take. So, I had to give up the possibility of admiral because I was gay and because I wasn't sure I could hide it well enough."

Other stories ended in the worst possible way. Drew Ference, the son of immigrants, spoke five languages and was serving in the U.S. Embassy in Paris when investigators confronted him with evidence that he was gay. Shortly after confessing, he killed himself.

He wasn't the only one.

Johnson said, "I saw lots of news reports, newspaper reports, of single young men, government employees, who committed suicide in Washington for no apparent reason."

"No one was defending gay people," said Howard. "The Democrats stayed away from this issue. At the time, the ACLU believed it was perfectly legitimate for the government to fire homosexuals as a threat to national security."

The persecution of homosexual public servants gave rise to the gay rights movement in the pugnacious person of Frank Kameny, a Ph.D. from Harvard and an astronomer with the U.S. Army Map Service. He was fired in 1957 for being gay. In the documentary he declared, "To the best of my knowledge and belief, I was the first person to fight back out of all those large number of people who were fired in the '50s."

According to Johnson, Kameny says that "this issue is not about national security, it's not even about morality. It's about civil rights. He creates this new rhetoric. He calls himself and his colleagues in the group 'homosexual American citizens,' and that you can't forget either part of that."

In 1963, he became the first openly gay person to testify on Capitol Hill.

Then in 1965, he organized picket lines in front of the State Department and the White House. He told CBS News then, "Every American citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own person merits as an individual."

"Those folks were very courageous," Johnson said. "It had never been done before, and they were scared to death."

But the discriminatory policy continued. In 1980, Jamie Shoemaker worked for the National Security Agency as a linguist. When asked what kind of security clearance he had, Shoemaker said, "Very high. Probably more than the president has, actually. You might be surprised."

One day, his supervisor told him that security wanted to question him: "And the first thing they said was, 'Mr. Shoemaker, we understand you're leading a gay lifestyle.' And I said, well, I didn't think I was leading it, but I said, 'Yes. I am.' And immediately they took my badge off. And they read me my rights."

And so, he called Frank Kameny. Shoemaker recalled, "He yelled at me and said, 'Why did you let them take your badge? And why didn't you shut your mouth?'"

Six months later, with Kameny's help, Shoemaker made headlines when the agency allowed him to keep his job, and his security clearance.

In 1995, after 42 years, the last vestiges of Eisenhower's executive order were finally overturned, when President Bill Clinton signed an executive order rescinding the policy.

Rocca asked, "How many gay federal employees actually spied for foreign governments?"

"There was not a single example of a gay man or a lesbian who ever submitted to blackmail by a foreign agent, not a single one," said Howard.

In 2009, Frank Kameny was back at the White House, this time invited by President Barack Obama for a ceremony extending the rights of gay federal employees.

Kameny died in 2011, not long after being interviewed by Josh Howard, who said there are still lessons to be learned from Kameny's courage:

"I grew up in a time before there was marriage equality and before Stonewall," Howard said. "So, I'm in some ways envious of younger people, that they are growing up in a more tolerant society. But I also hope that they understand that equality is not a given, that there are people who fought and sacrificed for those accomplishments."
To watch a trailer for the documentary "The Lavender Scare" click on the video player below. For more info:
Story produced by Kay M. Lim and Julie Kracov.

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The lavender scare: How the federal government purged gay employees

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You may have heard of the "Red Scare" of the 1950s - the fear stoked by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy that Communists had infested the federal government. Accused State Department employees would be interviewed for the purpose of acquiring information concerning others.

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Stonewall Uprising, Chapter 1 | American Experience | PBS

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How gay activists challenged the politics of civility

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How gay activists challenged the politics of civility

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INSTRUCTIONS TO LOG INTO NEWSELA: click the "Login with Google" button and use your NClack student email account.

"For the next three decades the gay liberation movement continued to confront public figures. They pioneered the hit-and-run tactic known as "zap action." Zaps gained media attention and forced homophobic figures and institutions to acknowledge gay rights."

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Newsela | How gay activists challenged the politics of civility

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From pie-throwing to shouting down public figures, these groups disturbed the establishment to effect change.

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Progress toward LGBTQ equality "is a jagged line". Here's what's changed over the past decade

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Progress toward LGBTQ equality "is a jagged line". Here's what's changed over the past decade

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"In 2010, only 12 states and the district explicitly prohibited discrimination against LGBTQ people in employment, housing and public accommodations. By 2020, that number jumped to 21.

• In 2010, just five states and the district banned health care discrimination against LGBTQ people. In 2020, that number more than doubled to 13 states and the district."

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In 2010, no states outlawed conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors, banned health insurers from excluding transgender-related coverage or offered gender neutral options on licenses and birth certificates.

Ten years later at the dawn of a new decade, roughly 20 states have these protections in place.

Breakthroughs? Or evidence of a plodding pace on the road to LGBTQ equality?

"It's both," said Ineke Mushovic, executive director of the Movement Advancement Project, which released a report Tuesday on the status of LGBTQ rights from 2010 to 2020.

"We have made a tremendous amount of progress understanding what LGBTQ people need to have a full opportunity to be productive workers, have equal access to health care, to go beyond the basics," she said. "But at the same time, in half the country, that progress has stalled out."

The report by MAP, a think tank that maintains a database on laws affecting LGBTQ people, shows a split in the policy landscape in 2020: Nearly half - 46% - of the country lives in states earning "high" or "medium" grades for equality because of protections. But the other half - 45% - lives in states with "low" or "negative" rankings.

Advocates hope rulings in three pivotal Supreme Court cases this year on whether it's legal to fire workers because of sexual orientation or gender identity will cement a precedent for LGBTQ rights. They also will continue to press for passage of the Equality Act, which would make nondiscrimination a federal guarantee.
'We are not drag queens': For transgender people in 2019, a conflicted reality
But for now, LGBTQ people are at the mercy of a patchwork of state protections. "You could live in one state and move across the border and core pieces of your life could be in jeopardy," said Naomi Goldberg, MAP policy research director.

The report, which tracks nearly 40 LGBTQ-related policies and laws in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the five U.S. territories, does show significant strides:

* In 2010, 48% of LGBTQ people lived in "negative" policy states. By 2020, that number dropped to 20%.

* The number of people living in "medium" or "high" equality states increased dramatically from 6% in 2010 to nearly half, 46%, in 2020.

* In 2010, only 12 states and the district explicitly prohibited discrimination against LGBTQ people in employment, housing and public accommodations. By 2020, that number jumped to 21.
Treating trans youth a crime? National firestorm on horizon as states consider criminalizing transgender treatments for youths
* In 2010, just five states and the district banned health care discrimination against LGBTQ people. In 2020, that number more than doubled to 13 states and the district.

Same-sex marriage ruling signals progress - then backlash

A landmark Supreme Court ruling sanctioning same-sex marriage in 2015 capped an evolution taking place in state legislatures and federal courts on LGTBQ relationships in the first half of the decade. In 2010, only 14 states and the district had some form of relationship recognition for same-sex couples. By 2020, marriage was the law of the land and included access to marriage-related parenting protections.

Bans on conversion therapy - a discredited practice of trying to change a young person's sexual orientation or gender identity - began to take root.
'Shocking' numbers: Half of LGBTQ adults live in states where no laws ban job discrimination
But midway through the decade, backlashes also started to sprout. Some targeted transgender people's rights. Many took the form of religious exemption laws that let people, churches and sometimes businesses cite religious beliefs as a reason not to enforce a law, such as declining to marry a same-sex couple or letting state-funded foster agencies refuse to place kids with LGBTQ parents.

"When we saw progress in marriage a decade ago, LGBTQ opponents realized that fight was over. All the rights and benefits that came along with marriage were solidified," Goldberg said. "But it was a strategic move on (opponents') part. Yes, you can go get married, but when you show up to get that license, we can say no - you have to go somewhere else."

In 2010, only one state had a religious exemption law. Now 13 states have those laws.

And more harmful bills are percolating. In 2020, MAP's database shows at least 121 anti-LGBTQ pieces of legislation in the mix in various states. Transgender young people take a particularly hard-hit: Fourteen states are weighing bills excluding transgender students from sports, and 11 have floated legislation that bans medical care for transgender minors, some even making treatment a crime.

And at least 14 states have three or more anti-LGBTQ bills on the docket.

Local laws help notch progress in Florida

Nadine Smith lives in Florida, where "Anita Bryant put us on the map in the worst possible way" in the 1970s with her anti-gay crusades.
Life in rural America: Nearly 4 million LGBTQ people live in rural America, and 'everything is not bias and awful'
But Smith, the CEO and co-founder of civil rights group Equality Florida, has seen a slow transformation in the state in recent years, mainly because cities and counties have moved the marker - much more so than the Legislature.

In 2010, Florida was ranked a "negative" equality state by MAP. Ten years later, it's a "low" equality state. "The people of Florida are absolutely moving in the correct direction," Smith said. "The majority of people are living in places where localities have passed nondiscrimination ordinances on sexual orientation and gender identity. Localities are showing leadership where the state has failed."

As LGBTQ people become more visible, attitudes shift and inspire change, Smith said. People "meet janitors, firefighters, accountants all living a life for themselves. Being out in everyday situations matters a great deal."

But the number of detrimental bills being weighed in the coming year in Florida - including one "horrific" piece of legislation that threatens doctors with up to 15 years of prison time for providing medical care to trans youths - loom large, she said. "To introduce legislation that would erode local policies in existence for more than a decade ... it's clear we are collateral damage."

Yet, Smith remains determined and optimistic. When she was growing up in the Panhandle, she had to trick a classmate into checking out a book that had gay themes from the library. Now her former high school has a gay alliance and there are anti-bullying policies.

Progress is "a jagged line. There's backlash, but sometimes it's like a rubber band. And we emerge from that backlash, growing much further."

In Colorado, bipartisan boost leads to inroads on equality

Daniel Ramos, executive director of One Colorado, has seen his state rocket up the road on equality in the 10 years since the LGBTQ advocacy group was founded. In 2010, MAP ranked the state "fair"; now it is a "high" equality state.

One Colorado focuses on amplifying LGBTQ voices in all parts of the state in an effort to educate and engage, he said. "One of the most powerful lessons we learned is the impact of sharing our own experiences by coming out. It's harder to hate someone you know or you love."
Fallout from transgender slayings: What happens after a transgender woman is murdered? For family and friends, a long and agonizing search for closure
The state is home to some high-profile groups that oppose LGBTQ rights, yet Colorado has notched many advancements, such as a conversion therapy ban and accurate ID documentation, notably through bipartisan efforts, Ramos said. In 2018, Coloradoans elected their first openly transgender legislator and the country's first openly male gay governor.

"The challenge has been that issues are hyperpoliticized," Ramos said. "But for youths to experience less bullying should be a nonpartisan issue, for folks to access health care should be a nonpartisan issue."

Ramos, who grew up in the rural town of Sterling, recalls coming out at age 13. It was one year after college student Matthew Shepard's slaying in 1998, a gruesome incident that cast an unnerving spotlight on hate crimes against LGBTQ people.

"When I think of my upbringing to where we are today in one of the most LGBTQ-friendly states in the country, it's very exciting," he said. "We have been able to leverage the spirit of Colorado to come together to get things done - whether Democrat or Republican, with conservatives and with faith communities."

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Progress toward LGBTQ equality 'is a jagged line.' Here's what has changed over the past decade.

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In 2010, no states outlawed conversion therapy for LGBTQ minors, banned health insurers from excluding transgender-related coverage or offered gender neutral options on licenses and birth certificates. Ten years later at the dawn of a new decade, roughly 20 states have these protections in place. Breakthroughs?

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In 1964, Portland Tried to Crack Down on the City's Gay Scene. Here's What Happened. (This story has oppression, resistance, AND justice)

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In 1964, Portland Tried to Crack Down on the City's Gay Scene. Here's What Happened. (This story has oppression, resistance, AND justice)

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"By 1967, nobody cared,” Cole says, of the year Darcelle XV opened in Old Town. “Gay bar. Lesbian bar. Drag bar. No one cared. By then, it was pretty open.”

In one odd (arguable) byproduct of the 1964 episode, the Portland bars’ survival may have muted activism. “In other cities, it was constant harassment,” Boag says. “In Portland, after 1964, the bars were left alone, and as a result Portland gays tended to be more lethargic politically.” We never had a Stonewall."

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"T he Unmentionable People are virtually untouchable people and they are growing stronger each week."

June of 1964: Doug Baker, the Oregon Journal's city gossip columnist, held forth under a caricature of his own cigar-gnawing mug. The Un mentionables proliferated. Their lairs numbered eight, maybe even 10. Portland's afternoon paper, zestier and more, eh, populist than the larger, duller Oregonian, was on the case.

Baker reported: "A veteran police officer said last week, 'Either they're growing in number or I'm just seeing a lot more of them.'" The unnamed sources kept coming: a Portland State student propositioned by another woman; a "businessman" vowing "vigilante" action. Baker noted the cops traditionally took a "hands off policy with respect to the Unmentionables." Now, though, matters grew more serious.

"[T]hese biological rejects cling tenaciously to the myth that they are, in some strange way, something special," the newsman typed. "It's time the mayor's office had a new look at this old problem."

Portland had been a relative oasis for (as we might say now) the LGBTQ community. Clubs and bars did a quiet business. In public, people "wore the mask." Queer politics barely existed. But in 1964-as national politics simmered in the heat of a presidential campaign pitting Lyndon Johnson against right-winger Barry Goldwater-a shifting culture and a conservative town's establishment collided.

T oday, June's Pride celebration is a decades-old civic tradition. As George Nicola, a longtime activist and historian for the Gay and Lesbian 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. An out bisexual Portlander serves as Oregon's governor; an out Portland lesbian, as state Speaker of the House. Rainbow flags fly everywhere. It's almost impossible to imagine queer Portland in the shadows. (Almost, but given certain ideologies prominent in national politics, not quite.)

Five decades and more ago, it was a different town.

"There was no organization," Nicola says, "and everything was very closeted." Progress was basically subterranean. 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. (Customers asked at the counter.) In the years after World War II, a small crescent of welcoming spaces evolved along our rainy streets. 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. 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.

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. (Boag's article quotes a 1949 police report: "These women were recently ousted from San Francisco for their actions and are ... 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.

The door would open and, whoever you were, you just walked in. The police and officials just left them alone.

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 bars were flourishing," the 87-year-old stage legend recalls. 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 archive records Other Inn as Portland's first leather bar, launched in '64 on SW Alder between Second and Third.

"The door would open and, whoever you were, you just walked in," Cole says. "The police and officials just left them alone-there weren't raids or that sort of thing."

The Harbor Club stood out: prominent and, perhaps, notorious. "Dark and busy," Cole says of the bar on SW First, a worn relic of the 19th-century waterfront. (The navy once declared it off-limits to sailors ashore.) "Mysterious," Cole continues. "Everyone went to the upstairs bar, and you wouldn't know it was there from the street. We didn't have a flag then, you know. Anything in the world went on in there."

The bars, as now, needed licenses from the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. For that, they needed city council's endorsement, which had rarely been a problem-until the fall of 1964.

O regon police made a series of arrests for various sex and pornography offenses in 1963, which triggered a classic media panic, with Oregonian headlines like "They Prey on Boys." Portland's mayor, Terry Schrunk, decided the time had come for action.

Schrunk reigned as mayor for 16 years, somehow bridging the Eisenhower era, '60s tumult, and the early '70s. By 1964, he had already survived a racketeering scandal that led to a US Senate investigation and a trial in which US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy testified against him. Boag classifies Schrunk, a Democrat, as a "breadwinner liberal," favoring benevolent big government-for traditional households and citizens only.

By '64, Schrunk had launched a Committee for Decent Literature and Films (!), and heated rhetoric swirled in city council meetings. 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. Most riotously, 1 a.m. at the Harbor Club saw a huge crowd "packing it, with standing room only. From then on, all activities, such as males openly kissing each other, fondling each other, with no attempt to cover these activities."

Schrunk and the council decided this would not stand (though one commissioner astutely noted that "these people are not going to disappear"). After a series of hearings in November and December, the city moved to shut down six bars, pressuring the OLCC to revoke their licenses.

"Everyone was shocked," Cole remembers. "This was not how things had operated."

James Damis was a young attorney, representing the Tel & Tel. "The owner bought it knowing it was a gay bar," Damis, now 82 and still practicing law, recalls. "He ran it clean. He didn't permit any hanky-panky." The city's move struck Damis, and other attorneys representing bar owners, as patently discriminatory. "I remember saying, 'You can't do that,'" Damis says, "and one commissioner saying, 'We're the city, we can do anything!' Well, no."

Standing room only .. . all activities, with no attempt to cover these activities.

Damis and other attorneys pressed their arguments to the liquor commission. "We said it's clear that this recommendation from the city is not because of any activity going on at the bar," Damis remembers. "It's simply because gay people congregate there. And that's not constitutionally permissable." According to Boag's research, some attorneys involved in the situation cited the just-passed Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The denouement, then, was classically Portlandian: no billy clubs, no bold riots in the streets, just two rival bureaucracies and a well-framed legal argument. The unlikely agent of progress: the OLCC, which essentially dismissed the City of Portland's attempt to crack down on "the Unmentionables" out of hand.

"I was surprised the OLCC had the guts," Damis says now. "But they did."

Schrunk sputtered. He wrote the governor, who ignored him. The only casualty, in the end, was the Harbor Club. When the city pulled its food license, the waterfront redoubt shuttered.

B y 1967, nobody cared," Cole says, of the year Darcelle XV opened in Old Town. "Gay bar. Lesbian bar. Drag bar. No one cared. By then, it was pretty open."

In one odd (arguable) byproduct of the 1964 episode, the Portland bars' survival may have muted activism. "In other cities, it was constant harassment," Boag says. "In Portland, after 1964, the bars were left alone, and as a result Portland gays tended to be more lethargic politically." We never had a Stonewall.

George Nicola notes that Portland's first formal LGBTQ political organization, the Gay Liberation Front, didn't organize until 1970, and arose from correspondence in a small alternative newspaper, Willamette Bridge, not any confrontation with The Man. Throughout the '70s, as progressive bastions across the nation adopted both symbolic and actionable antidiscrimination measures, Portland and Oregon tended to move slowly. But quick or slow, it got better. By 1972, the Oregon Journal was running gingerly neutral stories ("'Gays' Here Almost Prim"). In 1977, the city formally recognized a gay pride day. (This year's Pride Northwest festival and parade take place June 16 and 17.) Campaigns against ferociously bigoted early-'90s state ballot measures helped push Oregon politics in general onto their current progressive path.

Ironically, change came at the bar scene's expense. The sanctuaries the city targeted in '64 are now ghosts of the cityscape. A bank tower replaced the Dahl & Penne, where drag performers strutted before Darcelle XV; the Tel & Tel is now a social services agency. The Harbor Club's premises now house Paddy's, an Irish bar likely to see flush business during Fleet Week this month, no one the wiser.

"There was more entertainment-more shows and fun stuff-back then, and of course many more bars," Cole says. "We're down to what, five? And the reason is, we don't have to have a bar. We can go everywhere. When you're Darcelle, you get invited everywhere."

Top Image: The Harbor Club-off-limits to sailors, and at the center of the 1964 gay bars brouhaha (photograph courtesy the Oregonian)

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In 1964, Portland Tried to Crack Down on the City's Gay Scene. Here's What Happened.

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"T he Unmentionable People are virtually untouchable people and they are growing stronger each week." June of 1964: Doug Baker, the Oregon Journal's city gossip columnist, held forth under a caricature of his own cigar-gnawing mug. The Un mentionables proliferated. Their lairs numbered eight, maybe even 10.

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Major Milestones in the Gay Rights Movement

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Major Milestones in the Gay Rights Movement

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what you need to know about the gay rights movement - cnn video

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What you need to know about the gay rights movement - CNN Video

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After today's Supreme Court same-sex marriage decision, CNN's Anderson Cooper explores the key moments of the gay rights movement.