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."

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.

• 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."