Through the Queer Looking-Glass: The Future of LGBTQ Public History

In the summer of 1994, the gay activist, community historian, and author Alan Bérubé directed a seminar at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. In the course Bérubé spoke of the great need to document, collect, and preserve gay and lesbian history in keeping with his lifelong advocacy for community-based history. In October of that year, four students from the class, Tom Cook, Pat Young, Jeanine Wicks, and Bonnie Tinker, founded the Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific—the first archive of its kind in the region.¹ What was noteworthy about this grassroots initiative was its formation in the midst of one of the most perilous political periods for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Oregonians in the state's history—one that mirrored larger events in the country as a whole.

The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a conservative backlash to the social and cultural changes that had taken place in the US since the 1960s—one that consolidated the political gains resulting from the decline of New Deal liberalism and that coalesced into a political alliance between the New Right and the Christian Right. This backlash, which included a Christian-based sexual purity movement, was on full display in the fight against the gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida, led by Anita Bryant in 1977. The conservative political gains first ascended in 1980 with the presidential election of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of several noteworthy liberal Democrats in Congress. The 1990s proved to be another decade of fierce debates and ongoing clashes between conservatives and liberals over public policy, state funding, and civil rights for gays and lesbians. A second wave of conservative gains crested with Republicans' successful effort to take control of the US House of Representatives in the midterm elections of 1994. The culture wars that ensued featured prominently in the Republicans' Contract with America, battles over sodomy statues, sex education, and abortion laws, and in the successful adoption of the Defense of Marriage Act (1996), which was intended to prevent the adoption of gay marriage laws in the United States.²

In Oregon battles over gay and lesbian civil rights came to the fore in the late 1980s with the formation of the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), a Christian Right organization. In addition to its initial anti-abortion platform, the group also aimed to forestall the advancement of gay rights through local and statewide citizen initiatives. The OCA's most well-known initiative was Ballot Measure 9 (1992), which sought to amend the Oregon constitution to declare "homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism, and masochism as abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse" and ban any "special rights" for homosexuals and bisexuals. Measure 9 was eventually defeated by 56 percent to 44 percent of the vote; however, the battle over the measure resulted in a significant increase in anti-gay hate crimes in the state that year, including eighty-seven crimes officially reported against lesbians and gay men in the two months leading up to the election. In just one example, in September 1992 Hattie Mae Cohens, an African American lesbian, and Brian H. Mock, a white gay man, were killed in a firebombing of their home by a group of white supremacist skinheads. Although the OCA's follow-up anti-homosexual initiative in 1994, Ballot Measure 13, did not pass statewide (by a very close 51 to 49 percent), it did achieve passage in twenty-five of Oregon's thirty-six counties and coincided with the passage of several anti-gay measures at the city and county levels.³

The appeal of the OCA was grounded in deeper social, economic, and cultural stresses within Oregon at the time. Oregonians who supported the organization, worked on its campaigns, and voted for its citizen initiatives from the late 1980s through the early 2000s viewed gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Oregonians as a threat to public safety and social stability at time when the social and economic order seemed to be unraveling before their eyes. Support for the OCA was especially strong in rural areas hard hit by economic...