Every year since 2010 (with the exception of 2020), Ashland has been home to a Pride parade and festival in early October. This event happens four months after June, the traditionally celebrated Pride month, in honor of LGBTQIA+ History Month. October serves as a time when the queer community and allies can learn about, celebrate, mourn, and otherwise find connections with different generations of queer folks in Southern Oregon. In light of the recent pride parade and the wrapping up of LGBTQIA+ History Month, I want to spend some time today sharing how the queer community has been shaped in Southern Oregon and in Oregon as a whole.
The Oregon Territory was formed in 1850, but there were already people that we might now call queer living in the Pacific Northwest long before Western settlement. Many different tribes, including the Takelma, Shasta, Modoc, Klamath, and other tribal groups in the region were accepting of three or more genders, and some utilized language inclusive of many different genders. For example, the Klamath language features only one set of pronouns for those of any gender. And when white people began exploring and later settling in the Pacific Northwest, records of journal entries, letters sent to loved ones back East, and newspaper articles regularly featured references to people born as male but living as a woman or vice versa.
Tribes in the Pacific Northwest weren’t the only communities with evidence of queer identities, and research has also found plenty of settlers living as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, as well as same sex couples settling in Oregon Territory together. With a significantly less dense population and many coming over on wagon trails with strangers, it was a perfect opportunity to explore gender expression and same gender relationships away from as many prying eyes, something present day historians theorize was much more frequent than we realized. A Windows in Time presentation at the Medford Library in June expands on the stories of these communities, highlighting individual examples and sharing the complex background of these early queer Oregonians, if you’d like to learn more.
The Oregon Territory may have had records of queer folks since its creation, but it unfortunately also had records of discrimination since its formation. Just three years after the Oregon Territory was formed in 1850, the first sodomy law was passed that forbid same sex relations, with a prison sentence of up to five years. In 1913, this sentence was changed to 15 years after a sensationalized scandal about queer men in Portland (check out this article by the Oregon Queer History Collective for more information), and state sanctioned sterilization was introduced. Despite voters attempting to repeal the 1913 sterilization law and a judge declaring it unconstitutional in 1921, studies found that some form of sterilization was regularly used for those charged with sodomy or same-sex relations up until 1963, and Oregon led the nation in the number of sterilizations performed.
This pattern of discrimination, as well as a continued fight for the right to exist despite discrimination, continued throughout the 20th century. Queer bars in large metro areas such as Portland thrived despite the same types of police raids that led to the Stonewall riot on the other side of the country. Queer couples continued to live together and arrange protests in the fight for equality, even as organizations like the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance pushed for passage of bills excluding gay communities from human rights protections. Nonprofit and political organizations fighting for queer rights were founded, and despite the 2004 passage of Measure 36 that amended the state constitution to ban gay marriage, these organizations did not back down.
While Oregon has a long history of discrimination, the last few decades have seen a large shift in both public opinion and legal protections. In recent years we’ve seen a 2007 ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation or identity, a 2014 ruling that finally allowed for same-sex marriage, and a 2015 ban on conversion therapy for minors (check out this timeline of LGBTQIA+ legislation in Oregon for more information). We’ve also seen our first openly queer politicians, including openly bisexual Kate Brown serving as Governor from 2015 to 2023. Locally, recent decades have brought the formation of SOPride, Ashland’s annual Pride organizers, the expansion of queer-friendly events at a diverse array of event spaces and venues, and a thriving drag performance scene.
Due to the discrimination and criminality often associated with queer identities, particularly in centuries past, we may never know how many people in Oregon had queer identities. Traditional data metrics such as the census didn’t historically ask about same-sex relationships, and would even change answers from queer census takers, effectively straight-washing historical data (for more information about a history of queer data on the census, check out this fact sheet from the US Census Bureau). Furthermore, shifting language and sense of identity means that the words we use to describe queer people today, whether that’s “transgender,” “gay,” or “queer” itself, weren’t the words used in decades or centuries past, and we cannot know for certain how past generations saw themselves or if they would have identified with today’s terms (for more information about shifting concepts of queer identities throughout Oregon’s history, check out this Oregon Historical Quarterly article).
Despite this uncertainty about the past, it is clear that there were people, and sometimes whole communities, living outside the straight, cisgender binary over time. This was true prior to Western settlement, among early white settlers, and over the centuries since that have led to the vibrant and diverse queer communities in Oregon today. If you’d like to spend time this LGBTQIA+ history month learning more about these communities, consider checking out a title from this list.