18: Republicans Against Prejudice

With the current “battle for the soul of the Republican party” in which even the fundamentals of democracy are no longer respected, we remember the time in Oregon, only three decades ago, when a state’s GOP establishment united against discrimination.  

Republicans Speak Out Against 9

At the final weekend’s No on 9 rally overflowing Portland’s Pioneer courthouse Square, The Oregonian noted, “speakers included the chairmen of both the Democratic and Republican parties in Oregon; Ken Harrison, chairman of Portland General Electric; Bob Ames, chairman of the Port of Portland; and Rabbi Emanuel Rose.”

“I am a moderate, mainstream Republican and I’ve just returned from Romania as the United States Ambassador. I’ve seen what happens when you lose your human rights. That is why I vote with you. No on 9!”

Businessman Allen “Punch” Green, former ambassador to Romania, No on 9 rally speaker

At a press conference earlier in the fall, 25 prominent Republicans calling themselves “Republicans Against Prejudice” denounced Measure 9. Among them were GOP party chairman Craig Berkman and former Secretary of State Norma Paulus, at that time the elected state superintendent of public instruction. Former Governor Vic Atiyeh, a Republican, joined the current governor and the living former governors (all Democrats) in opposing Measure 9.

Most political candidates that year went on the record against Measure 9, including Republican incumbents and challengers in some rural communities. Some, like Neil Bryant, who won the first of two state senate terms in central Oregon that year, walked a line by opposing both Measure 9 and the idea of protection against discrimination: “It is one thing to say that homosexuals should be granted a protected class status in housing and employment, and quite another thing to require all forms of government to teach that a particular lifestyle is abnormal, perverse and so forth.”

Oregon’s senior U.S. Senator, moderate Republican Mark Hatfield – renowned for “challenging his party’s orthodoxy” (NPR) – said: “Through 40 years of political service, I have found myself many times in the trenches of civil rights battles, believing such rights are guaranteed by at least two basic principles: the separation of church and state and political-religious pluralism. Measure 9 violates these principles.”

Our other U.S. Senator, the pro-choice Republican Bob Packwood (who would resign three years later after a sexual harassment exposé prompted by the Congressional mistreatment of Anita Hill in Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination hearings), was slower to come out against Measure 9. Historian Pat Young notes, “He maintained that he had a policy of not getting involved with state ballot measures, but his opponents thought he was being silent because of the OCA’s threat to run someone against him. When he finally spoke out, his critics noted that the announcement came immediately after it was officially too late for the OCA to run someone against him.” (In the 1986 Republican primary, despite being a well-established incumbent, Packwood had lost 42% of the vote to Baptist minister Joe Lutz, whose campaign had launched the OCA.)

Another high-profile Republican actively campaigning for Measure 9’s defeat was former Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer, at that time Dean of the University of Oregon Law School and later, U of O President. Part of a well-respected Republican family whose father was a Southern Oregon civic leader and brother John, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Having won the Republican nomination for governor as a pro-choice moderate in 1990, Dave earned 40% of the statewide vote, losing to Barbara Roberts who won 45% when Independent OCA-back Al Mobley took 13%.

In a tribute published by the Oregon State Capitol Foundation after Dave Frohnmayer’s death, his longtime assistant wrote, “I vividly recall the anti-Measure 9 television ad that he and his father, Otto, made in 1992, with their powerful statement opposing discrimination against gays and lesbians.”

Another campaign ad, Scot Nakagawa remembers, featured Dave Frohnmayer with his one-time rival Governor Barbara Roberts. In the ad, they talked about disagreeing often, but not on the question of discrimination. 

A Contest for Control of the Republican Party

As The Oregonian wrote on the eve of the 1992 election, “Driven by the increasing political savvy and clout of the religious right, homosexuality has erupted as a brutal political issue across the nation. The Republican National Party adopted a platform denouncing homosexuality as a threat to families even as Democrats broadened their family definition to include homosexual couples.”

“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a culture war as critical to the kind of nation we will be as the cold war itself, for this is for the soul of America. Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history!”

Pat Buchanan, 1992 Republican National Convention

OCA Chairman Lon Mabon was giddy about the Republican National Convention that year, bragging that it “was like an OCA convention. We couldn’t have written some of the speeches better if I’d done it myself.” He told supporters, “Vice President Quayle, and Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson are not wrong. It is a war, and it has to be fought like a war.”

It was a war being fought inside the Oregon Republican party as well, long defined by its moderation. After religious-right candidate Joe Lutz had come close to ousting Packwood in the 1986 primary, “a few moderate Republicans began to speculate that perhaps the conservatives were maneuvering to take over the state Republican Party,” historian Pat Young noted. “In addition to accusations of a takeover, moderate Republicans accused the conservatives of having a ‘purity test’ that determined a candidate’s view on certain moral and conservative issues. Conservatives would support candidates only if they passed the test.”

In response to the OCA’s first statewide ballot measure in 1988, GOP leader Norma Paulus said, optimistically, “I believe most Oregonians are concerned about fairness, and will vote for civil rights and will vote for equality and will vote for justice.” Having learned the hard way that such a vote could not be taken for granted, the moderate wing of the party realized they had to do more to prevent the passage of Ballot Measure 9.

“Some Republican leaders stepped up on their own,” No on 9 field organizer Scot Nakagawa remembers. Others were recruited by the campaign manager or their business or political colleagues. Many came forward in response to pleas from family members, local organizing by constituents, or when put on the spot by the media or in candidate forums.

What accounts for the level of No on 9 support from Republican Oregonians? Scot says, “It seemed to me to be an expression of a number of things:

“First of all, LGBTQ people are everywhere. We appear in every class, race, gender, religion, nationality, ability, age, profession, neighborhood, and so on. We might be the waiter at your favorite restaurant, the dentist you see for a toothache, or the janitor or security guard who greets you every morning in the office building where you work. By coming after us, the OCA awakened a sleeping giant of ally support. Pushed to action, those allies came out swinging.

“It was a lesson in never, ever underestimating the importance of being everywhere and building relationships with everyone possible. The networks this kind of relationship-building creates are the single greatest form of social security we can have, both individually and collectively. And it was a demonstration of the catalytic, transformative power of friendship, kinship, and love. 

“Secondly, the LGBTQ community organized opposition to Measure 9 in the wake of organizing efforts around reproductive freedom and ending domestic and sexual violence, through which bipartisan coalitions had been built. The contacts were already there, and the presence of so many LGBTQ people in those related movements made reaching out pretty easy. Some of the relationships were built through work that was done by the Oregon chapter of the National Organization of Women, a group in which the No on 9 campaign manager was a leader. 

“And finally, those were less polarized times. Today, social identity polarization is so extreme that choosing sides on an issue of this sort can have serious, even career-ending political consequences, as well as the possibility of harassment and violence. As a result, freedom of choice, when it comes to ideology and associations, has been much eroded – with serious political and cultural consequences.” 

As we remember No on 9 today, in 2022, the phrase “battle for the soul of the Republican party” refers most often to the dominance of Trump’s Big Lie and the willingness of so many in the party to cosign even the most extreme anti-democratic scenario, an attempted Presidential coup.

Even the GOP old standard, being “the party of business,” is in question. As historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in April, 2022 of the tolerance shown to the “culture war” agenda by those who aren’t true believers, “While pro-business Republicans could live with these ideas in the past if it meant getting the economic legislation they wanted, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott have illustrated that the Trump wing of the party has abandoned Republicans’ traditional support for business.” She cited DeSantis’ legal attack on the Walt Disney Company and Abbott’s shutdown of trade to and from Mexico that “cost the U.S. an estimated $9 billion in gross domestic product while turning up no drugs or immigrants.”

Back in 1992 in Oregon, the business case against Measure 9 was one of the primary motivators for Republicans. 

The Business Case Against Measure 9

Printed in black ink on grey card stock, the outside of the invitation read, “If You’re Concerned About Oregon’s Business Future….” On the inside: “You Must Attend The ‘No on 9’ Ballot Measure Business Breakfast.” A message appearing below the general information read, “This measure would make Oregon the first state to mandate discrimination. Don’t Let That Happen.”

“The Business Community: Constituency Organizing,” from the 1993 NGLTF Fight the Right Action Kit

In her Action Kit description of the Business Breakfast, campaign fundraiser Linda Lee Welch noted, “We recruited a host committee and included people we thought would receive the most positive response from their peers in the business community. Members included a rabbi and his wife, a former governor, a large urban property owner, the vice-president of a large grocery chain, the owner of a nationally known book store, a business owner and philanthropist for whom a concert hall is named, and the owner of a very visible real estate firm.”

The Oregon business community feared an outcome like the one Colorado would experience when a majority of its voters passed a Measure 9-like Amendment 2 the same year Oregonians defeated Measure 9.

“Discrimination Costs: The Boycott Strategy,” the Fight the Right Action Kit article by Boycott Colorado Director Terry Schleder, described what happened there, and the implications of a business boycott strategy for fights over rights around the country.

“On November 3, 1992, Colorado became the first state to legalize discrimination against gays, lesbians & bisexuals at the ballot box. Colorado’s Amendment 2 is part of a nationwide attack by the religious right on civil rights everywhere. At least ten states will face petition drives in fall 1993 which, if sufficient signatures are gathered, will thrust those states into the divisive and expensive struggles that cost Colorado and Oregon millions of dollars and great political divisions in 1992.

“Since the passage of Amendment 2, hate crimes against gay men and lesbians have jumped by more than 400%. Five gay men have been stabbed. Lesbians wearing ‘No on 2’ buttons have been physically attacked. Colorado Springs is headquarters to more than 55 religious right organizations. Many gay activists have left the state. There has even been an Amendment 2-related suicide.

“In the seven months since Amendment 2’s passage, the Colorado Boycott has garnered national attention and support. As of June 1993, more than 60 companies have canceled conventions or meetings in Colorado, and more than 110 groups have called for a boycott of Colorado to protest Amendment 2. Some 20 U.S. municipalities have severed ties with Colorado because of the anti-gay initiative. New York City has divested its stock holdings in any Colorado companies, and canceled a contract for new municipal buses. Ziff-Davis Publishing had planned to relocate their operations to Colorado; in the wake of Amendment 2, they reconsidered, costing the state $1 billion dollars in revenue over a five-year period had they chosen to operate in the state.”

“What does this mean for other states, particularly those targeted for initiatives by the religious right? The Colorado example serves as a warning to voters, businesses, and political leaders in the other 49 states, attesting to the strength of the determination of activists and citizens to oppose discrimination and ballot-box bigotry.”

“I believe a Colorado-type amendment would have a negative impact if adopted in Michigan. Such an Amendment could lead to tourists and convention planners boycotting our state, which would obviously have an adverse effect on our economy. Michigan does not need an amendment of this nature.”

Michigan Governor John Engler , a conservative Republican, 1993

In 1996, Colorado’s Amendment 2 was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in Romer v. Evans.

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Read Oregon G.O.P. Faces Schism Over Agenda of Christian Right, published by The New York Times 10 days after the election which defeated Measure 9, which begins: “In a political civil war that presages a battle for the soul of the national Republican Party, the chairman of the Republican Party of Oregon has threatened to form an independent state branch free of the religious right.”

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.  

“An openly gay man from Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbians and Gays was on a panel that included speakers from religious organizations, Southeast Asian refugee groups, from a Korean small business owners organization, from progressive coalitions of or including Asian and Pacific Islanders, and from a local chapter of a national Japanese American civil rights organization.

“This sort of unified Asian and Pacific Islander press conference, not to mention one that included a lesbian and gay organization, was unprecedented in Oregon,” wrote Lynn Nakamoto in the NGLTF Fight the Right Action Kit section, Working with Communities of Color: The Asian and Pacific Islander Experience in Oregon.

Lynn, recently retired as the first Asian American and first woman of color on the Oregon Supreme Court, talks with No on 9 Remembered about the organizing that culminated in that groundbreaking press conference, and why it was needed.

“I came to Oregon in 1987,” says Lynn, who was born and raised in Southern California before starting her legal career at Bronx Legal Services in New York City.

Measure 8, the Oregon Citizens Alliance’s first anti-gay initiative, passed in 1988, the year after she and her partner arrived. “It was a shock,” Lynn remembers. “Why did we move here? What is wrong with this state?

“I tried to get involved with the community, joined the board of LCP [the Lesbian Community Project]. With the lesbian and gay community in general, there was some marginalization of Asian Pacific Islander (API) folks back then. There wasn’t always the welcome mat.

“A group of us started Asian Pacific Islander Lesbian & Gays (APLG) so we could have buddies, a sense of community. Part of my being involved came from that experience with the larger community – I felt a little left out. We are constantly overlooked. None of our issues ever gets addressed.”

That experience was magnified during the mass mobilization to defeat Ballot Measure 9.

…as the months passed and election day grew closer, Lynn did not see anything in the media about Asian-Americans taking a stand against Measure 9. She did not see an organized effort by the No on 9 Campaign to get the Asian-American groups on board. Nor did she find any Asian groups in the listings of No on 9 endorsers.

From historian Pat Young’s interview with Lynn Nakamoto, cited in Pat’s 1997 Masters thesis

Lynn began to take matters into her own hands. As she documented in her Action Kit essay, “In Oregon, the idea to gain unified Asian and Pacific Islander opposition to Measure 9 did not come from the No On 9 Campaign, but instead from Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbians and Gays (APLG), a Portland-based group for lesbian and gay Asians and Pacific Islanders in Oregon.”

Making connections was essential to their work. Lynn’s “outsider” identity could have been a factor even within the Japanese American community. First, she was a relative newcomer to Oregon. “When I say my name in the Japanese American community in 1992, it’s ‘Who are you, and where did you come from?’ The people who stayed in Oregon after the internment of Japanese Americans – everyone knows each other. They were incarcerated together.”

Then there was the discomfort or lack of familiarity with out lesbian or gay folks within API communities. “When I was young, being gay – what was that?” Lynn remembers. “Like any racial community, the API community is very diverse. There’s a real range of religious affiliation and non-affiliation, for example. Some members of the community have more traditional Christian values.”

Reflecting on the change in LGBTQ acceptance since that era, Lynn says, “There’s been a huge progression in API communities from ‘we don’t know about these folks’ to a really strong identification with the civil rights struggles that everyone faces, including the lesbian and gay community. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), as a national civil rights organization, had huge, huge debates about whether to come out and oppose LGBTQ discrimination and endorse same-sex marriage rights. Japanese Americans in the main have evolved from we’ll try to control and humiliate you and write you out of our community to being active participants in the struggle for LGBTQ rights.”

A Unified API Voice

Presenting the matter as a civil rights issue, Lynn won the support of local JACL President June Schumann who secured easy passage of a No on 9 resolution with their board. “For the JACL board, there was a very strong resonance,” says Lynn. “You are tying to take away and basically demonize a small group of people. They recognized, Hey, that happened to us.”

Building from this success, several APLG members fanned out to approach over twenty API groups. Lynn remembers Mary Li (later a lead plaintiff in a same-sex marriage rights case) as essential – “she was more deeply involved in Asian-centered groups than I was. Mary and I were the organizers getting people in the various parts of the community to get leaders on board with holding a joint press conference, getting these leaders together in a room.” With other APLG members, they reached out out to more than twenty API groups.

The joint press conference was one prong of the mission that APLG defined when they decided to address the absence of any API-specific organizing against Measure 9:

“(1) Contact and educate leadership in the various local Asian and Pacific Islander communities. (2) Get endorsements from community organizations for the campaign against Measure. (3) Get endorsing organizations to publicize their endorsements and the campaign to their members. (4) Hold an Asian and Pacific Islander press conference opposing the measure.”

The result illustrated Lynn’s assertion in her Action Kit essay: “A tremendous amount can be accomplished even in the relatively short span of two months, which is the approximate amount of time APLG took to initiate the idea and to accomplish the mission of getting endorsements for the campaign against Measure 9 and holding an Asian and Pacific Islander press conference opposing the measure.”

“I remember growing up and hearing the words, feeling the sting of names like ‘nip,’ ‘jap,’ ‘chink,’ ‘slant eye,’ ‘gook,’ ‘f-o-b’– they were mere words, but words which carried real consequences in a country that allowed slavery, genocide and segregation to occur within its borders. I understand that the twisted logic and language of bigotry rendered Asian immigrants less than human, and subject to exclusionary policies, mob violence and discrimination. I understand that the dehumanization of Japanese-Americans, partly through language, paved the way for the World War II imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps. Ballot Measure 9 is a 1990’s version of the same twisted language and logic of bigotry.”

Asian Pacific Islander Press Conference held at Southeast Asian Catholic Vicariate on October 29, 1992

Read The Oregonian’s coverage of the event, Asian-American Groups Unite to Oppose Measure 9.

“When we pulled it together, I was so proud of all of these leaders who were able to get buy-in from their community to get out there,” Lynn says. “Some were immigrant groups; it was a big deal for them to be willing to step out there and be in The Oregonian and on TV. Probably not everyone’s group was entirely okay with gay people. But they did it.

“I was incredibly proud. People saw that – hey, maybe we can work together in the future on other items of mutual benefit.”

Lessons for Today

Not long after the defeat of Measure 9, Lynn reflected on the unlikely nature of what they had accomplished, writing: “There was significant disbelief among lesbians and gay men and among Asians and Pacific Islanders that we would be able to get many Asian and Pacific Islander organizations or individuals to help or to oppose Measure 9. At times, we as a working group were surprised by the support we received. If we had not attempted to do something despite this prevailing attitude of resignation, we would have missed the opportunity and success ultimately achieved.

“Sometimes we were subjected to rejection or were unable to dispel fears. However, some fear was countered because the working group was Asian, and because of our passion regarding the campaign as vital to everyone’s civil rights. Additionally, our descriptions of our oppression as people of color and as gay men and lesbians were perhaps more believable or better delivered and received by an Asian and Pacific Islander audience because we are Asians and Pacific Islanders. We were able to go forward despite the rejection because of the successes along the way, our clarity regarding the mission, and our mutual support for each other.”

Asked what she would advise people today, based on her experience in 1992, Lynn boils it down to this: “Pick your projects and pick carefully who you’re working with.”

Remembering the press conference, Lynn says, “I was just so elated that we got members of such very diverse parts of our community together. We got people to think about, if this small group [the LGBTQ community] gets attacked like that, we could too.”

As we publish this story, anti-Asian hate violence continues to rise both across the U.S. and in Oregon, where surveys of Asian Oregonians found: “Half of those surveyed indicated that they had heard someone use a racial slur, epithet or degrading language against them or a family member or both,” and “A third of the survey’s respondents said they are spending less time in the community to engage with friends and family, be physically active or go shopping because of a race-based bias incident or hate crime. And nearly 40 percent said they are worried their children will become victims.” (See “Asian Oregonians face rising level of race-based hate crimes, harassment.”)

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.  

In the early 1990s, most LGBTQ people didn’t think of cops as our allies. We’d seen decades of police raids on gay bars – including the infamous showdown at Stonewall – sexist treatment of both conventionally feminine and gender-nonconforming women, and brutality against queers of color, by those sworn “to protect and serve.” 

But when our community came under an entirely different kind of attack – Ballot Measure 9 – we had the unlikeliest of friends: the chief of the Portland Police Bureau, Tom Potter, and his lesbian daughter Katie, also a Portland police officer.   

“Chief Potter was well-known and well-respected for his community policing and his view that all citizens, including women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals deserved equal protection,” noted Pat Young in her Master’s thesis on Measure 9. “Just Out and The Oregonian ran stories on the Potters describing what it was like for Katie to come out and how her family and the police force responded. But it was not the newspaper articles that upset the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) as much as the fact that Chief Potter appeared in Portland Gay Pride parades. The OCA claimed Potter was not acting as a positive role model and his public support for homosexuals was ‘inappropriate use’ of his public office.” 

“A Scary Time for the City”

“It was a scary time for the city, and one-hundredfold for the gay and lesbian community,” Tom says, in an interview with No on 9 Remembered. 

“I have never seen anything in my tenure as chief, other than the civil rights issues and the Vietnam war, that has created such division within our state, and pitted family members against family members. There’s a very strong sense of imminent danger,” he testified to the Oregon Senate on October 26, 1992, one week before the election. 

Convening in response to the surge in hate crimes accompanying Ballot Measure 9, the hearing also included law enforcement from Salem and Hillsboro, communities that had suffered hate murders and the desecration of a Catholic Church the prior weeks. 

As Chief Potter told the legislators at that time, “Almost every gay and lesbian organization has received death threats. We’ve met with the No on 9 people, looked at the security of their premises. Gay and lesbians that are working on this issue are moving in pairs now.” 

Tom recounts his personal role in these security measures: “I visited the No on 9 campaign headquarters at least weekly. I wanted officers to see that, as well as the community. If we could prevent problems, we would. And if not, we wanted to respond as quickly as possible. The chief’s responsibility isn’t just to parrot something, but to live it. I was always being watched. 

“We installed a 900 alarm system at the campaign office that went directly to 911, with the immediate dispatch of a police officer. We put together a task force inside the bureau. It looked at all the possible scenarios: what happens if someone is shot, if there’s a demonstration. You try to develop responses that are lawful, appropriate, and create the least damage.”  

“Police presence is one of the most effective tools,” he says. “In the academy, they’re considered halos. If people see a police car, they behave differently – at least they used to. Having a patrol car a block from the campaign HQ – not right out front, that would be intimidating, but close by. A lot of the officers that I knew were gay, even if they may not have been out, would volunteer for these jobs.” 

Katie was one of those officers. Lesbian Community Project Executive Director Donna Redwing and her partner Sumitra lived in Katie’s district. “I gave their address to a couple of other lesbian cops I worked with, because I knew that Donna was receiving a lot of death threats. I would park my car and sit outside of their house as much as I could, because I knew that they were having to deal with a lot.” 

Pat Young’s thesis notes: “As election day approached, Portland Police prepared for violence. The bureau gave special security to 30 persons and extra protection to about 76 locations citywide that had been identified as potential targets of violence. The No on 9 Campaign headquarters had been surrounded by a 6-foot chain link fence, which the police recommended for protection against firebombing. Twenty-five people were given telephone pagers so they could be reached during a crisis.”  

Of these measures, Katie says: “All of that is dependent on who is at the top. I don’t think it would have happened on that level had there been somebody in that position who was not so pro-LGBTQ and pro-civil rights. Because my Dad happened to be there during that time, those things happened.” 

“I was very grateful for all that was put into place for people whose lives were endangered just because they were being outspoken about who they are and supporting civil rights for queer people.” 

Katie Potter

Looking back on his tenure as chief during Measure 9, Tom says, “I felt fortunate to be in a position to provide assistance to other Portlanders, to help people to understand.” 

Lesbian & Gay Pride

“A Father’s Love” is how The Oregonian captioned their entry about the 1991 parade in their history of Portland Pride. The article noted, “While Portland’s Lesbian and Gay Pride parade had featured local and state politicians over the years, 1991 brought something new. Police Chief Tom Potter rode in the parade to show solidarity with his daughter Katie, a Portland police officer who had recently come out. Potter also wanted to show the gay community that they could count on fair treatment from police, after a long history of being targeted.”  

Tom Potter was the first chief of police to march in the city’s Gay Pride, something few if any other major city chiefs had done. 

“I marched in uniform in the Pride parade for the first time as a police captain in 1987 or ’88,” Tom says. The OCA was already pretty visible then. I remember being stopped by a reporter: ‘The OCA has said you were a child molester, that you have sex with children.’ I was so disgusted that she would repeat that!”  

“Early on, I was the only one in uniform marching. I’d asked permission from the chief. Our gay and lesbian officers weren’t interested in marching; they had been feeling the heat. After I became chief, I told the organization: ‘I’m marching, and would like to have others join me.’ Maybe half a dozen or ten stepped up; my daughter was one. Over my time as chief, our contingent became sizable and other [law enforcement] departments became part of it too.”

Tom Potter

The response within the bureau was not all positive. Tom remembers, “As I was marching, uniformed patrol officers on duty blocking traffic would turn their back on me. After a few intersections I understood it was their way of slighting me, of saying we don’t like what you’re doing. They knew that discrimination against other officers or anyone in a protected class was not something I would tolerate; you’d have to answer to me personally. But they figured out the loopholes, what they could get away with.”  

Katie’s car was vandalized on one of those Gay Pride days, parked in the police parking lot. Another year, Katie tells us, “after walking in the Pride parade, I was later at a Precinct on-duty. An officer walked into an adjacent room, not seeing me, and told two other officers that working the Pride parade was the worst duty of his career.” 

Some of the hostility came not just from other cops, but from parade onlookers. “I think it was just really hard for some people to accept that a police officer would be happily and proudly walking amongst all of my community,” Katie says. “It was hard because most police officers at that time wouldn’t have done it.” 

Participation at Lesbian and Gay Pride was a chance to change that dynamic. “After the parades,” Tom says, “we spent time where the booths were set up, just talking to people. Not just the gay and lesbian community, but folks wandering in to the festival area, wondering What’s all this about? Katie and I and others also set up a booth at Pride for recruiting. We tried to use those events as opportunities not just to show up for communities, but also to get something from it – recruits more fully representative of the community. We did the same with every other community parade or celebration.”  

Ten years later, in 2002, Katie was asked to serve as the Pride parade’s grand marshal. (By then the event name had expanded to the Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans Pride Parade.) She and her partner and two young daughters rode in the Wells Fargo stagecoach, leading the way for the more than 100 groups marching that year. 

Tom remembers seeing his daughter and granddaughters in that stagecoach: “I thought – wow, we’ve come a long way! The crowd was cheering them! When you have a police force carrying guns, you want people to be on your side.” 

For Katie, those years of marching – especially later as a pregnant lesbian cop and then with her children – heightened her awareness of the risks of her visibility. “I felt all those eyes upon me when I would go by, and could see some people on the sidelines that were really clearly anti-gay. I would have to wonder, ‘What if one of them loses it and comes after us? How do I protect my children?’” 

Even with the continued targeting of queer people and threatened roll-back of our rights, Tom says – compared to 1992 – “I’m so impressed by how far our gay and lesbian community has come.” For that reason, he “was so disappointed” by the 2017 decision by Pride organizers to ask officers not to march in uniform.  

Oregonian coverage from the time shows the request – spurred by excessive force used against anti-Trump protesters – was not well-received: “Some Portland police officers, notably those who are members of the LGBTQ community, expressed outrage this week when they received a request from Pride Northwest to consider wearing something other than their police uniforms to march in the Pride Parade on Sunday.”  

“It was so hard to get gay and lesbian officers accepted and treated as equals,” Tom says. “If the people making that decision had been around in 1992, they may have seen things differently.” 

Katie, who retired in 2016 after 27 years as a Portland cop, says, “I do not share the same opinion as the rest of the police bureau. When they made that request I would have shown up not in uniform. What we should have been focused on is building bridges with the people who were scared or intimidated or felt threatened by our presence in uniform.” 

Read more about police culture then and now in our addendums: A Former Chief on Police Culture and A Lesbian Cop on Police Culture. 

Tom & Katie Under Fire 

The OCA saw Chief Potter’s participation in Gay Pride as evidence of governmental promotion of homosexuality. The way he saw it, he told The Oregonian, was as an expression of his responsibility as police chief to “work to ensure that every citizen has the right to live their life free from the fear of crime and free from any governmental interference in their right to think, express themselves and live as they choose.”  

In response to the OCA’s demand that Potter be fired, “Portland citizens, community leaders, and The Oregonian rallied to Potter’s side,” Pat Young recounts. “The issue of whether Potter should resign was aired in editorials, letters to the editor, news conferences, and eventually in a face-to-face meeting between OCA leaders and Potter. The meeting ended with both sides ‘agreeing to disagree.’” 

Supporters at a well-attended news conference defending Chief Potter included longtime African American community activist Richard Brown; Darryl Tukufu, executive director of the Portland Urban League; a representative of Governor Barbara Roberts; and Patrick F. Donaldson, director of the Citizens Crime Commission, an affiliate of the Portland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.

“We are in complete agreement with the chief in accepting and allowing diversity. As a public servant, he is acting in the best interest of all citizens.”

Patrick F. Donaldson, Citizens Crime Commission, Groups Declare Support for Embattled Chief, July 10, 1991

Tom’s job may have been secure with this level of community support, but Katie knew hers wasn’t. “The discussion around Ballot Measure 9 made it clear to me  that it was very likely that I would have to be removed from my job if it passed – the language was super specific around that,” she remembers. 

One OCA activist went a step further and filed a lawsuit against Katie, Tom, and the City of Portland, alleging that Katie was a part of Bigot Busters. “This woman who lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in signed an affidavit that said that I was at a mall Bigot Busting, which I had never participated in. Not that I was opposed to it,” Katie says, “because I wasn’t – but I wasn’t a participant because of my status [as an officer] at the time. 

“But she said that I was there, that I got within a few inches of her face and spit in her face, and was intimidating everybody. And that part of the intimidation was because I was a police officer, and everybody knew it. That I was using my police officer authority to intimidate people.” 

The lawsuit was eventually thrown out, but “It was so painful, every day, to figure out what was going to happen around all that,” Katie says. “And I thought: What does this mean that someone can make something like this up out of thin air?”  

Tom says, “I worried for my daughter on a personal level. I knew she could take care of herself but it was a scary time.” 

“It was just nuts. There were enough people that were so angry and, I think, unwell around this issue that they might try to kill us.” 

Katie Potter

“My Dad told me afterwards about getting a bunch of mail, some of which were death threats. I’m not a person that carried my gun everywhere. When I was off duty I didn’t want to feel like I was still on duty, so I just didn’t have it with me. My Dad asked me one day, ‘Are you carrying off duty?’ I said no, and he said, ‘You should really think about that.’ And I was like oh, crazy thing to have to tell your kid!” 

Read more about the internal harassment Katie faced within the police bureau as a woman, an out lesbian, and as the chief’s daughter, in A Lesbian Cop on Police Culture. 

Lessons from that Time 

“Ballot Measure 9 was a bellwether event,” Tom says. “We need to keep it in focus. If we’re not careful, we’ll go back there – which is happening. 

“I’m so concerned about the divide in our country. Today we have counties in Oregon that want to go to Idaho. Those groups that were looked at before as different from the norm are being looked at again. We have friends in the Chinese American community who are concerned about the problems they’re facing based on their heritage. We have to learn the lessons all over again. 

“We’ve lost the stability of truth. There’s nothing we can say that folks will take as gospel. Our belief systems have been shattered. There’s no common belief now, from what is democracy even to the role of the Supreme Court. Trump didn’t create this, but he brought it out, all those people ready and willing to believe whatever he’s saying. 

“How do we develop systems that people can believe as honest and true information? We need to develop shared beliefs about our democracy, how we treat each other, and how we solve problems,” Tom says. 

For Katie, the harassment she faced from coworkers on the force underscores one of the threats to democracy and the rule of law. “Guess what? Social justice is a part of justice – it’s not just about criminal justice. It stuns me that’s not better understood.” 

Tom and Katie both see our No on 9 experience as instructive around what’s needed now. 

“Measure 9 locked people into having to pay attention,” Tom says. “They could see people being insulted, injured, threatened. Portlanders were shocked by it. It forced the larger community to pay more attention to how gay and lesbian folks were treated.  

“We tend to look at situations and say it’s never going to change, but given the opportunity and good information, and the chance to do something better, I think people can change. From my positive side, I want to think we can use all these hard things that happen as lessons for the future; not just to learn from them, but to grow.” 

Tom recently gave Katie the boxes of all the mail they had received during his years as “Police Chief with a Lesbian Cop Daughter.” She says, “We received a lot of mail and a ton of it was supportive. It’s pretty incredible to go through all of it – it’s amazing and heart-filling and simultaneously heartbreaking in some instances. But the positive support that was shown us through most of those letters far outweighed the negative stuff.” 

For Katie, the experience taught her, “The most useful thing that all of us can participate in is being a part of a collective of community members. Along with all the terrible stuff from that time was the joy of meeting and making community with people – so many amazing people.”

“I was reminded about the Rainbow Coalition recently, and the work that Kathleen Saadat did in the African American community, and with Jesse Jackson. That was transformative,” Katie says. “I remember when Basic Rights Oregon moved into, not just advocating for queer rights, but also looking at racial justice [see Timeline, 2007]. That was transformative. 

“Those kinds of coalitions are what we’re going to need now – as much as we did back then – for the things we’re going to come up against with the current makeup of the Supreme Court.”  

Read more in our addendums: A Former Chief on Police Culture and A Lesbian Cop on Police Culture. 

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.  

“The trick was simply to help progressives and people who reject bigotry to find each other and organize in small communities,” says longtime activist Mike Edera who was living in rural Washington County during Ballot Measure 9. “The Right may be loud and dominant in a community but there are always many who do not agree, but are isolated. Working out a way for folks to gather makes a big difference.” 

The votes-to-win calculation in a statewide campaign argued for a nearly exclusive focus on urban and suburban areas (see Story 4). This story is about a few of the people who refused to give up on rural communities. 

“It was a function of living in a small town and recognizing that people who might have been your friends a couple of years ago were not your friends anymore,” Mike says of the impact of the divisive social politics of the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA). “It felt very important to me to understand that.” In a small community, “there was no mechanism for just shutting out the folks you disagreed with – there wasn’t enough density to do that.” 

For rural LGBTQ residents, like the “back-to-the-land queers, fairie gatherings, [and] lesbian collectives” described by author and artist Tee Corinne in the Just Out column, “A Report from the Southwest Corner,” community connections were a matter of solidarity and safety.  

For straight allies like Mike, it was about not shunning neighbors whose attraction to the OCA was bound up with economic dislocation. “I always felt,” Mike says of OCA supporters in declining timber towns and agricultural areas, “that this was a divided working class. Our opponents were fronting for some of the forces that were running society, but they were not of that. They were an independent force that had come out of years of neglect.” 

People Who Are Hard To Talk To 

Whether it was coming out as gay or lesbian to people who thought they didn’t know any or trying to connect around common values or economic anxieties, the method was the same. “Some of the most effective work starts with people talking with their neighbors, friends, family and those they work with,” Tee wrote at the time. 

What happened then is what’s needed now, Mike says, in this time of even greater polarization.

“The practice was to actually go out and talk to people. Even people that were hard to talk to because I disagreed with them. Our side really made a great effort to connect with these folks, all over the state.” 

Mike Edera

A listing in Just Out titled “Statewide Organizations Mobilized to Fight the OCA” included groups located in or dedicated to at least 23 of Oregon’s 36 counties. Alongside the Portland-based statewide campaign organization were local groups in the smaller I-5 cities of Salem, Corvallis, Eugene, Roseburg, Grants Pass, Medford, and Ashland; groups up and down the coast; and to the eastern Oregon reaches of I-84: from the Gorge Alliance for Human Dignity to Citizens for Human Dignity-Blue Mountain Region in Pendleton, People for Human Dignity in La Grande, and a Malheur County contact on the Idaho border. In the vast rural spaces of southeast Oregon were the Lambda Eastern Oregon Association in Baker City and the Klamath County Coalition for Human Dignity. (The backlash faced by Klamath Falls leader Cindy Patterson is featured in Story 7: Hate Crimes Surge.) 

Many of these groups drew their name and inspiration from Columbia County Citizens for Human Dignity, co-founded by Marcy Westerling. Marcy’s drive to support and link rural activists became the Rural Organizing Project (ROP), the most durable institution to come out of the entire No on 9 experience. ROP is celebrating its 30^th anniversary this year and telling its own story. (Western States Center’s relationship with Marcy’s early work – and the close connection your author Holly Pruett had – are part of Story 3: Oregon Democracy Project.) 

Marcy shared some of what she was learning in “An Anecdotal Study in Rural Organizing,” an essay for the June, 1992 issue of Oregon Witness, published by the Coalition for Human Dignity (another partner in the Oregon Democracy Project), that was later reprinted in the NGLTF Fight the Right Action Kit.  

“As the network evolved,” Marcy wrote, “the Rural Organizing Project found its most pivotal role was breaking down the isolation of local leadership. The project found rural leaders facing tremendous barriers in identifying and connecting with allies in their own and other areas. These obstacles range from geographic isolation to a historic silencing of progressive voices and values in more conservative communities.” 

Technological Innovation

There were two primary ways Marcy and rural leaders tackled this isolation. One was technical, the other, very human; both were highly relational. 

For as much as urban folks might stereotype rural Oregonians as backwoods or backwards, the scrappy network of small town and frontier leaders that Marcy linked together were among the very first to adopt email. This was 1991 and 1992, several years before the popularization of the World Wide Web. The No on 9 campaign was entirely off-line. But a gay man in Portland named Larry Taylor had a technology background. He heard about what Marcy was doing from a mutual friend and approached her after a meeting. 

“I lived in Portland,” Larry says. “There were lots of folks doing stuff in Portland. I saw that I could make a bigger contribution by helping rural communities. I started following Marcy around, going to all of her meetings.” 

Larry proposed that one solution to the isolation gays and lesbians in rural Oregon felt was to connect them through email. He dedicated himself to explaining the nuts and bolts and equipping leaders in dozens of small towns and enormous rural counties to get on-line. “I would explain what a modem was,” Larry remembers. “You had to have a phone line, a computer, and software like AOL, which was about all that was commonly available at the time.” Larry was on call to help trouble-shoot when a phone wouldn’t dial up a modem, for example. 

The OCA was active statewide, “doing lots of stuff everywhere,” Larry says. Sharing what was happening on the ground over “ROP-Net,” as the email network came to be called, “helped give us a holistic picture of what we were fighting. They’d do something in Klamath Falls and we’d put it on the email so folks in other communities could prepare themselves to fight back when OCA supporters tried the same thing with them.” 

Larry was no stranger to anti-gay violence; he had a friend who was beaten with a chain after leaving a gay bar and had grown up in an era of bar raids by police. But living in Portland at that point, he felt relatively safe. The rural folks he met through setting up the email network “truly did feel frightened,” he remembers. “It made the work of breaking down their isolation even more rewarding.” 

Achievable Steps Towards a More Inclusive Community 

While technology facilitated connections across Oregon’s vast 98,000 square miles, it was a form of something more fundamental: support. Marcy addressed this crucial element in another contribution to the “Action Kit” titled, “Breaking the Isolation: Keeping Leadership Vibrant.” 

“It is difficult to create a liberation movement without the presence of viable local groups, and isolated, unsupported leaders rarely keep a group alive. The Project saw that every community group had a need for an infrastructure that not only shared informational resources, but more importantly, allowed those in primary leadership roles to feel supported.” 

Marcy Westerling, “Breaking the Isolation: Keeping Leadership Vibrant,” NGLTF Fight the Right Action Kit

“The support provided by the Rural Organizing Project varied along the continuum from moment to moment and from community to community, but inevitably our organizing included putting forth an obtainable vision of the world we were organizing to create,” Marcy wrote. “This meant checking in on a frequent basis with lead activists to monitor their mood. Often a negative mood reflected a concrete obstacle that, once problem-solved for solutions, returned the lead activists to a position of hope crucial to their ability to inspire others.” 

On the road with Marcy, Larry saw, up close, her commitment to uplift. “Marcy’s public face was relentlessly positive and encouraging. She spoke plain language to people. I never fully appreciated what Marcy did ‘til long afterwards. Privately, I could see the work was very difficult for her; she would talk frankly with me about her frustrations.” 

Publicly, Marcy – and rural leaders like her – kept their eyes on the prize of a positive vision and achievable steps towards a more inclusive community. 

Tee Corinne put it this way: “We may win in November. Then again, we may not. But the networks are coming into place to fight the long and broad battle for human rights, not just for lesbians and gay men, but for all women, people of color and religious minorities as well. In a time when people all over the world need to earn to tolerate and embrace differences, perhaps in southwest Oregon we can find ways to get along with our neighbors to work for a world in which lesbian and gay men can live without fear.” 

In words that hit the mark as much today as they did in 1992, Marcy wrote: “As the Christian Right creates a frantic pace for our social change work by setting brush fires for us to rush around and extinguish, local leaders desperately need to remain connected to the bigger picture. Establishing a true democracy that includes the participation of all is a daunting goal. It is often easier to see why liberation cannot happen than to feel it within our grasp. In the face of constant challenges that appear to require an organizational response, we become reactive and worn and are too exhausted to contemplate the additional work of being proactive.” 

“In 1992, chaos and uncertainty seem to reign. The value of our organizing to date is that we have given a community hope and belief in the power of our collective strength. For now we fight the bigotry being advanced by the OCA, but our real purpose is to assert the vision of inclusion that we have for our community in a time of challenge.” 

Marcy Westerling, “An Anecdotal Study in Rural Organizing,” Oregon Witness, the newsletter of the Coalition for Human Dignity, June, 1992

Read more about Marcy’s work in Story 3 and Story 5 and in her obituary on the ROP website. After organizing against the OCA’s state and local ballot measures, Marcy went on to marry Mike Edera and provide hands-on training to organizers in Wyoming, Texas, Maine, New York, Colorado, Washington, Idaho, Nebraska, and Minnesota.  

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.  

On the final Sunday before Election Day, more than 5,000 people packed into Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square to unite behind the message, “Love Thy Neighbor.” Along with the chairmen of both the Democratic and Republican parties in Oregon, the state AFL-CIO president and a number of prominent business leaders, speakers included clergy and leaders from nearly every major religious denomination. 

As The Oregonian reported at the time, each speaker “urged a vote against the anti-gay measure in short, one- or two-sentence speeches, all ending with the phrase, ‘that’s why I vote with you . . . No on 9.’ The crowd…joined in to shout the last three words.” 

The idea for the scriptural rally theme, Love Thy Neighbor, came from faith leaders like Rabbi Rose and Lutheran pastor Joe Smith, Dan Stutesman remembers. “They contacted me and said, “We want to do something.” 

“Now is not the time to be silent. If you ever thought of standing up for something, now is the day for you to stand up.” 

Rev. Joe Smith of St. James Lutheran Church, Love Thy Neighbor Rally 

With the attack on civil rights and the gay and lesbian community led by Bible-quoting activists affiliated with the national Christian Right, and with campaigning taking place in Christian Right churches, lifting up faith-based opposition to Measure 9 was seen as critical. It was important not only to the undecided voters that each side was working to persuade, but to the LGBTQ folks within religious denominations who experienced the OCA’s rhetoric as doubly damning. 

For some, it was a time of coming out not only as LGBTQ in largely heterosexual settings, but also of coming out as a person of faith within the LGBTQ community. Looking back on photos, news accounts, and community papers from that time reveals a visible burgeoning of pro-LGBTQ (or at a minimum, anti-Measure 9) activity across the faith spectrum – from educational sessions and social action committee meetings to rallies, prayer circles, and sermons from pulpits. (Read more about the work in African American churches.) 

Congregation Beth Israel, for example – established in 1858, self-described as “the leading voice of Reform Judaism in Oregon,” and as we write this 30 years later, the target of antisemitic vandalism – already had a very active social committee. Member David Sarasohn, an editorial columnist for the Oregonian at the time, remembers that they formed a No on 9 subcommittee “which had about 45 people, the largest committee of any kind the congregation had ever had.” That was just one synagogue among the many houses of worship that engaged in the questions raised by Measure 9. 

Job Title: Gay Person of Faith

Dan Stutesman was perhaps the only Oregonian at that time employed to be an out, gay person of faith. He was the Gay and Lesbian Program Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Nobel Peace Prize-winning Quaker organization founded during World War I that describes itself today as working “with people and partners worldwide, of all faiths and backgrounds, to meet urgent community needs, challenge injustice, and build peace.” AFSC had been working on sexuality issues since 1961, Dan says, “ahead of the times.”  

Having grown up gay in a “split family” – half Protestant, half Catholic – then training at Catholic University as a priest, Dan understood his lifelong avocation as working to bridge divides. 

His first faith-based organizing job was with Fellowship for Reconciliation, where he primarily worked in schools and churches on disarmament and peace and justice issues. Once he started working for AFSC’s gay and lesbian program in 1986, his sexuality was part of his calling card; “I was introduced as gay” he says. 

“It was still very new for people,” Dan says. “I’d be invited to speak to the Baptists, for example. They had never talked to an out gay person.” 

AFSC’s work was broadly focused on LGBT equality. Part of this was AIDS education, which provided opportunities, through various committees and boards, “to make connections out in the community,” Dan says. He served on Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon’s AIDS Council, for example, which entailed road trips around the state. “I spoke with all of the teachers in John Day” (a small town in the middle of the vast high desert of eastern Oregon). “I was there to talk about AIDS, but of course I spoke about homophobia too.” 

Once the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) began to use homophobia as an organizing tool, Dan’s position with AFSC allowed him to serve as the informal coordinator of a group of faith-based activists who became known as People of Faith Against Bigotry (PFAB). 

Besides having a salary that supported his community organizing, Dan’s board included “substantial people like ministers and psychiatrists” that he could deploy to whichever speaking engagements and audiences needed to hear from such mainstream authorities.  

People of Faith Against Bigotry

The core of PFAB, Dan remembers, was about 12 people from different faith backgrounds, mostly LGBTQ, who “met all the time, quite often – maybe weekly – to decide different things” and coordinate their outreach work. This steering committee included both educators and church and synagogue members. 

“People of Faith Against Bigotry, representing people of all faiths, organized people all over the state to reach ‘those in the pews.’ They led discussion groups of social principles, invited lesbians and gay men to speak in their churches and synagogues, held days of reconciliation, distributed packets of materials targeted for specific faith groups, held candlelight vigils, and published a full page ad that read ‘The OCA Does Not Speak for Me,’ signed by hundreds of people of all faiths.”  

From Suzanne Pharr’s account, “The Oregon Campaign,” in a list of a few “shining examples of hope.” (Transformation: Towards a People’s Democracy, pg. 115)

Their methodology was simple. “It was a scattershot approach,” Dan says. “We would take any denomination or faith group where they were, and try to move them one step closer to equality views. They didn’t have to endorse homosexuality.”  

They were well aware that each religious organization was “having their own internal fights – and many still are” about LGBTQ inclusion and rights. 

As Cecil Prescod, a United Church of Christ minister who was part of PFAB’s core group, remembered in our story about the attacks on a Catholic Church in a farming community outside Portland, “It was such a different era then. Thirty years ago very few churches were welcoming of LGBTQ people and all the mainline denominations had laws forbidding queer clergy. Clergy and laity who stood up for the LGBTQ community felt very much like trailblazers, confronting the possibility of backlash not only from others in their faith community but also the church hierarchy. The threats, withdrawal of financial support, and then the physical intimidation and destruction of sacred spaces – it was terrible, a very scary time.”  

Cecil also says, “But in a strange way, it allowed ordinary people to say, ‘No more. They’re destroying our community. We have to say something.’ This was no longer a philosophical discussion. It impacted the real people’s lives, community life. It forced faith communities to say, ‘What are our true values?’ and to move beyond our comfort zone.” 

“We got invited to places like the Seventh Day Adventists,” Dan recalls. “I was shocked, but happy to be invited.” They met each group where they were at. “It was about whatever next step was right for them, towards opposing discrimination and supporting equality.” 

For some denominations, the discrimination they had faced for their religious beliefs became the basis for opposing Measure 9. Cecil says, “The Idaho Citizens Alliance failed in that state in part because within the DNA of the Mormon population there was religious persecution. The same was true for the Catholic Church in Oregon. The history of having been targeted by the KKK in the early twentieth century was in the DNA of Catholics in Oregon.” (Learn more in Story 8.) 

Dan remembers PFAB’s work as being complementary to the other religious leadership voices prominent in the campaign. Rodney Paige, the executive director of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon (EMO), was featured in many high profile speaking engagements. EMO lobbyist Ellen Lowe (known by some as the Church Lady like the popular Dana Carey character on Saturday Night Live from that time) was a primary spokesperson for the No on 9 Steering Committee. 

“Some of my views were more radical than EMO’s,” Dan says, “but I tried to focus on what we had in common. They never tried to influence PFAB or tell us what to do. It was a positive relationship.” 

Of the grassroots work in faith communities spurred by the fight over Measure 9, Dan is clear: “We actually did make a difference.” 

Then & Now

Looking back 30 years to the many forums where Dan discussed or debated the Christian Right’s characterization of LGBTQ people, Dan reflects, “It was the nascent beginning of QAnon thinking. What they were saying about us was so outlandish, I never knew if they really believed what they were saying. I remember asking to see the ‘gay agenda’ they kept claiming existed. They had one printed up, something made up by some crazy person. We didn’t have a common truth.” 

Dan points to Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow, a self-described “straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom” who recently had to defend herself against claims that she promotes pedophiles because she supports the LGBTQ community and considers “the notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism somehow means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense.”  

Dan says, “We’re in a probably more dangerous place right now,” pointing to “modern day burnings of books that address racism and LGBTQ issues” and the homophobic and transphobic legislation that’s being introduced in so many places around the country. 

For Cecil, the memory of the No on 9 era combined with the fact that “conditions are horrible today” is a reminder that “every era confronts challenges and things that are frightening. What we can learn from hearing the stories of the past is how our ancestors confronted those issues and sought to make changes.”

“Things won’t ever be fine. Every generation confronts its challenges. We have to continue the good struggle.” 

Rev. Cecil Prescod

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.  

“One Sunday my daughter and I were baking,” Anne Sweet remembers. “We didn’t have one of the spices we needed, so we went to the Safeway across the street from our house. And there was the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), right at the entrance. They were strategically targeting Black parishioners, waiting for the moment when church let out when lots of Black people would be going to the store. 

“My daughter said, ‘Mom, please don’t make a scene! Let’s just get our spices.’ But people were signing. It was just an awful feeling, to see them giving in to that homophobic piece that’s embedded in Christianity and agreeing that gay and lesbian folk should be gone after in this way.  

“So I started asking people not to sign. The store manager told me I had to leave or he’d have me arrested – he didn’t say that to the OCA! That’s when I called Bob, and soon after, the Bigot Busters just came out of the sky. The Safeway parking lot was filled with every kind of gay person of every stereotype and description – they all showed up. It was one of the best moments of the whole campaign for me!” 

Bigot Busting 101

“We set up Bigot Busters to suppress signature gathering by the OCA,” remembers Robert Doyle, a gay SEIU member at that time. “It didn’t keep Measure 9 off the ballot but it was clear that directly challenging the lies and misinformation changed minds. We have to be out, loud and proud about our democracy and equality.” 

Bob Ralphs, the burly bear of a gay man who founded Bigot Busters, is now deceased and remembered in periodic Facebook posts as “funny as hell,” “very loving,” and “a good friend [who] fought for equality with every fiber of his being while keeping his grand sense of humor and his high-level cooking skills alive to share with us all.” He left a primer on Bigot Busting as part of the NGLTF Fight the Right Action Kit. 

“Bigot busting has two primary objectives: preventing petition signatures, and providing a gay-positive experience to as many people as possible. An individual who might have signed a petition earlier can become an ally when confronted with the truth.” 

Bob Ralphs, NGLTF Fight the Right Action Kit

As evidence of the method’s effectiveness, Bob could point to the OCA’s failed attempt to put a local version of Measure 9 on the Portland ballot in the same primary election as similar measures were embraced by voters in Springfield and rejected by voters in Corvallis.   

“Why did Portland pose such a problem for the Oregon Citizens’ Alliance petitioners?” Bob asked. “Because, in part, wherever they went, the Bigot Busters would follow.” 

Bob’s “Action Kit” section explains the dynamics at play: “Our presence and effective presentation of the reality behind the rhetoric of the Christian right can result in the inability of our opponents to gather enough signatures to put their measures to a vote. Especially in urban communities where extreme homophobia is unpopular, potential signers are often too embarrassed to add their names to petitions. 

“Very often, the rhetoric used by the religious right to encourage people to sign their petitions succeeds by presenting us as a menace, as evil, unlawful, distasteful people whose special rights agenda must be stopped. By participating in bigot busting, our mere presence deflates many of those arguments. People approaching the petitioners can see some real living, breathing, walking and talking homosexuals calmly explaining the impact of right wing initiatives.” 

The Courage to Remain Calm

The national TV news magazine 48 Hours captured the festive scene in the Safeway parking lot after Bob answered Anne’s call. The courage required to engage alongside OCA petitioners was also featured in Fighting for Our Lives, a 20-minute video produced by Elaine Velazquez & Barbara Bernstein as an organizing tool during the campaign. 

In a Builders Square parking lot, an OCA petitioner asks someone off camera, “Have you had a chance to sign, sir? No special rights for the homosexuals!” She gestures over her shoulder to a young gay man standing nearby holding a placard who can be heard to say, “Don’t support discrimination. Don’t sign.” 

The woman tries again with two young men, one long-haired wearing a hardcore punk band t-shirt, the other bare-chested in a backwards baseball cap.  

“Have you had a chance to sign? No special rights for the homosexuals. We don’t want them to be a minority.” Seeing her targets looking at the gay man nearby, she gestures again, “This is the homosexuals. I’m not for them.” 

The long-haired guy loudly gathers his saliva and hurls a ball of spit on the gay man. “Fucking faggot! Get the fuck out!” 

The gay man responds calmly, “That’s assault.” 

“Oh it’s assault?” the assailant says. “Good! Arrest me! Where’s the pigs at? You fucking faggot.” He proceeds to take up a pen and clipboard to sign the petition. 

Nearby, another OCA petitioner tries to draw people to the signature gathering table by shouting like a carnival barker, “These are the Bigot Busters right here. Their purpose is to try to intimidate you so you will not sign this petition.” 

One passerby responds loudly, “Smear the queer with the baseball bat!”  

Non-Violent De-escalation

Given the potential for “violence and messy confrontations” like this, Bob’s Dos and Don’ts included: 

• All bigot busters should be trained in non-violent de-escalation tactics. 
• No one should go alone. 
• Don’t engage in lengthy discussions about the issues, and don’t argue with belligerent petitioners or signers. 
• Bigot busters should come back together at a designated time and place to return leftover materials and to debrief. At this point, the coordinator should count heads; those who chose not to attend debriefing sessions should be accounted for. 

Bob’s tips also included how to establish a Bigot Busters Dispatch Line, recruit and train volunteers, and coordinate the action in the field – “have one trained, cool-headed Bigot Buster serve as the site coordinator.” 

To identify where Bigot Busters would be needed, he advised: “Calling the opponents’ campaign and asking where you might find a petition to sign is a quick and efficient way to track them down.” And apply common sense: “Become familiar with the areas where petitioners frequently gather. Large grocery stores, malls, professional sports events, and large outdoor gatherings are likely petition hot spots.” 

Once common spots were identified, teams of volunteers would go to these “preplanned” sites “on evenings or weekends when it is known that petitioners are out.” In addition, teams should be ready for rapid response – “able to gather supplies and people and transport spontaneously to a petitioning site,” like the Safeway across from Anne’s house. Another example: “Someone attending a Portland Trailblazers game saw two OCA petitioners, called the hotline, and three Busters arrived within minutes to counteract the signature gatherers.” 

The heart of the Bigot Buster interaction was “to give short, effective answers to the questions that are likely to be asked,” supported by “informational flyers, impact statements, favorable editorials, etc.” 

Building Community

Bob was a seemingly tireless community organizer. In addition to founding and serving as lead organizer of Bigot Busters, he was a founder and organizer of the Portland-based No On Hate Political Action Committee, one of the efforts working parallel to the “official” No on 9 campaign. After the campaign he served as the coordinator of the Oregon delegation to the 1993 national March on Washington for Lesbian & Gay Rights and advised activists in Washington state facing a copycat OCA measure. 

Through all of this Bob cooked for everyone he organized. He was a big, sometimes controversial personality, who knew how to make things happen. His highly visible leadership made him a target. At one point the brake lines on his car were cut, and he routinely faced threats of violence and death. 

At the end of the day, Bigot Busting was as much about community empowerment – being “out, loud and proud about our democracy and equality” – as it was about exposing bigotry and inviting people to make another choice. 

Bob held his own organizing to the same standard of inclusion.  

“Allow people to talk about good and bad experiences they had during the day,” he advised. “Take suggestions for how things could be done better, and take the time to answer questions that came up during the day. It is important to maintaining unity and enthusiasm that people be given the chance to give feedback.” 

Bob died at age 45 of a heart attack in 1995. Twenty-one years later Kathleen Saadat wrote on Facebook: “Those of us who knew him miss his presence and the annual fried chicken dinner at his house. If you don’t know him, let me introduce the original Bigot Buster, Robert Ralphs. While he’s no longer on this plane of life, his words and actions reverberate through time.” 

“It feels like we, at this historical moment, might need a reminder of another Pride Hero, BOB RALPHS.” 

Kathleen Saadat, in a June 2021 repost of her 2016 Facebook message

As they say on The Moth Radio Hour, “Moth stories are true as remembered and affirmed by the storyteller.”  Read more about the benefits and challenges of historical memory.