7: Hate Crimes Addendum 1

Kathleen Saadat would not want the story of African Americans Voting No on 9 to be about her. “I see myself as a conduit,” Kathleen says.

But her willingness to come out as a lesbian on the cover of Just Out, the state’s major LGBTQ newspaper, in November, 1991, changed the terms of the debate.

At the time an assistant to Portland Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury, Kathleen wasn’t new to activism or politics. In an alumna profile in Reed College magazine, she said she’d grown up “shy but angry” in the Jim Crow-era South and Midwest; “attending segregated public schools and sitting in the blacks-only sections of the movie theaters would forge her social conscience.”

Already in her 30s when she moved to Oregon, by 1976 Kathleen was one of the organizers of Portland’s first gay rights march. She served as the state’s Director of Affirmative Action under Governor Neil Goldschmidt during the time he signed the executive order banning discrimination against gays and lesbians in executive department employment (later overturned by the OCA’s Ballot Measure 8; see Timeline). She helped craft Portland’s anti-discrimination ordinance protecting gays and lesbians, passed the same year she posed outside City Hall for Just Out.

The fact that Kathleen was a lesbian wasn’t a secret. “But she hadn’t advertised it either,” Just Out writer Andee Hochman noted in the cover story titled, “The OCA opens the door for Kathleen Saadat.”

Cecil Prescod was one of the many community members affected by Kathleen’s courage. An African-American minister in the United Church of Christ, Cecil was just newly becoming involved in LGBTQ activism at the time. “This was the first time that I got to meet and know Kathleen,” he remembers.

“We were all very young and Kathleen was this amazing woman that people respected. People respected her so much that they became more comfortable speaking about gay issues in the African American community as a result of her example. The integrity she had made it possible for many people to have conversations they otherwise wouldn’t have.”

Cecil Prescod

Cecil notes, “It’s still a very hard community to talk about these issues in,” even 30 years later. For that reason, Kathleen made sure that she wouldn’t be left standing out in the cold.

Before the cover story came out, Kathleen reached out to friends and leaders in the African-American community. She told Just Out, “I’ve talked to people that I know and said to them, ‘This is what’s going to happen, and this is what I expect. I expect you to remind people that I’m the same person today that I was two weeks ago.’ To a person, each one of them has given me a hug and said, ‘You got it.’ It’s been pretty nice to have that support and reassurance.”

Among those committing to stand with Kathleen were State Rep. Margaret Carter, the first Black woman elected to the Oregon legislature; State Rep. Avel Gordly, who would go on to become Oregon’s first Black female state senator; JoAnn Hardesty, who in 2019 would become Portland’s first Black female City Commissioner; Black United Front co-chair Richard Brown; labor and community activist Anne Sweet; and more.

After committing to serve on the No on 9 campaign steering committee (see Gay Bar in Eugene), Kathleen found herself needing to go back to these allies once more. Her impetus came from two directions. First was from within the campaign and the white leaders with greatest influence on strategy – the campaign was not doing enough to engage communities of color.

Attempts by Kathleen and others “to have that campaign address issues of race and utilize effectively people of color… seemed to fall on deaf ears,” she later told historian Pat Young.

Racism Inside and Outside the Campaign

“The problems of racism within the campaign were the same as outside the campaign,” Kathleen says today.

She’d encountered dismissive treatment all her life. Serving on the No on 9 steering committee was no different.

She recalls being attacked several times in meetings, her statements subjected to innuendo and lies. Debriefing one of these incidents with fellow steering committee member Jeff Malachowsky over pizza, he asked, “What’s that about?” She said simply, “Racism and sexism.” The next time it happened, Jeff – a white straight man, then executive director of Western States Center – spoke up, countering the ways Kathleen’s words were being distorted with a simple, “That’s not what she said.” Kathleen says, “It changed the whole dynamic.”

Still, with all the dangers and difficulties of life on the campaign trail – the death threats, the long days, the big work of changing hearts and minds – she says, “The hardest part was the racism.”

Even as Kathleen and others were struggling to get the LGBTQ campaign to take issues of race seriously, the opposition was only too eager to feature people of color in their media to reassure white voters, and conservative voters of color, that Ballot Measure 9 “was not about discrimination.”

As Suzanne Pharr wrote at the time: “This mis/dis-information is used to wedge us apart from our allies. The OCA has gone into African American churches in Portland and told their members that while they were clean, upstanding Christians in their Civil Rights Movement, these perverted and diseased homosexuals now want the same rights African Americans fought so hard for. They remind them that there are very few opportunities to go around, and that they must protect what little there is available for them. Abortion rights are also presented as genocide against the African-American community and women’s participation in affirmative action as an attack on the position of Black males. Through presenting the idea of deserving and undeserving victims of hatred and oppression, the Right reinforces the idea of hierarchies of oppression, and divides us from another.” (Transformation, pg. 39)

African Americans Voting No on 9

With little support inside the campaign, Kathleen turned back to her allies in the Black community.

She recounted her course of action to Pat Young a few years after the campaign: “I approached Avel Gordly, Margaret Carter, and Richard Brown and said, ‘We have no presence. We have no visible presence in this struggle.’ They immediately agreed to help get one.” The four co-signed a letter inviting folks to convene at Margaret’s house. About two dozen came to that first meeting. They committed to organizing as African Americans Voting No on 9, with an average of about 17 people meeting regularly for the duration of the campaign – “which I thought was remarkable,” Kathleen says.

As they made their voices heard within the African-American community, “It was not a monolithic or unilateral response,” Kathleen recalls. “There was a lot of discussion just like in the broader community around what was right and what was wrong.”

Writing in The Oregon Witness, the newsletter of the Coalition for Human Dignity (see Oregon Democracy Project), Cecil stated it succinctly: “In summary, the OCA’s agenda is an anti-Black agenda.” Read his full article, “Oil & Water Do Not Mix! The OCA and the African American Community,” here.

African Americans Voting No on 9 made this case in one of their fliers:

Ballot Measure 9 violates every civil rights principle African Americans have fought for over the years. Not even one generation has passed since people twisted the Bible to justify laws which discriminated against Black people. Before that, practitioners of discrimination used the Bible to justify slavery and its inhumane treatments. Ballot Measure 9 is a vile reincarnation of both the Jim Crow Laws and McCarthyism. In light of these discriminatory practices we urge African-American citizens not to be deceived by the biblical justification that is being used to discriminate against people who are perceived to be different.

African Americans Voting No on 9

“Because the whole issue of homosexuality is surrounded with issues of religion,” Kathleen told Pat Young, “some of the Black ministers had been saying to their congregations that they should vote for Measure 9.” Some of these ministers allowed OCA spokespeople to speak from their pulpits, fanning fears not only about morality, but about jobs through the false claim that gays and lesbians were seeking “special rights.”.

With the campaign focused on the white majority for the votes it needed to win, there were no resources dedicated to dialogue with the African-American community to discuss their fears and dispel misinformation. That work fell to African Americans Voting No on 9.

One prong of their strategy to counter the OCA’s attempt to wedge the African-American and LGBTQ communities was public. The group partnered with the Rainbow Coalition (which Kathleen co-chaired with Jan Mihara) to bring Rev. Jesse Jackson to Portland to speak against Ballot Measure 9. “We had a packed crowd. Absolutely packed to the rafters,” Kathleen remembers. Rev. Jackson stated: “No right-thinking person must ever use any scriptural text to justify any group being left outside the umbrella of civil rights protections.”

Another prong of their strategy was behind-the-scenes. Countless conversations were devoted to persuading Black ministers to consider neutrality.

“If they couldn’t support our effort, [we wanted them] to at least understand that it was a human rights issue and not say anything,” Kathleen says. By the final months of the campaign, as Pat Young documents, “ministers were speaking out. Reverend Willie B. Smith, pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, commented that while his church opposed homosexuality, he equated Measure 9 with Jim Crow Laws. Another pastor, Paul Spurlock of the Ainsworth United Church of Christ, said Measure 9 was ‘an affront to the conscience of the community.’”

A key turning point came when the Albina Ministerial Alliance (the association of African American clergy) agreed to team up with the Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon to place a full-page ad in an African-American newspaper urging people to vote No on 9, with quotes from prominent African-American clergy.

“The proposed Measure 9 is a violation of basic human rights. In light of the long difficult struggle of African-Americans in this country for our human and civil rights we must be extremely sensitive to the exclusion of Gay and Lesbians in regard to their struggle for the same rights. Voting No on Measure 9 does not endorse homosexuality. It simply affirms that Gay and Lesbian people are part of God’s whole family.”

Rev. Robert Eaddy, Highland United Church of Christ

Voter education included print and radio ads (Western States Center helped raise the funds); speaking to community groups; and coming out, again and again, to invite people to think about gays and lesbians of all skin hues as humans.

The Power of Radical Inclusivity

“I can talk with almost anyone, if they’re willing to talk with me,” Kathleen Saadat told the Black United Front’s Oral History Project in 2010.

On the road during the campaign, she met with about 20 other people of color in the conservative southern Oregon town of Grants Pass. A Latino man was the last person to arrive; he turned to leave, saying, “I shouldn’t be here. I support the Oregon Citizens Alliance.” Kathleen countered, “Please stay.” When he asked why, she said, “We have to live on this planet together.” At the end of the meeting, he told her, “I’m so glad you asked me to stay. You talked about roads, work, children, schools. Now I see you’re not one dimensional.”

A white woman told Kathleen her support for Ballot Measure 9 was connected to her religious faith. Kathleen invited her to attend a service at Metropolitan Community Church with her. After worshipping with the primarily gay congregation, she told Kathleen, “I’m not sure I can support gay rights, but now I can tell people the bad stuff they’re hearing about homosexuals is not true.” Within the next ten years, she’d become an ally and advocate.

“I don’t expect the world to change overnight,” Kathleen told Just Out – or that her coming out would “make everybody go, ‘Hallelujah.’” Her hope was “maybe just to get people to think, to think about the value of human beings.”

For Kathleen, the No on 9 campaign was about more than gay rights, or even the broader threats to civil rights that was being advanced by demonizing LGBTQ people and propagating false threats of “special rights.”

“It’s time to stop throwing one another away,” Kathleen said in the 1991 Just Out interview, pointing to a dehumanizing dynamic that has only worsened since then. “If people are mean to me, I can tell them they’re being mean to me. I don’t have to kill them. If we can raise a few generations without the idea that killing is the solution to a problem, we might see a brand new world.”

Looking back from 30 years later, Kathleen says the most important message to carry forward about the fight to defeat Ballot Measure 9 is, “Everybody can participate in making the change we need.”

That’s why she agreed to stand for election to the original campaign steering committee in that bar in Eugene, and stuck with it, despite all the difficulties that followed.

“Winning 50 percent plus one of the vote was not a big enough goal,” Kathleen says. “You still need to build a movement.” The broad-based community representation of that original steering committee was an example of what building a movement might look like. The determined work of African Americans Voting No on 9 in the face of both campaign indifference and community discomfort is another example of movement building.

The need for an inclusive movement persists to this day. “The struggle to include, to broaden, is still there,” Kathleen says. “We talk about working together. We need to talk more about listening to each other. That plants the seeds of growth. You can’t do that while you’re diminishing the other person. You have to give what you want to get.”

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.  

Oregon’s farmworkers’ union took a courageous stand for LGBTQ Oregonians, setting in motion one of the most durable legacies of Ballot Measure 9.

The conventional wisdom in 1992 was that Ballot Measure 9 would be defeated by white, liberal voters in the state’s main population centers (see A Gay Bar in Eugene). Despite this view, many were committed to engaging with rural communities and communities of color.

For some, it was a matter of survival – for queer people of color or rural LGBTQ folks, or as friends and family members of either, the danger was intensely local. Some white LGBTQ activists had a general desire for diversity without a deep political analysis.

For other activists, both people of color and white allies, there was a clear understanding that Ballot Measure 9 was at its heart a racist attack on civil rights that must be fought by an ongoing multiracial coalition.

Many who saw the underlying white supremacy of the religious right’s agenda expected that an attack on immigrants would be next. They were right – Prop 187 passed in California in 1994, a watershed moment in the growing anti-immigrant movement.

The intersection of immigrant rights and LGBTQ rights is one of the most durable stories to emerge from the fight against Ballot Measure 9.

“The legacy of this beautiful bond was established during devastating times. As a young organizer, I remember seeing our leaders, and hearing them teach us the value of being in community, and supporting all social justice causes.”

Reyna Lopez, President of Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos Del Noroeste & Executive Director of PCUN

Farmworker Rights: Gay Community, Where Have You Been?

The Walk for Love and Justice was conceived of by Anne Galisky, the queer daughter of a once-undocumented Ukrainian immigrant who came to the U.S. after a seven-year journey via Mexico. Anne envisioned a 150-mile, two-week walk from Eugene to Portland to “take the agenda out of the hands of the Oregon Citizens Alliance and go directly to the people of Oregon, asking them to stand with us for justice and against bigotry” (from the April 1, 1992 press release; we’ll tell the full story of “For Love and Justice: A Walk Against Hate” in the coming months).

Along the route walkers would stay in churches, synagogues, and community meeting rooms. Between the state capital of Salem and the walkers’ destination of Portland was the town of Woodburn. A profile of Anne recounts:

“Hosts and participants took on the risks that were inherent in boldly and publicly supporting the LGBTQ community in that highly charged environment. In Woodburn, the only organization that was courageous enough to stand up for the LGBTQ community was Oregon’s farmworker union (PCUN). Farmworkers met the LGBTQ walkers and allies on the edge of town and marched into Woodburn together. That evening a crowd packed into the PCUN union hall for a bilingual getting-to-know-each-other session, with dinner provided by a synagogue from Salem.”

PCUN co-founder and then-President Ramón Ramírez has told the story of what happened that night, and what it set in motion, many times over the years. In a video produced by Gary Delgado for the Rural Organizing Project, Ramón recounts a core topic of that evening’s dialogue: solidarity and reciprocity.

“One of the questions that we put to the LGBTQ community was where had they been in terms of farmworker rights? We work in close proximity to Portland, so it was a question that was very difficult for them to answer.”

Ramón Ramírez, Former President of Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos Del Noroeste & Co-Founder of PCUN

Individual LGBTQ community members may have acted in solidarity with farmworkers, participating in boycotts or providing financial or organizational support through non-LGBTQ-specific congregations or social justice groups. But there had been no queer-led organization to build a sustaining relationship of mutual respect and support.

Even without this track record, Ramón and participating PCUN members stepped forward. “We opened up a dialogue because we knew we needed to stand up for the LGBTQ community and build a long lasting relationship for justice for all,” Ramón remembers.

Rural Organizing Project (ROP) founder Marcy Westerling had been at the PCUN union hall that night. As Ramón recalls, “Marcy immediately started identifying with PCUN. Once ROP got formed we began building a relationship.”

Prop 187 Comes to Oregon

With the success of Prop 187 just to the south, anti-immigrant organizations filed multiple copycat measures in Oregon in 1995. “The Oregon initiatives required the following: the verification of the legal status of all students by public schools, and the exclusion of those without documentation; the denial of driver’s licenses to undocumented people; the denial of public benefits and services to anyone undocumented; and that reports on ‘suspected undocumented immigrants’ be made by all state, local, and governmental agencies.” (The Story of PCUN and the Farmworker Movement in Oregon, pg. 30.)

Marcy had already activated the ROP network of small town human dignity groups to support a PCUN boycott in 1993, in a multi-year effort to bring agribusiness NORPAC to the bargaining table. And in 1995 ROP included a full-page titled “Why Should Queers Care About Immigrants” in their kitchen table activism packet. Written by Sue Dockstader for Communities Against Hate’s The Racemixer, the piece concluded: “We owe a debt of gratitude and support to those in communities of color (both straight and queer) who have fought against the OCA. Stop immigrant bashing!” [Examples courtesy of ROP Archival Collection.]

Coming off the defeat of the OCA’s Measure 13 in 1994, Basic Rights Oregon was newly forming with a commitment to ongoing LGBTQ solidarity work around civil rights.

“The first thing we did was go to people like Marcy Westerling and ROP and Basic Rights Oregon and say, help us out to defeat these measures. And they did, they helped us out.”

Ramón Ramírez, Former President of Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos Del Noroeste & Co-Founder of PCUN

When the anti-immigrant measures were filed in 1995, Ramón says, “The first thing we did was go to people like Marcy Westerling and ROP and Basic Rights Oregon and say, help us out to defeat these measures. And they did, they helped us out. They taught us how to strategize, and how to do electoral organizing, something we’d never been involved in, in any serious way. We were able to learn a lot. They laid out this beautiful strategy that [involved] CAUSA, PCUN, ROP, and BRO, developing a strategy that had different components to it. Immediately we began a 35-city tour in rural Oregon to talk about anti-immigrant measures. ROP shared their contacts with us. In every town we met with ROP supporters and the Latino community. It was a truly grassroots effort, a very successful effort.”

As noted in The Story of PCUN and the Farmworker Movement in Oregon, “CAUSA, an Oregon statewide Latino-based coalition, was co-founded by PCUN in 1996 to oppose four anti-immigrant ballot initiatives, which were potentially worse than California’s Proposition 187. PCUN co-founder Ramón Ramírez was a key player in the founding of CAUSA and in its successful attempts to prevent the anti-immigrant initiatives from reaching the election ballot: they fell far short of the 97,000 signatures needed to qualify.”

Continued Solidarity Work

Nine years after the No on 9 “Walk for Love and Justice” opened a dialogue about solidarity in the PCUN Union Hall, the Walk for Farm Worker Justice “included people from immigrant, labor, religious, human rights, community, small farmer, environmental, and youth organizations who marched to bring NORPAC to the bargaining table with PCUN,” according to the union’s history. It notes, “The Oregon Farm Worker Ministry and Rural Organizing Project provided a major supporting role for the march and the effort to bring NORPAC to the bargaining table by providing tours of field conditions through Washington, Yamhill, and Marion Counties and mounting protests, including a major picket line at NORPAC corporate headquarters in Stayton.”

After struggling for over a decade to center racial justice in its work, Basic Rights Oregon established a standing Racial Justice Program in 2007.

“Basic Rights Oregon was born out of ballot measure fights,” the program description reads. “Oregon has faced more anti-gay ballot measures than any other state, making us seasoned veterans at the type of ‘get out the vote’ operations that are needed to win when a community’s rights are on the line. One place our racial justice values emerge is in giving field support to battle Oregon’s anti-immigrant ballot measures.

“Our racial justice work is rooted in solidarity with groups that have supported us as we’ve supported them. For instance, in 2004 the farm workers union and immigrant rights group PCUN opposed, and organized its members against, Measure 36, which banned same sex marriage. Then, in 2014, after marriage equality was settled in Oregon’s federal court, we shifted our staff to focus on fighting against Measure 88, a ballot measure which sought to repeal the rights of undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s cards.”

For Ramón, it’s not just a matter of white queers and straight immigrants or farmworkers standing up for each other. It’s a recognition of the love and support needed for people who are members of both communities. On National Coming Out Day in 2016, Ramón wrote:

“Once again this year I am proud to come out as a vocal ally for LGBTQ communities, particularly people of color who continue to face unique struggles to coming out and being out. This remains true within the Latino community, where LGBTQ people face unique cultural barriers because of the strong presence of the church. As a result, they are less visible and less authentic. We can change that by standing up for justice for all people in our communities.”

Ramón Ramírez, Former President of Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos Del Noroeste & Co-Founder of PCUN

Ramón continued: “I am among many other straight leaders of color who are making videos, writing opinion editorials, and sharing our stories to raise the visibility of leaders of color who are fighting for LGBTQ equality this National Coming Out Day. We are joined by more than 140 leaders and organizations that work in communities of color across Oregon that have publicly come out in support of LGBTQ people of color.

“Together, we can bring more visibility to LGBTQ people of color and help all families get the resources, respect and love they need to thrive.

“Thanks to the work of Our Families at Basic Rights Oregon, LGBTQ people of color can live in communities freer from discrimination and distress. It benefits not only them, but the rest of us as well, because when you do something positive for one member of our community, it affects all members of our community.”

A Legacy Formed Out of Devastating Times

In 2018, Reyna Lopez was named executive director of PCUN, which is now Oregon’s longest standing Latinx-led organization. The proud daughter of immigrants from Mexico who came to Oregon in the late 80’s just as the OCA was starting its slew of bigoted ballot measures, Reyna remembers hearing the story of farmworkers’ collaboration with the LGBTQ community. “As a young organizer,” she says, “I remember seeing our leaders, and hearing them teach us the value of being in community, and supporting all social justice causes.”

“To this day these bonds continue, and have grown and developed into golden coalitions and alliances for the long term. The lessons of 30 years ago can be brought to 2022, where PCUN and the farmworker movement continue to show up with radical generosity for all communities experiencing injustice. This story is still told to our younger generations, and will continue to be upheld as a key moment in our history bringing together the farmworker movement and the LGBTQIA2+ movement. Your struggle is our struggle.”

Reyna Lopez, President of Pineros Y Campesinos Unidos Del Noroeste & Executive Director of PCUN

For more on PCUN’s many accomplishments, read the 2012 history compiled by PCUN staff and members with the University of Oregon’s Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies, The Story of PCUN and the Farmworker Movement in Oregon.

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.  

Eugene, where the campaign began, provides a portal to explore Oregon’s political and cultural geography.

“A rarely told part of the story,” remembers Scot Nakagawa, “is the origin of the No on 9 campaign. It began with an election for steering committee members at a gay bar in Eugene.”

To understand the significance of this, and how much the eventual organization of the campaign veered from its origins, we need to look at the political and cultural geography of Oregon in 1992. It’s a story of power and control that continues to this day.

The first two facts to know:

Oregon’s population is highly concentrated in the handful of counties with sizable cities, and is overwhelmingly white. The 1990 census counted more than 90 percent of residents as white, just under 4 percent as Hispanic or Latino, 2.4 percent as Asian, 1.6 percent Black, and 1.4 percent Native American. Since then Oregon’s population has grown by 1.5 million people but remains 84 percent white, 44^th among states for its percentage of African Americans.

Oregon’s Political Geography

Oregon is the ninth largest state by area, covering nearly 100k square miles between Washington to the north, California and Nevada to the south, Idaho to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.

In 1992 nearly 65 percent of the state’s 2.8 million residents lived in the six counties with more than 100,000 residents. Clustered along Interstate 5, these were the tri-county Portland metropolitan area, where 41 percent of the total state population lived; Marion County, surrounding the capital city Salem; Lane County, home of the University of Oregon; and Medford/ Ashland’s Jackson County on the California border. 

Of Oregon’s remaining 30 counties, 21 had fewer than 50,000 residents, including eight with county-wide populations of less than 10,000.

From the standpoint of a conventional electoral campaign, the fundamental goal is to get 50 percent plus one of the votes. You want to identify and turn out every one of the voters on your side (your base) and then persuade and turn out those most likely to move to your side from the undecideds in the middle. You don’t want to waste a minute of time or a penny of your budget on those who are already against you.

On a social issue like gay rights the strategy would be to find the votes in the reliably “blue” pockets where a liberal population was concentrated and ignore the rest of the state. One of the many problems with that assumption was that the victory of the Oregon Citizens Alliance Ballot Measure 8 in 1988 showed that Democrats weren’t immune to homophobia. The religious right was betting on gay rights as being an issue that could divide Democrats and recruit more people to vote conservatively. That had certainly proved the case in Eugene a decade earlier.

The Locus of Gay Political Power

Eugene – college town, lesbian mecca from the late 1960s-90s, gateway to numerous counter-cultural remnants like Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters – is known as the Emerald City but is deep blue politically. It was the first and only jurisdiction in the state that had enacted legal protection for gays and lesbians. (See Timeline.)

Members of the city’s gay community in 1977 persuaded the Eugene City Council to add sexual orientation to its ordinance banning discrimination. This historic City Council vote was immediately undermined by a referendum to rescind the state’s first gay rights protection. Despite a vigorous campaign to defend the anti-discrimination ordinance, voters repealed it by a 29 percent margin. It would take 24 years for the City Council to reinstate these protections, a decade after Ballot Measure 9.

The story of the Eugene campaign is told in the 1983 publication, It Could Happen to You: An Account of the Gay Civil Rights Campaign in Eugene Oregon, as told by the Gay Rights Writers Group. The title was a pointed and prescient forewarning – if voters in a notoriously liberal city like Eugene could be persuaded to endorse anti-gay bigotry, it could happen anywhere. Watch the video of Eugene lesbians remembering the Measure 51 campaign in the Politics collection of the Outliers and Outlaws archive.

Terry Bean, a white fifth-generation Oregonian who attended University of Oregon, was one of the campaigners. By the time the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA) filed Ballot Measure 9 he had moved to Portland, co-founded several Portland-based gay institutions (Right to Privacy PAC in the early 1980s and the grantmaking Equity Foundation in 1989) and helped launch the national Human Rights Campaign (1980) and Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund (1991).

The locus of gay political and financial power was firmly established in Portland by 1992. Right to Privacy (RTP, later renamed Right to Pride) held their 10^th annual fundraising gala in a downtown hotel in October, 1991. Keynoted that year by Oregon’s Governor Barbara Roberts, the highlight of the banquet was always the lineup of dozens of elected officials from local to Congressional, waiting to be introduced one by one to the cheering crowd of 500 or more people. RTP’s strategy was to raise and contribute money to candidates such as these, willing to support LGBTQ rights. Not everyone in that room believed it was worthwhile to campaign against the OCA, believing the courts, elected officials, or Congressional action at the federal level were more likely to advance the cause.

In this context, what happened in that gay bar in Eugene was counter to all prevailing political norms.

The Gay Bar in Eugene

“It began with an election for steering committee members at a gay bar in Eugene,” says Scot Nakagawa, at that time a community organizer and expert on the racist and homophobic right. “Whoever showed up could be nominated, and those nominated were to be community representatives, and not just the directors of a political action committee. People were nominated or volunteered and then were voted on. Bob Ralphs facilitated the process.” [We’ll write more about Bob Ralphs later.]

About the setting, Scot remembers: “I remember it was dark. The meeting took place in the basement which doubled as the main dance floor and bar area. The room looked just like you would expect a gay bar to look like in the light of day – a little cobbled together, stained black painted walls. Beyond that there was the obligatory disco ball and not much else. It was very spare and felt very small, befitting a relatively small and very closeted queer community of that time.”

Among those nominated and elected were Scot, white lesbian Cathy Siemens (founder of the Lesbian Community Project) who had encouraged Scot to attend, and African American community leader Kathleen Saadat. Of the two Latinx community leaders Scot remembers having been elected that night, one quit shortly thereafter “over the sense that the committee was racist.”

“Why did they want me?” Kathleen asks today. “Because there was a commitment of people to broaden the movement and be inclusive.” The previous campaign, against the OCA’s Ballot Measure 8 in 1988, had been hastily organized (see Timeline) and left some activists feeling that more needed to be done to introduce voters to gay people.

The Contest for Control

Once this initial leadership body was elected, the Portland-based, primarily-male, predominantly-white gay donor base rejected the campaign.

“They didn’t know us or, if they did, they didn’t trust our ability to run an effective campaign.”

Scot Nakagawa

Kathleen (see African Americans Voting No on 9), Scott Seibert, and one or two others of “the originals” stuck with the steering committee despite the racist dynamics and serious differences over campaign goals and strategy that would persist. Scot Nakagawa moved onto the paid staff of the organization led by that steering committee, the Campaign for a Hate Free Oregon (CHFO), renamed No on 9 once the measure qualified for the ballot and received its numeric designation.

This came to be known as “the official campaign” or “the mainstream campaign” to differentiate it from the literally dozens of other groups and organizations that were created to defeat the measure. (We’ll tell the stories of some of those groups in the coming months.)

Scott Seibert, for example – a white gay former deputy sheriff, Marine recruiter, and fraternity president – formed OUTPAC, dedicated to tracking OCA membership and money and sharing copies of OCA propaganda with queer groups. Scott drove around Eugene in an era with zero legal protections for LGBTQ people, with the customized license plate GAYMAN.

Despite serving on the “official campaign” steering committee, Scott Seibert was the kind of activist who was more tolerated than embraced by the small core of actual decision-makers. There was a fear of the many flowers blooming – the proliferation of multiple campaign entities, slogans, logos, messages, tactics. Would they form a harmonious bouquet to decorate the stage on a victorious election night? Or were these weeds starving the main harvest of the food, water, and oxygen it needed to thrive?

The “mainstream campaign” tried at various times to equip, persuade, cooperate with, co-opt, or ignore these many other efforts. This depended in part on the rise and fall of the influence in any given moment of paid organizers, national allies, and steering committee members.

After the ballots were counted, the “official campaign” closed up shop – as it had always intended. Many of the other organizations that formed or flourished through the long fight against Ballot Measure 9 lived to fight another fight.

The question of control, in some ways, was never really a question. Ballot Measure 9 was defeated because of the dozens of organizations that inspired thousands of queer Oregonians and their allies to come out and to turn out the No vote. But the big money for the metro-area media buys that fulfilled the conventional wisdom about how a campaign “was really won” would remain in the hands of the white liberal power structure that dominated the state (and still does).

In the aftermath of the No on 9 campaign, it was clear that not only would small towns across the state be subjected to mini-9 OCA measures but we would have to return to the statewide ballot (in a non-presidential, lower turnout year) to fight a sanitized version of Ballot Measure 9. A few of us, including your writer Holly Pruett, began organizing the foundation of the next “official campaign.” If we won both the vote and the trust of the community, we intended to become a permanent campaign-ready LGBTQ rights organization. Both happened – we defeated Ballot Measure 13 in 1994 and founded Basic Rights Oregon.

Early in that difficult two-year slog, campaign manager Julie Davis and I were called into the penthouse office of a downtown office building. The former mayor of Portland and cabinet member for President Jimmy Carter, who as a white college student had gone south to help with voter registration drives and as governor of Oregon had enacted the first ban on lesbian and gay discrimination (later overturned by voters); now a kingmaker and fixer for the business community, told us essentially this:

The gay community couldn’t be trusted and wouldn’t be allowed to run this next campaign. Ballot Measure 9 had been defeated – yes, but the campaign was a mess. It was chaos. A similar measure had passed in Colorado and the state was now facing business boycotts. The Portland business community couldn’t let that happen here. They would be running this next campaign. We shouldn’t feel bad. After all, civil rights wouldn’t have been won for Blacks in the south if white Northerners hadn’t come down.

Ultimately, the nascent No on 13 campaign brokered a compromise that allowed the queer community and our community-based allies to do all the hard work while a few business representatives – alongside labor, faith, and civil rights leaders – got to review the (never controversial) campaign polling and message.

Ballot Measure 9 was a campaign about civil rights that accomplished many things – but it did not fundamentally alter the underlying racial, geographic, or economic power dynamics of the state or the LGBTQ community.

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.  

Western States Center joins scores of new and longtime community-based groups fighting Ballot Measure 9.

We don’t have the original project materials, grant proposals, or reports. The memories of the architects of the Oregon Democracy Project are influenced by the passage of 30 years. Not all of us are still alive.

A description remains on the back of a brochure in one person’s personal archive:

The Oregon Democracy Project, a coalition of four community-based organizations – Lesbian Community Project, Oregon Alliance for Progressive Policy, Oregon Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence, and the Coalition for Human Dignity – sponsored by Western States Center, work[s] to oppose bigotry and promote progressive social change. The Oregon Democracy Project has been generously funded by the Public Welfare Foundation and the Veatch Foundation.

We could probably go back and dig up more documentation. But this is not an archival project. It’s about historical memory. The stories we carry within us. The lens of today through which we understand the past. The kaleidoscopic view glimpsed through many fragments in ever-shifting configurations. 

Looking back, three things are crystal clear about Western States Center’s views at that time: 

The fight against Ballot Measure 9 couldn’t be seen only as an attack on the gay and lesbian community; it was an attack on democracy and the gains of the twentieth-century civil rights movements. Because of that, the fight had to engage broader segments of leaders, communities, and voters than the No on 9 campaign would prioritize. And we had to start to move away from the boom-and-bust cycles of electoral campaigns that didn’t build infrastructure or movement. 

The Oregon Democracy Project was conceived as a way to channel progressive philanthropic resources to address these critical needs as Oregonians considered the question of Ballot Measure 9.

Western States Center 

Western States Center (WSC) was founded in Portland, Oregon only five years before the Measure 9 campaign. Its vision was of a just and equitable society governed by a strong, grassroots democracy. Its mission: to build a progressive movement for social, economic, racial and environmental justice in eight western states.

WSC founders were largely rooted in labor and place-based community organizing with an emphasis on economic class as the driver. “Speaking truth to power” was mainly seen as workers to bosses, tenants to landlords, poor neighborhoods to city halls and statehouses. What came to be called “identity politics” was still pretty new. The modern Christian Right and LGBTQ movements (see Text of Ballot Measure 9) were each only about two decades old. 

“Ballot Measure 9 came along at a time of generational change. It was time we woke up to the anti-pelvic right,” says Jeff Malachowsky, founding Western States Center executive director.

WSC described itself at the time as “a unique regional organization of political activists, community leaders and progressive officials.” While there were a number of programs meant to encourage cross-pollination, the biggest tent was an annual conference, the Community Strategic Training Initiative (CSTI, now biennial and renamed AMP: Activists Mobilizing for Power).

“CSTI was a place where organizational leaders, and those on their way towards running organizations coming out of student, environmental and LGBTQ movements, would make connections with aging dinosaur organizers,” Jeff says. “We had a lot of work to do to unify the various wings: historic economic and civil rights organizations with the new social identity groups. But the energy for that was led by the latter.” 

Deb Ross, one of Western States Center’s program directors, was an early leader in the feminist movement to end violence against women and children. The co-founder of the Center Against Rape & Domestic Violence (CARDV) in Corvallis, Deb had gone on to staff the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence (OCADSV) and to co-direct McKenzie River Gathering Foundation (now Seeding Justice).

Oregon Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence

During the ballot measure fights against the Oregon Citizens Alliance in 1990 and 1992, your writer, Holly Pruett, was executive director of the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence (OCADSV). As only the second-ever director, I had the incredible good fortune of learning from the movement’s founders – Deb and many of the others who had created Oregon’s first rape hotlines and battered women’s shelters. 

These founders had established some of the country’s first laws addressing domestic violence and made marital rape a state crime. They’d lobbied for a fee on marriage licenses that provided the only steady public funds in that era, distributed through a cooperative formula that made sure there was some level of resistance to violence against women in every one of Oregon’s 36 counties.

OCADSV, along with the national coalitions we were a part of, worked hard towards being explicitly anti-racist. It was the kind of work that came to be understood as intersectional after Kimberlé Crenshaw’s analysis entered the mainstream.

We understood that making the criminal justice system responsive to violence against women was complicated by the fact of anti-Black racism. The use of rape accusations had long justified both legal and extra-judicial lynching even as the sexual abuse of Black women was rarely acknowledged, much less punished. Trainings at my first crisis line in 1985 included role plays to practice “interrupting racism” – for example, objections to “that part of town” when transporting white women to a battered women’s shelter in a historically Black neighborhood. 

Our ability to live up to our anti-racist ideals, both individually and institutionally, was a mixed bag, of course. There were many mistakes, and there was pushback from white women. But anti-racism trainings were mandatory. There was a staffed Women of Color Caucus.

A commitment to addressing the inter-relationship of racism and violence against women and a belief that the liberation of any one oppressed group was tied to the liberation of all oppressed groups – these were the prevailing norms across OCADSV’s network of 30-some community-based organizations when Ballot Measure 9 came to call.

Suzanne Pharr was a big part of that push at the national level. She had founded the Women’s Project in Arkansas in 1980, working at the time for Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), part of the federal government’s mid-1960s “War on Poverty.” The Women’s Project’s Women’s Watchcare Network tracked violence against women along with racist, antisemitic, and homophobic hate violence and the activity of the Klan and other far-right groups. Suzanne became visible as one of the white women working in partnership with the women of color leading the push for anti-racism awareness and practices within the larger domestic and sexual violence movement. 

In 1988 Suzanne published the first of her several essential movement books. Homophobia, A Weapon of Sexism exposed the ways that progress towards dismantling the barriers created by systemic misogyny could be weakened by accusing a woman of being a lesbian. Labeling feminists as “man-haters” was a primary form of discounting us and resisting the changes we demanded. Suzanne travelled to Oregon and around the country leading anti-homophobia trainings with other movement colleagues, extending OCADSV’s understanding of intersectionality to include the ways that anti-LGBTQ bias threatened the rights and safety of other marginalized groups. 

This was the organizational base Deb Ross brought to Jeff Malachowsky’s attention as they were prioritizing constituencies to engage through Western States Center. It meant overcoming a conventional organizers’ bias against what was seen as “social service” organizations. It would prove catalytic to WSC’s commitment to expanding the parameters of the fight against Ballot Measure 9 beyond the confines of a typical electoral campaign in Oregon – by involving communities ignored by typical campaigns, and by strengthening progressive infrastructure for the future fights to come. 

Oregon Democracy Project

Jeff and Deb conceived of a loose structure that would bring together four 501(c)(3) organizations that had much to offer the larger No on 9 effort. The idea was to channel some resources for each to do the kind of non-partisan voter education and engagement that was allowable under their tax-exempt status. Bring them together to develop some shared analysis. See if any synergy might develop among these groups, which were largely unknown to each other.

The Oregon Alliance for Progressive Policy (OAPP) was the closest to WSC’s core constituency. Based on a model already well-established in other states (now called “a table”), OAPP aimed to aggregate the power of public employee unions with other environmental, consumer, and civil rights advocacy groups. Its lifespan was short, from 1989 to 1994.

The Lesbian Community Project (LCP), founded by Cathy Siemens (a former WSC board member), and others in 1985 was in its heyday at that time. It mixed social and recreational community building (like a big annual softball tournament) with visibility and advocacy work. LCP’s second executive director Donna Redwing was a major figure in the No on 9 campaign, as documented in the film Ballot Measure 9.

The Coalition for Human Dignity (CHD) was a semi-underground opposition research and organizing shop based at that time in Portland. Part of their anti-fascist work addressing the hate violence described in Act I: 1988 is told through the podcast series It Did Happen Here. Scot Nakagawa, a key No on 9 organizer who afterwards became Fight the Right Director for NGLTF, was part of CHD. He and Tarso Luís Ramos (who joined the WSC staff for a 12-year run in May, 1992) were working on a series of essays and pamphlets making the case against the measure and the Oregon Citizens Alliance to different constituencies. Current WSC executive director Eric K. Ward and his then-colleague Kelley Weigel, later the third WSC executive director, worked on one about the OCA and race. I worked on one about the OCA and women’s rights. Others focused on environmentalists, labor and so on.

The fourth group was the one I directed at the time, the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence. Besides having the base of intersectional political education described above, we were about the only statewide organization with a presence in every one of Oregon’s largely rural 36 counties. Some of our member groups were pretty tiny, a handful of volunteers – but they had at least some recognition of what was at stake when their neighbors were asked to vote to condemn gays and lesbians in the state Constitution. 

Deb was the builder who brought the four organizations together.

It required a paradigm shift about what organizing is and how power building is done. Patriarchal models of organizing weren’t going to work. The people with the most skin in the game and the most to offer weren’t in those old models.

Tarso Luis Ramos

Tarso credits WSC with the kind of broadly inclusive leadership we need more of in 2022. “Jeff took a risk,” he says, “that proved very significant. Jeff came out of Alinsky organizing, a very white, extremely ‘bro’ culture, and had a lot of credibility in that world. He was convinced to leverage Western States Center’s resources and platform for leaders – many of them queer women – and communities that hadn’t previously figured prominently in his imagination of how to build power. The resulting alliances transformed the politics of an array of institutions and shifted movement culture in the Northwest.”

It was clear that regardless of the poll-driven, media-market-targeted messaging of the official No on 9 campaign, there had to be a conversation about democracy. What it meant to vote on a group of peoples’ rights. The way this campaign was a covert referendum on race and the gains of the civil rights movement.

As Suzanne Pharr said when the “special rights” attack was first discussed at the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force’s Creating Change conference, “This is not just about queers. This is something different.”

Western States Center and the four organizations it brought together decided to call the consortium the Oregon Democracy Project. 

Suzanne came out to Oregon to work both inside the official campaign, doing political education and fielding media to broaden the understanding of the OCA’s agenda, and to work with Oregon Democracy Project (ODP) members.

The full range of what ODP did as a consortium, and what each of the four groups did towards the defeat of Ballot Measure 9, is either forgotten or to be told on another day. Tarso remembers that WSC featured the Rev. Dr. Mac Jones, a Black Baptist preacher from the South, at CSTI that summer. “That was an important talk,” Tarso says, “explicitly linking the struggle for African American civil rights with Ballot Measure 9” in a state that was then 90% white. The Child Advocates Caucus at OCADSV took the lead on debunking the measure’s conflation of pedophilia and homosexuality. And both LCP and CHD worked 24/7 from the start to the finish of the fight against the OCA.

In all this activity, the most significant and durable was the focus the Oregon Democracy Project brought to rural Oregon. 

Rural Road Trips

With Oregon’s population concentrated along the Interstate 5 corridor, a statewide electoral victory can generally be achieved by ignoring the residents of the rest of the state. Our last Republican Governor left office in January, 1987. But a commitment to inclusive democracy meant we couldn’t see anyone as expendable.

If you throw away small towns and rural people you’ve defeated yourself. You set up fertile ground in the face of an anti-democracy movement that thrives on resentment – you contribute to the resentment.

Suzanne Pharr

Not only was reaching out to rural communities the right thing to do for the long-term prospects of democracy, our relationships within OCADSV and other progressive groups outside metro areas – like the farmworkers’ union – meant that we personally knew or lived in communities that were being torn apart by the OCA’s divisive agenda.

Marcy Westerling decided to do something about it from the small town of Scappoose, north of Portland on the Columbia River. The director of the OCADSV member group Columbia County Women’s Resource Center, Marcy organized her neighbors into Columbia County Citizens for Human Dignity, a model she thought could work elsewhere. 

With Suzanne Pharr, Scot Nakagawa, and Pat McGuire from Coalition For Human Dignity on board, Marcy hit the road. Years later, when Marcy died in 2015 after five years of “livingly dying” of ovarian cancer, her memorial tributes included this from Tarso:

“The official ‘No’ campaign hoped the liberal vote in Portland and a few other west side cities would be enough to defeat the measure. Marcy and other savvy people at the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence (where she was board chair) doubted that calculus and were in any case unwilling to concede rural and small town Oregon to the Right. So they set out to build a statewide resistance network. That network would be carried by the leadership of women who already understood about White Christian patriarchy and were in various capacities already combatants in the struggle for women’s survival and liberation.

“Marcy went on tour around the state with Patricia McGuire, Scot Nakagawa, and Suzanne Pharr. While they all came home—challenged and elated—in some sense for Marcy that tour never really ended. Rather, under her leadership and in response to the shifting conditions of the day, the network she built evolved over time into the Rural Organizing Project.”

And this from Suzanne Pharr: “Of all the many things I cherish about Marcy Westerling, the most outstanding was her relentless commitment to rural people and belief they can organize for change in their local communities. In 1992, Scot Nakagawa, Pat McGuire, and I were Marcy’s sidekicks in a memorable ride around Oregon to see if there was an interest in organizing in small towns. Marcy drew from what she learned on that trip to found the Rural Organizing Project. With a belief that every voice should be heard, she established strong democratic principles and began organizing.” 

Infrastructure for the Long Haul

There will be more to say about the Rural Organizing Project, celebrating their 30^th anniversary this year. OCADSV was proud to serve as their fiscal sponsor once the Oregon Democracy Project wrapped up, until their independent tax-exempt status came through.

There were other relationships forged through the focus on the underlying issues of race and the threat to inclusive democracy that we’ll have time to tell over the course of the year.

There’s one more outcome from Western States Center’s investment in the Oregon Democracy Project to mention now. 

Immediately after the defeat of Ballot Measure 9, the official campaign closed its offices, its singular goal of achieving 50 percent + one having been achieved. Jeff and Deb brought in campaign organizer Thalia Zepatos for a huddle around a tape recorder. They, with Kathleen Saadat, documented all of the strengths and all of the weaknesses of what had gone down, with an eye to how such campaigns going forward could have dual goals. Not just to win at the ballot – in this case, we had only stopped something bad from happening – but at the same time, to build the movement for inclusive democracy.

Their observations formed the framework for the fight against the OCA’s next round of local measures and their “Son of 9” statewide Ballot Measure 13 in 1994. That campaign, which I co-led, defeated the OCA and laid the groundwork for a permanent, campaign-ready LGBTQ organization with an intersectional anti-racist commitment. That organization is Basic Rights Oregon, still thriving more than 25 years later.

Thalia’s notes formed the outline for a Movement Building Campaign curriculum and toolbox that later I helped to edit, used by Western States Center with dozens of groups around the region over the course of the next decade or more.

In the shorter term – January, 1993 – Marcy and Deb took those lessons to Idaho which in 1994 would face an Idaho Citizens Alliance measure modeled on Ballot Measure 9. Idaho leader John Hummel remembered the impact in his memorial tribute to Marcy:

“Marcy and Deb spoke to a group of LGBTQ activists in our living room, just as they had in countless living rooms throughout Oregon during the 1992 Ballot Measure 9 campaign. Together, Marcy and Deb inspired the formation of our campaign, the ‘Decline to Sign/No On One Campaign,’ that defeated Proposition One, Idaho’s anti-gay ballot measure, in the statewide general election in November 1994 (by approximately 2,000 votes, but who’s counting?). In 1993 and 1994, Marcy and Deb and Suzanne Pharr returned to Idaho three times to teach and inspire at a series of training events sponsored by our statewide equality group, Your Family Friends & Neighbors. My partner Brian co-chaired our statewide campaign, and the wisdom and support that both Marcy and Deb provided was a great foundation to his leadership.” ~ John Hummel

An Important Story for Our Present Moment

Reflecting on the No on 9 effort that expanded beyond the confines of the traditional electoral campaign box – the Oregon Democracy Project and other complementary organizing – Tarso says:

Taking the long view beyond short-term policy fights took a lot of chutzpa, a lot of fight, and a willingness to deal with dissent in our own coalitions. A commitment to a long-term struggle for power required competing in places that were strongholds for our opposition. It meant making decisions not to just fight within the opposition’s frame and to invest in new infrastructure that could build countervailing power.

Tarso Luís Ramos

As the first state to enable direct legislation through citizen-led ballot initiatives, Oregon already had savvy electoral organizers safeguarding reproductive rights and public employee unions. The Ballot Measure 9 campaign benefitted from that base of expertise. In turn, the fights against the OCA’s anti-LGBTQ ballot measures may have strengthened progressive infrastructure for other issues. It’s one of the reasons, Tarso believes, that Oregon has just about the strongest commitment to reproductive rights in the country, defeating every attempted restriction at the ballot box, defending state funding for abortion, and winning comprehensive Reproductive Health Equity Act legislation in 2017 (another Western States Center priority).

“The infrastructure that began or developed through the fight against Ballot Measure 9 organized new constituencies and galvanized others,” Tarso says. “It’s one of the most important stories we need to tell in this current moment in time.”

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.