Grave Charges Lead to Arrests

This front-page Portland Evening Telegram article refers to "grave charges" but does not explicitly state that those charges are accusations of homosexuality. The article followed previous reports that, on November 8, police had arrested an unnamed young man (Benjamin Trout) for a petty crime. Becoming nervous at the police station, Trout confessed that he knew of and had taken part in activities that characterized what historian Peter Boag later called "a local homosexual subculture." Trout's confession resulted in multiplying accusations and confessions. Boag argues that the 1912 scandal prompted a series of "reform activities" that determined how the region reacted to same-sex affairs during the following several decades.

Prior to this scandal, public acknowledgement of homosexuality had been limited to national stories about Oscar Wilde or local attacks on immigrant and transient populations, which already faced racial and class discrimination. As this newspaper article notes, however, the scandal that had begun in 1912 in Portland included "a number of well-known young business and professional men of the city." In other words, the accused men, who quickly confessed, were white and middle or upper class.

At the time of these arrests, no laws existed to protect homosexual people, and there was widespread outrage about the subculture that gay, middle-class white men had forged in Portland. Many men fled the city to escape being implicated, but they were sought by police in cities up and down the West Coast. This article and its accompanying scandal focused only on male gays and, at the time, the city had one prominent lesbian, Dr. Marie Equi.

Further reading:
Peter Boag, Same-sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)

Written by Eliza Canty-Jones © Oregon Historical Society, 2007.