Eugene gay bar

Top 10 Best Gay Bar in Eugene, OR - Last Updated May - Yelp - Cowfish Dance Club, Luckey's Club, Bugsy's Bar and Grill, Southside Speakeasy. Spectrum Queer Bar is Eugene’s only official queer bar, and manager Kiki Boniki is proud of that. Since its opening in , the bar’s boasted queer themed events from Bear Mixers to GAYmer Nights; Spectrum tries to cater to every type of queer under the sun, Boniki says, and aims to be a safe space for every person under the queer umbrella.

Spectrum is Eugene's LGBTQIA+ venue for working, eating, entertainment and special events. All ages until 9pm. LGBTQIA travelers in Eugene find a receptive and friendly community. Find inclusive gay-friendly and lesbian-friendly hotels, bars and gathering places. Spectrum is more LGBTQIA+, not necessarily a gay bar. The bar that was there was called the Wayward Lamb and it, at times met the gay bar standard, the new owners are quite a bit more inclusive.

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 The census counted more than 90 percent of residents as white, just under 4 percent as Hispanic or Latino, 2. Oregon is the ninth largest state by area, covering nearly k square miles between Washington to the north, California and Nevada to the south, Idaho to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.

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. 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. It was the first and only jurisdiction in the state that had enacted legal protection for gays and lesbians. See Timeline. Despite a vigorous campaign to defend the anti-discrimination ordinance, voters repealed it by a 29 percent margin.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 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.

The locus of gay political and financial power was firmly established in Portland by 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.

People were nominated or volunteered and then were voted on. Bob Ralphs facilitated the process. 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.

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

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?

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. Many of the other organizations that formed or flourished through the long fight against Ballot Measure 9 lived to fight another fight.