Gay cruising portland

GayMapper brings you information about gay bars and cruising bars in the city. Here are the top choices, read more about these bars or click below to see listings of all gay venues in this city. Steam Portland stands out as the citys most frequented gay sauna. It offers amenities including a spacious steam room, dry sauna, private rooms, a maze and a gym.

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Top 10 Best Cruising Bars in Portland, OR - Last Updated June - Yelp - Badlands Portland, Eagle Portland, Silverado, District, Scandals, Slammer Tavern, Reel M Inn, C C Slaughters, Stag PDX, Renner's Grill. The best gay bars, dance clubs, gay-rated hotels, gay saunas and gay cruise clubs in Portland. A listing of gay cruising (cruise) bars and nightclubs located in Portland (PDX), Oregon.

That was Portland on a February day 34 years ago, as a young gay man walked by the State Theatre at the corner of Congress and High, accompanied by a couple straight friends. I figured it was now or never…. But they had little sub-theaters, little movie booths that you go in, much like The Treasure Chest that used to be here [next to Blackstones]. But I went in. I had to experience it and see what it was about. Cruising , in gay culture, means the same thing it means in straight culture: driving, riding, walking or hanging around a public place looking for a sexual partner.

Even in a supposedly gay-friendly city like Portland, where an ordinance prohibiting cruising has been on the books since , scores of men gay and otherwise have been sent warning letters and cited by police for cruising, uncountable thousands have been bullied by surly beat cops not to cruise, and traffic signs downtown and in surrounding neighborhoods warn residents and visitors by the million not to try it.

In his book Cruising: An intimate history of a radical pastime, novelist and University of California professor Alex Espinoza traces evidence of gay cruising back to Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, to homosexual hot spots of the Renaissance like Florence, into the backrooms and boulevards of 18th century London and Paris, through to the crumbling cities of our modern United States.

Historically, the response of church and state has been to threaten, harass, humiliate, imprison and kill gay men seeking sex in public places. So urgent, so necessary is our desire to connect, to engage in this act of intimacy, that we would do almost anything for it, even risk exposure, arrest, our very lives in some parts of the world. And if one has to do something outside, you want shrubbery.

Nobody wants kids to be subjected to any outside entertainment of an adult theme. I found a Maine gay newspaper stacked in the entrance to one of the pubs. Gay culture was taking its first tentative steps out of the shadows in this corner of the country, where waves of social change born in big cities always arrived a decade or two late. The following year, Portland hired a tough-talking former drug cop and homicide detective from Philadelphia named Mike Chitwood to be its chief of police.

Undercover cops also busted Portland bars for hosting nude dancing by women , while other plainclothes officers also women posed as prostitutes in Parkside to lure unsuspecting johns into handcuffs. Chitwood also sent undercover cops into local businesses like Video Expo and the Fine Arts Theatre — two o joints on Congress Street that outlasted the scene at the State — where patrons were reportedly exposing themselves, masturbating and hooking up, and made numerous arrests.

He wanted a law to intimidate and outlaw gay men desperately looking to meet someone. And then it snowballs out of control. Whether they cruised or not, their everyday activities — driving, taking a walk, taking a leak — became suspect, resulting in a pervasive feeling of repression in all sorts of public places.

With not having many places to hang out during the day, especially in the winter months, I found that the library was a safe and warm place to be. The employees were less than kind and I had to either have my face in a book or on a computer. This became a nightmare after a while as I felt constantly monitored. Do heterosexuals get arrested when they get caught after 10 p.

No, the Police just warn them and let them go. But, by his own admission, this only pushed the activity to other parts of Portland, including the Eastern Promenade and outer Congress Street, where it was less noticeable to blue bloods but more dangerous for those involved. The obvious absurdity and futility of these Keystone Kop operations suggests their real purpose was less about apprehending sex criminals and more about causing apprehension in the minds of lonely and repressed people compelled by homophobia to seek sex in the streets and toilet stalls.

About 50 letters were sent in late , and nine more had recently been mailed when that article was published. Tellingly, only one of those nine letters was sent to a Portland address. One politely worded letter — no big deal, right? Until you consider why someone from another town may have been driving around Portland looking an intimate partner on the sly. Most of the cruisers behind the wheels were closeted gay men, typically older and wealthier than the objects of their desire.

Unless they just so happened to be the one who took the envelope from the Portland Police Department out of the mailbox that day, the secret of their sexuality could have been exposed to their spouse or partner or parents or siblings or kids or whomever, with terrible consequences for their life, work and reputation.