Mitch Gould: This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VII Issue 162). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online. Mitch Gould is a multimedia developer and the curator of the forthcoming Web site, LeavesofGrass.org online.
In 1904, writes historian Peter Boag, Oregon was already “one of the leaders of the Progressive movement.” To help win the war on alcohol, the Anti-Saloon League hired a broad-shouldered, baby-faced attorney named Edward McAllister. He had just arrived in Portland, minus his wife. He soon joined with a classmate from Virginia to create a Portland law partnership.
Then McAllister really began to rack up big enemies. He joined groups that proposed a stiff tax on lands owned by real-estate speculators and Oregon's citizen-initiative system (which is today famous). During the election of 1912, he was also involved with capital punishment, the vote for women, and a funding measure that punished the University of Oregon.
As Boag tells it,”the results of the election did not bode well for McAllister.” When the election was over, voters soundly trumped most of McAllister's causes. The exception: a repeal of funding for the University of Oregon. The University's home town expressed its outrage in the pages of the Eugene Daily Guard.
Hardly a week passed before the Daily Guard broke the story of McAllister's “bestial practices” in a homosexual panic called Portland's “Vice Clique,” which implicated sixty-eight men. It was followed by similar scandals in Philadelphia, in 1913; in Los Angeles, in 1914; and just after WWI, in 1919, in Newport, Rhode Island. Is the timing of these other panics a coincidence? If not, we need a plausible explanation, and Same-Sex Affairs does not provide one.
McAllister lived and worked on Washington Street—the heart of Portland's gay district. His law office was practically on the corner of the city's “Whitechapel” vice district (nick-named in reference to Jack the Ripper).
During the trial, local men testified that he picked them up and took them home or even to his office. In February, 1913, he was convicted of sodomy. “The weight of public opinion against him for his role in the single tax movement, for his stand on university appropriations.,” says Boag, “played a role” in his conviction. “Nor did being a Democrat in a Republican city and state help his case.”
Although McAllister won his case on appeal, he was disbarred, and his impeccable reputation was destroyed. He moved to a farm near Myrtle Creek, where he became active in small-town associations such as the Masonic Lodge.
When he died from a stroke in 1926, he was only 58. The Myrtle Creek Mail said that he was widely respected in the area, but “had known tragedy, and persecution, and disappointment.”
It's too bad that McAllister is the closest thing Same-Sex Affairs offers to a hero. Credit Boag with being inclusive; he demonstrates how poor immigrants, transient laborers, and the homeless also suffered politically at the hands of homophobic opportunists.
But Same-Sex Affairs is a book about sex, crime, and victimization; and in leftist texts, the word love never rates its own entry in the index. Boag is too occupied teasing out sexual subspecies among the homeless and impoverished—based upon small variations in gender identity and sexual techniques—to study the basic question of whether love and commitment helped any of these desperate men lead worthwhile lives.
Boag's best results are an account of how the press wavered in covering this “unprintable” topic. But instead of Boag's explanation (censorship), reticence may have been a humane strategy. To his credit, he tries to make sense of these events as expressions of great social changes. This is a difficult task for any historian. But he fails to address the steady rise in American church-going prior to the scandal. And he gives too little notice of the concern with sexually-transmitted diseases, just before the widespread introduction of a new syphilis cure (a history brilliantly covered by Alan Brandt).
Despite these drawbacks, Same-Sex Affairs draws upon a wealth of original, first-class scholarship, It provides a unique perspective into the lives of the men who really built Oregon. That includes the loggers and sailors who actually created its vast wealth, and the progressive politicians who strove to make the state a national model for good government.
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