For the first time, the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park of the National Park Service is recognizing LGBTQ Pride during the month of June.  The inaugural Pride exhibit features Dr. Marie Equi, the longtime agitator for social and economic justice who spent her early years, 1872 to 1892, in New Bedford along the southeast coast of Massachusetts. The exhibit, curated by Aneshia Savino, presents descriptions and photos of Marie Equi with five primary themes from her life as an Activist, Daughter, Doctor, Lesbian, and Mother. Participants at the exhibit’s opening night were offered pins with Equi’s likeness to wear.
 
Born in 1872 on Second Street along New Bedford’s famed whaling waterfront, Equi was the fifth child and fifth daughter of John Equi, and Italian immigrant from Tuscany, and Sarah Mullins, and Irish immigrant from County Tyrone, Ireland. Four additional children followed. She attended grade school in New Bedford but had to drop out of high school to work in local textile mills to help support the family. Equi later homesteaded in Oregon, self-studied her way into medical school, and became an early woman physician in Portland.
 
Equi was a strong advocate of women’s rights. She used her professional standing to help drive the campaign for woman suffrage. She also believed in reproductive rights and was jailed with birth control advocate Margaret Sanger for distributing pamphlets about limiting family size. Her passion for justice also led her to provide abortions to her patients. She protested unjust working conditions for laborers and aligned herself with the radical labor union, the Industrial Workers of the World.  She objected to World War I and lectured against unfair wartime measures.

What was Marie Equi doing in jail on Christmas Eve? She felt she had no other choice with a blatant injustice inflicted upon those whose cause she championed. Here’s what went down:

“While many Portlanders spent the day before Christmas in 1913 preparing for the holiday, Equi learned that unemployed men arrested for demanding food and lodging were being relegated to the rock pile. She rushed to the courthouse, where she found the judge mumbling the sentences. When she asked him three times to speak louder, he gave her a five-day fine for contempt of court. She tried to shame him with the news that the old man he had sentenced the day before had died after only a few hours’ busting rocks. For her impertinence, the judge increased her jail time. She refused to post the bail offered by her supporters.

“Equi spent a few hours in jail before the judge offered to release her if she apologized. She declined. The Christmas Eve standoff was resolved only when hundreds of men – “her army,” the newspapers reported – packed the courtroom and hallways with a low, grumbling protest over the holding of the woman who had stood up for them. The judge relented and freed Equi. Although the dailies reported that Equi had apologized first, Helen Lawrence Walters, a Bohemian artist and socialist familiar with the incident, advised in her journal, “Don’t believe it.”

Excerpted from Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions
by Michael Helquist, OSU Press, 2015.

Shopping for the holidays? Find Marie Equi at bookstores and online, in print and digital formats including Kindle on Amazon. 

The official mock-up of Marie Equi’s plaque for San Francisco’s Rainbow Honor Walk was unveiled last month during a presentation by author Michael Helquist (Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions). The rendering reveals Equi’s likeness, her signature, and a description of her efforts to achieve a more just society. In spring 2018 the 3’ by 3’ bronze plaque will be installed in the sidewalk along Market Street, San Francisco’s primary thoroughfare, as part of a tribute to deceased LGBTQ individuals worldwide who made significant contributions to their fields.   

Equi will join a stellar group of nearly three dozen individuals who have already been recognized with plaques, ranging from activists Bayard Rustin, Harry Hay, and Jane Addams; artists Frida Kahlo and Keith Haring, authors Virginia Woolf, Yukio Mishima, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, and Federico Garcia Lorca; scientist Alan Turing, singer Sylvester James, and Jose Sarria, founder of the Imperial Court System.

The Rainbow Honor Walk is an all-volunteer project based in San Francisco’s LGBTQ community. Begun in 2011, the organization funds production and placement of the bronze plaques through community outreach and private donations. (Each plaque costs about $5000).  The City and County of San Francisco collaborates with planning and installation and the city’s art commission approved the design. Artist Carlos Casuso of Madrid, Spain was selected to design the plaques following an international design competition. The first 24 plaques were installed mostly along Castro Street in the city’s LGBTQ neighborhood, then organizers extended the route on either side of Market Street with the next batch of twenty-four plaques.  

In November 2017 Helquist and historian Paula Lichtenberg presented a talk at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco that illustrated the shift in the general public’s attitudes toward same-sex intimate relationships from the late 1890s to the 1920s. Helquist referred to the Oregon public’s general acceptance of Marie Equi’s relationship with her companion Bessie Holcomb in the mid-1890s contrasted with the harsh disapproval she encountered during a public inheritance dispute involving her intimate companion in Portland in 1906.

Although Marie Equi’s reputation extends far beyond the Pacific Northwest, she was not particularly well-known in San Francisco’s activist, women’s and LGBTQ communities. Her recent biography significantly changed that.  

For more information on Marie Equi see michaelhelquist.com and for the Rainbow Honor Walk (including bios of the first round of honorees) see rainbowhonorwalk.org, 

When did Americans turn against the "Romantic Friendships" enjoyed by many women couples in the mid-19th century and early 20th century?

These were intimate, and often sexual, associations between pairs of women, especially those who were independent by means of their professions or personal wealth. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, sexologists identified homosexuality and often diagnosed them as individuals with aberrant, transgressive behaviors. The public began to reject these previously "normal" associations as unhealthy, dangerous, and even criminal.

Dr. Marie Equi and heiress Harriet Speckart of Portland and Dr. Mary Sperry and attorney Gail Laughlin of San Francisco are two early 20th century couples confronted with this more hostile public attitude.

Michael Helquist, biographer of Marie Equi, and Paula Lichtenberg, independent scholar and curator of "Faces From the Past," a new exhibit at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco, will describe how Equi-Speckart and Sperry-Laughlin were subjected to vile charges of inappropriate behavior and maligned in the press and in court trials.

The talk will be presented Wednesday, November 8, 2017, 7 - 9pm at the GLBT History Museum, 4127 18th Street, San Francisco. Admission: $5; free for members.

An added attraction for the talk is the unveiling of the prototype for the MARIE EQUI bronze plaque that will become part of the Rainbow Honor Walk in the Castro and Upper Market districts. The plaques are embedded in the neighborhoods' sidewalks to honor LGBTQ individuals, now deceased, who have made significant contributions to freedom, justice and the arts.

Copies of Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, Oregon State University Press, 2015, will be available for purchase and signing by the author.

Marie Equi, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, Oregon State University Press. 
At your bookstore and online outlets.
Coming soon in eBook edition.

One hundred years ago, in the spring of 1917, Oregon authorities began arresting and prosecuting a remarkable number of residents suspected of sedition. This hyper-vigilant campaign in the state complied with Congress’ demand to rid the country of any dissent that might impede the war effort. Anyone could report suspicious or disloyal talk. And they did.   
 
From May 1917 through November 1918, nearly 100 Oregonians were arrested for “disloyal utterances.” The arrests swept up wealthy farmers and business leaders, ranch hands and railway workers, attorneys and physicians, a small-town postmaster, and radical union members. Many had simply made casual remarks that disagreed with the war, the draft, or the many war drives that effectively required residents to support. Dozens more residents were investigated by federal agents, interrogated, and advised to watch what they said in public or in private.
 
Eighteen of Oregon’s 36 counties reported seditious incidents that led to arrests, as indicated in the attached state map. One-third occurred in Central and Eastern Oregon counties with two-thirds from Portland-area counties, several in the Willamette Valley, and others in Southwest Oregon. Notice that Lane County, home to considerable anti-war dissent later in the 20th century, registered no arrests. Seditious acts were reported in 24 Oregon cities, ranging from the state’s largest to several of the smallest. (See list).