The life of lesbian doctor and political activist Marie Equi anchors Oregon’s early LGBTQ history and reflects how a sexually transgressive individual made a life for herself during the late 19th and early 20thcentury in the Pacific Northwest. Equi managed to do so by seeking an independent financial and personal life – and a thick skin – as a defense against social norms, hostility, and discrimination.
 
Born to working class, immigrant parents – her father was Italian; her mother, Irish – in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1872, Equi was forced to drop out of high school to work in the city’s harsh textile mills. She escaped with the assistance of her older girlfriend who invited her to live on an Oregon homestead in 1892. For five years Equi helped manage the 120 acre site two miles outside The Dalles along the Columbia River.  It was where she first made her public debut, and it was sensational.
 
The new biography Marie Equi, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, published by Oregon State University Press in 2015, describes the explosive occasion when 20-year-old Equi horsewhipped a school superintendent who was also a Baptist minister in the center of town. The ruckus captivated the town. But the incident also provoked a closer look at Equi’s relationship with her girlfriend. Newspapers reported the women’s “ardent affection” and “singular infatuation between them.” The public read that Equi’s friendship with her companion “amounts to adoration.”
 
By 1906 Equi was well-known as one of the Oregon’s few women doctors. She was successful and respected for her relief work following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Afterwards she became entangled in a family inheritance dispute involving her new girlfriend, a younger woman who was an heiress to the Olympia Brewing Company. Equi was portrayed as a gold-digger seeking the family’s money and wielding an unhealthy, hypnotic influence over the younger woman. The newspapers employed every innuendo to suggest the lesbian relationship. It was the second occasion that a same-sex, intimate relationship was presented to Oregonians.

​These two “outing” incidents – in 1893 and 1906 – were the first to establish Equi’s life as a sexual outsider. The remainder of her life story reveals her several love affairs with prominent women of the early 1900s as well as her being the first publicly known lesbian to legally adopt a child, in 1915, and create a same-sex alternative family. She also provided medical care to a woman who gender-identified as a man, was associated with colleagues implicated in Portland's 1912 gay sex scandal.

Mention Eugene, Oregon and my mind floods with memories – University days, anti-Vietnam War protests, coming out, the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy presidential campaigns, and my first professional job.
 
This upcoming Saturday, August 6 I will give a talk with slides of my biography of Oregon’s fiercely independent firebrand Dr. Marie Equi at the Eugene Public Library downtown. As I prepare my presentation, I can’t help but think of the late 1960s when I studied history at the University of Oregon’s Honors Program. I never expected to return to campus decades later with an historical biography published by Oregon State University Press.
 
I lived off-campus my first two years at the university. The administration granted me and half-dozen housemates an exception to the rules since we had already clocked four years of dormitory life at Mt. Angel Seminary High School. We rented a small house near the old mill run within easy walking distance of classes.  This was the fall of 1967, and the protests against the Vietnam War and against President Lyndon B. Johnson accelerated. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy visited the campus prior to the Oregon presidential primary election. They both opposed the war. For some students, the choice between backing McCarthy or Kennedy resembled this year’s choice between Sanders and Clinton. I switched from McCarthy to Kennedy, mostly due to Kennedy’s passion for social justice and his reaching out to poor Americans.
 
At some point during the conflict, student demonstrators flooded into the Administration Building on campus for an over-night sit-in. No serious clashes occurred with guards or city police, as I recall, but other protests during this period involved arson and vandalism and involvement of the Oregon National Guard.
 
I returned to Eugene in the early 1970s after graduating from the University at Albany in New York.  I had obtained Conscientious Objector status from the US Selective Service (draft board) and was not required to do alternative service. I settled in West Eugene close to what was then called the Beltline. This was my first house purchase, one that required just $1500 as a down payment.

People in Eugene had been agitated for weeks leading up to the Oregon state election on June 1, 1908. The fate of the University of Oregon depended on the electorate. Would Oregon taxpayers approve an appropriations bill for the continued operation of the state’s only publicly funded university? The outcome was far from certain.

Since 1901 the university had depended on an annual appropriation by the state legislature totaling $47,000. The institution had managed to get by with those funds and various fees and interest payments from private funds. Occasionally the university regents requested, and obtained, a supplement to the appropriation. But in May 1908 the regents revealed its financial straits to the readers of Portland’s Oregonian newspaper, the largest in the state. To continue operations and to accommodate various new needs – housing accommodations for women students, increased library support, and building improvements – $150,000 would be needed. Without it, the regents warned that the university would likely need to be closed. 

Opposition to the measure was considerable, especially in the “country” sections of various counties, and support in the cities was uncertain. All eyes were especially on the voters in Portland, the state’s largest city. Significant support in that city and the surrounding Multnomah County could determine the outcome.

Voters went to the polls on June 1st, but the fate of the university appropriations bill remained uncertain throughout the day and evening. Students at the university were unable to study while awaiting the results. They feared their future education was on the line. Supporters retired with one question hanging over their heads: Would the support in Portland hold?

Finally, on the evening of June 2, the vote outcome was certain enough to declare victory for the university bill. Portland held with a majority in favor, along with other cities: Astoria, The Dalles, Pendleton, Baker City, Roseburg, Ashland, Marshfield (today’s Coos Bay) and, of course, Eugene. However, voters in Salem, the state capitol, opposed the measure. Of the nearly 80,000 votes cast, the measure passed with a slim margin of 3500 votes.