I N S I G H T
W ilde Oscar's —
the demise of
an institution
trying to sell us this portrait of Oscar Wilde.”
They asked us if it would be possible for us to
come over and identify it I did and it was our
stolen picture. It was an interesting story. A
woman from Tillamook was trying to sell it to
the trading post and somehow she had been
given the picture by a tenant of hers to store >
for him. He owed her some money so she
consequently tried to sell it to get back the
money he owed her.
by Rupert Kinnard
Even before hearing the news that Wilde
Oscar’s had closed, I often thought about the
special memories it held for me. I visited
Portland for the first tim e in the summer of
1979 as part of a West Coast tour after
graduating from college. I cringed at the idea
o f returning to Chicago, my home town, after
graduation because I felt the city was too big. I
fell in love with Portland after being here for a
couple of days but eventually ended up going
back to Chicago. I stayed there about a
m onth and a half before deciding to move. I
packed up all my belongings, joined a Port
land friend who had flown to the Midwest and
drove back to Portland. Instead of driving
directly to his home he decided we should
stop someplace downtown to have a drink.
That place turned out to be Wilde Oscar’s —
my first Portland "gay bar.”
After hearing the news about the closing of
- Wilde Oscar’s and the rumors as to why it
happened, I called its owner, Earl W right to
arrange for an interview. We had to find a
place to meet for the interview. We were look
ing for a quiet place downtown with a relaxed
atmosphere that serves good food and
d rin ks. . . “ like Wilde Oscar’s!” we both exc
laimed together. We finally chose Elephant &
Castle and began our conversation:
RK: I m interested in a couple of things.
There are bascially two rumors as to why
Wilde Oscar’s closed. One is that the OLCC
didn’t approve the liquor license for which
you applied and the other that your lease
wasn’t renewed.
EW: Well, actually you can pin it down to three
things, the first being the recession. Business
was down — that’s why we went for hard
liquor. The OLCC turned us down and then
the landlord tripled our rent in 1979. And
now, within the last couple of months we were
talking about renewing it [the lease] and he
wanted to double the rent So actually I think
there were three factors: the economy, being
turned down by the OLCC, and definitely the
rent
RK: When did you open Wilde Oscar’s?
EW: We opened December 1,1976.
RK: Who would “we” be?
EW: My form er lover and myself.
RK: How did you come up with the name
"W ilde O scars’?
EW: The name, of course, is a play on Oscar
W ilde’s name. The back bar actually came
from Scotland about 1890, and we wanted to
somehow tie that into some part of European
history. So we looked around for someone
who was gay and literary at that time and
came up with Oscar Wilde, of course, first
thing.
RK: And the m otif of the bar?
EW: We tried to do it like a European pub ..
At this point we were approached by the
barmaid who asked if we would like some
Just Out February 3-February 17
RK: Any other good or unfortunate
memories come to mind?
thing from the bar. Earl ordered coffee, I
wanted orange juice. No go. Cranberry
juice? Be serious. “We only have tomato
juice," she said. How about hot chocolate? I
was batting a thousand. I ended up ordering a
Coke. Earl and I joked about having been
spoiled by the selections at Wilde Oscar’s.
RK: So you pretty much knew the type of
place you wanted to establish?
EW: We noticed that the Europeans really
lived in their bars and their cabarets, and we
thought it would be nice to have that sort of
thing for the gay com m unity in Portland. We
had come to Portland and neither one of us
had really been out and about as far as the
gay com m unity goes. So we came to Port
land, went to a few of the bars and thought
how lim ited it was. Usually men were in one
bar and women in the other. We both had a
lot of straight friends and we both had lots of
lesbian friends as well as gay male friends.
We didn’t like the limitations in bars so we
thought there m ight be a need in Portland for
a bar where everyone could get together on a
human level. That’s the way we came up with
the atmosphere and ambience of the bar.
RK: When did you start featuring live per
formances?
EW: We started that about 1979 when the rent
was tripled. We tried to figure out what we
could do to offset that increase of rent At
about that time Leigh Clarkgranville came to
us with her concept She had spent some
tim e in London and liked the cabaret
atmosphere of our bar and she came to us
with this show written to be performed at
Wilde Oscar’s.
RK: Was that her first Portland performance?
EW: No, she had been at Storefront Theatre.
It was the first thing she had done in cabaret
RK: That’s interesting. I’d always thought of
Wilde Oscar’s as being the start of her one-
woman show. I think you should feel respon
sible for helping her get that start
EW: Yeah, we do. We feel real good about
th a t In fact Leigh and I work together very,
very well and it’s one of the reasons we hated
to close the place. She’s not really sure where
she’s going to perform in Portland. Plus, we
had some ideas for doing some things
together.,
RK: Are there any other people you feel re
sponsible for helping their careers get
started?
EW: Well, I think Kaci Cooney definitely got
her start there. We were doing a show called
“ M idnight Madness" and she was a part of
that show. She came out of that to do her own
show. Carol Stinell and John Keating kind of
got their start there, also.
RK: What about Ron Snyder?
EW: Well, Ron was Leigh Clarkgranville’s
pianist That’s how he got his start
RK: And what about Mother Light?
EW: Mother came back to Portland from the
East Coast and had been out at a bar in Lake
Oswego but wanted to come downtown and
be more active in the gay community. So, she
came to Wilde Oscar’s.
RK: One of the most impressive aspects of
Wilde Oscar’s was that it really did lend itself
to being a really pleasant meeting place for all
types of people who worked downtown or for
a group of people, after a big function, to go
and relax. Do you know of any groups of
people who met at Wilde Oscar’s fairly con
sistently, like GMT?
EW: Yes, that’s rig h t Gay Males Together did.
Oregon Fair Share met there a lo t There was
a counseling group out of William Temple
House, a group of 10 or 12 gay men who
would come to Oscar’s to socialize after their
group session.
RK: Little Willamette Weekies would
drop by quite a bit also, eh?
EW: Yeah.
RK: I would think that after running a busi
ness like Wilde Oscar’s for a number of years,
you would have a lot of interesting stories to
tell — some good, some bad.
EW: Well, like I said, it was rewarding for me to
see men and women get to know each other
on a very personal level and turn out as
friends rather than eye each other warily
across the room. I’ve watched a lot of close
friendships develop. Another thing that
Oscar's was noted for was that several people
met their current lover there and I feel really
good about tha t That’s kind of what we
wanted... the more human element a place
where people could come and meet and
make lasting friendships or relationships.
RK: You had a nice picture of Oscar Wilde
hanging up near the front entrance of the bar.
Once it disappeared and was gone for quite a
while. What was the story behind that?
EW: Actually, it was almost two years later that
it came back.
RK: Really? Was it that long?
EW: Yes, somehow it was ripped off from the
front entrance. It was given to us on our first
anniversary. It was a sepia-tone portrait of
Oscar Wilde in a very nice frame and we were
very upset about that loss. But ironically...
m ust’ve been about two years later, we got a
call from a local trading post asking if we had
received the picture back. I said no, we hadn't
and they said that "someone was over here
EW: I really can’t think of too much bad. I
think it was a disappointment that it [the bar]
wasn’t used more, especially by gay males. I
felt we were definitely supported more by the
lesbian faction. They seem to want more of
the atmosphere we had to offer. We were
referred to by a lot of gay men as "the couples
bar,” and that may be why a lot of single men
felt out of place. That was too bad, because
it's not what we wanted it to be at all. The
entertainment end of it I felt good about It
was an opportunity for a lot of people with
talent who may not have had a chance to
perform elsewhere to perform on our open-
mike nights and so forth.
RK: Is there anything else you’d like to share
with the com m unity that hasn’t already been
said? I found it unfortunate that Oscar’s was
never as heavily frequented as the “ cruise
bars." If you found yourself with half the
crowds as some of those bars on any of their
busy nights, that would be quite a lot of
business.
EW: Yes, it would’ve helped us offset the rent
increases very definitely. Ironically, I’m just
reading a new book called Which Way Out
o f the Men s Room ? It deals with options for
the male homosexual. It's too bad I didn’t
have that book a couple of years ago. 1 think I
could’ve incorporated some things into
Oscar’s from some of the ideas in that book.
His basic tenet is that — and it’s interesting
what would hapen right now — the white,
straight male in our culture pretty much calls
the shots. And he [the author] feels that —
and he was only dealing in his book with the
white gay male, because the black gay male
has a different set of problems — the white
gay male is in a m inority very comparable to
the Jews in Germany. I don’t think a lot of gay
white men realize the position we’ve been put
in — that we’re confined to our certain bars,
we re confined in our behavior and our sexual
activities to certain areas. The white straight
male can control us and I'm very angry about
th a t I think the one thing Oscar's tried to do is
to have straight men in for lunch and to have
gay posters up and gay literature on the bar. I
think what we were trying to do was say, “ Hey,
don't be so afraid of us. We re really just like
you are. It’s just that we have a different sexual
orientation."
In talking with my staff, to which, by the
way, I have to give a lot of credit because the#
certainly helped to maintain Wilde Oscar’s
and values we tried to get across, since we
closed we seem to be getting more attention
than we did when we were open. So, maybe
the impact of Wilde Oscar's is going to be felt
more now while we re closed than when we
were open.
RK: So you don’t have any plans of opening
another bar in the future?
EW: W ell... not yet I'm kind of thinking about
getting back into the corporate structure and
making some money [ laughs] for a change.
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