20 jMAt AMI ’ January L 2005-
by Pat Young
The Portland Gay Men s Chorus
sang at Mayor Vera Katz’s final open house
at City Hall. It was fitting that they sang gtxxl-
hye to her, since they also sang to welcome her
as Portland’s mayor 12 years earlier.
Vera Katz has a long history of supporting
the gay community of Oregon, beginning in
1973 when she and Steve Kafoury sponsored
the first gay rights bill in the state Legislature.
The bill ultimately failed, but Katz was always a
visible supporter as new ones were introduced.
“She was everybody’s Jewish mother, and
we desperately needed one in the movement
at that time,” says Susie Shepherd, a lesbian
who was active with the Portland Town
Council, a gay rights organization in the
1970s.
Katz and Kafoury were part of a handful of
political and public figures who dared to sup
port gay rights in the early ’70s. They were
joined in this fight by Frank Roberts, Stevie
Remington and later Gretchen Kafoury. But for
the longest time, remembers Shepherd, it was
just the two of them.
“At the very beginning, when our earth was
still cooling, it was Vera,” says Shepherd. “Her
door was always open, whether it was her office
door in Salem or rhe front door to her home in
Portland. There were st) few people to talk to
and so little help that any support we got was
just huge. It was so greatly appreciated when
we were such total strangers in Salem and the
concept of gay rights was still so strange for
everybody.”
It was the 1970s, after all, a time when The
Oregonian was still refusing to advertise meet
ings for the organization Parents of Gays. They
told Shepherd’s mother, Ann—who co-founded
Portland’s chapter, which later grew into Par
ents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and
Gays—that it was a family newspaper and that
they didn’t use that word. And here they were,
a group of gay activists wanting to talk to the
Legislature about equal rights—to seriously dis
cuss discrimination in housing, public accom
From left, Katz at a No on 9 function, 1991; Katz leads AIDSWalkO3; Katz in 2002; Northwest Gender Alliance honors Katz, 2002
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modations and employment. Katz was ready to
help.
“She would say: ‘Susie, have your mother
talk to so-and-so. She can give them the moth
er’s standpoint. Larry [Copeland of the Port
land Town Council], you go and talk to so-and-
so because they won’t even listen to a woman,
but they might listen to a man a little bit,’ ”
says Shepherd. “She knew who to talk to and
who should talk to whom.
“We could not have gotten the start we
had without her,” notes Shepherd. “There
was no earthly way. She gave us balance. We
learned to laugh. We learned to work. We
learned to give hack to those who gave to us.”