citations & references:

· ListedJune 1971 The Fountain, CLASSIFIED Remember: Everyone is always welcome at the Second Foundation meetings held the first and the third Wednesday of every month at Zorba the Greeks, 620 SW Park, 8:00 pm

· January 1972 Vector Magazine from SFO states: San Francisco Scene Bay Area Invades Portland Festivities by Bob Ross The Bay Area descended on Portland in mid-November for the coronation of the fourteenth Rose Empress. A sample of one afternoon and evening is as follows: a nice spaghetti buffet at ZORBA, THE GREEK’S.

· Listed in Guide to the Portland Area Gay Scene July 1972 – The Fountain

· Zorba The Greek First Anniversary [Sunday, August 15, 1972]. Party, Food, Surprises, Floor Show 8:00 pm 620 SW Park.

· Mentioned in The Oregon Journal article, Thursday, August 31, 1972, “Among other bars that cater to the homosexual crowd are the Embers, Red Room at Dahl & Penne’s, the Other Inn, Half Moon Tavern, Pink Cat, Club Northwest, and Zorba’s The Greek.”

· Listed in Damron Address Book/Address Guide 1972 under Bars/Clubs with no notations

· January 1972 Vector Magazine from SFO states: A sample of one afternoon and evening is as follows: a nice spaghetti buffet at ZORBA, THE GREEK’S.”

· Listed in the September 1972 issue of The Fountain, page 17, Guide to the Portland Area Gay Scene

· Listed in Guild Guide 1973 USA & International - no connotations.

· Listed in Bars and Taverns PORTLAND The Fountain 1973

· Ad in Darcelle XV “Green Book” 1973

· Cited in The Golden Businesses of our community – The Golden Awards Ball – Sunday, January 21, 1973

· Listed in Damron Address Book/Address Guide 1973 under Bars/Clubs with notation D – Dancing

· Listed in Damron Address Book/Address Guide 1974 under Bars/Clubs with notation D – Dancing and note: (Liquor)

· Listed in Damron Address Book/Address Guide 1975 under Bars/Clubs with notation D - Dancing, G – Ladies/Ms with the note: (Some G)

·  Cited in Jeff Taylor’s Gay Guide for the Pacific Northwest – Summer 1975 edition, page 17 under both Restaurants and Taverns. Open 11 am -2:30 pm Mon-Fri for lunch; 5-9 pm daily for dinner. Reservations advisable. Tavern: Dancing, pool. Very popular with women.

· Listed in Damron Address Book/Address Guide 1976 under Bars/Clubs with notation D - Dancing, G – Ladies/Ms with the note: (Some G)

· Cited in I Love Portland “A Guide To the Portland Court System and It’s Organizations” 1976 a booklet stated, “another public service of Tom Terrific”

· Mentioned in Portland listing Northwest Gay Review Page 12 – June 1977

· Listed in Damron Address Book/Address Guide 1977 under Bars/Clubs with notation D - Dancing, G – Ladies/Ms, R - Restaurant with the note: (Some G)

· Listed in Damron Address Book/Address Guide 1978 under Bars/Clubs with notation D - Dancing, G – Ladies/Ms, R - Restaurant with the note: (Some G) – has Zorba’s at 1533 E Burnside which an incorrect address

·        Listed in Damron Address Book/Address Guide 1979 under Bars/Clubs with notation D - Dancing, G – Ladies/Ms, R – Restaurant

· Not listed in Damron Address Book/Address Guide 1980 or thereafter

Description of the interior: It had a main floor with a grand staircase that led to a lower section. The motif was Greecian.

Paper by Jamie R Walton – Gay and Lesbian Archives – Profession Ann Mussey December 1, 2000 Locations: (1) The Model Inn (2) Zorba the Greek Walton Page 2-5

      “Why don’t you come and eat your lunch with us at Zorba’s?” she asked further upsetting Sue. .. I went in the door and realized I could not see because of the poor lighting. There were people sitting at the bar and others at tables eating lunch. Most of them looked like people who worked in offices and just stopped in to have their noon meal. A cranky man was serving at the bar. He gave me a surly look; A waitress led me to a table.

I sat down and looked into a room on the lower level where I saw Kathy and Sure playing pool. I looked around and realized that there were other couples and groups of women eating there, having drinks, and playing pool.

I realized this was not an ordinary tavern. I also knew my life was about to forever.

 How Other People Experienced Zorba’s

Sally Cohn, who had just spent 10 years living in New York, said that the thing that struck her about the décor of Zorba’s was the ceiling that appeared to be stucco. In New York all the Lesbian bars had stucco on the ceiling and, often, the Mafia owned the bar”.

Sally says, “I remember going in there for lunch. A lot of straight people ate lunch there. There was this gray-haired Butch Dyke that worked there. She wore a regular-waitress uniform. You know, the black skirt and white blouse. She looked like a man in a shirt, and she tried to act as straight as possible”.

Susie Shepherd remembers Zorba’s as a place where she felt welcome. She visited it for the first time at the invitation of Kristin Aspen. It was Susie’s first visit to a Gay bar. Jimmy (His name is really Angelos Markantantos) the Greek manager was always kind to her. I told her I remember as a gruff and cranky man who did not seem to want us there. She reminds us that he knew they made him money, so he was always kind. Later on, she recalled how was when a Pong electronic game was introduced to the bar. It was a very simple electronics Ping-Pong game and by today’s standard it would be considered primitive but, at that time, the women lined up to play it.

Later on, she was introduced by Larry Copelanchto the Portland Town Council which held a meeting at Zorba’s which Susie attended.

 Later on, Susie says that Oregon’s first Gay Lesbian election party was held at Zorba’s during the election of Vera Katz and Gretchen Kafoury.

Frodo Okuree remembers going to Zorba’s because it had a good dance floor and she like the pool tables that were down on the lower level. “Was one of the places we would go to because we could get in so easily,” says Frodo…

Frodo and her partner, Marty Hoy (who was even younger), usually preferred “The Plastic Fern,” the name she uses for the Magic Garden. The(y) also like to go to Tasha’s which was run by Sally Bird who Sally says probably lives in Utah now. Frodo recalls a time when she and Peggy Norman stripped off their shirts, along with several other women, and danced away summer heat until word swept through the crowd that the cops were on the way!

I asked Sally if she thought there was any level of classism of a sort. I told her my sense was that there was a division between Feminists who did not believe in “role-playing” and the women who were not college students and were often blue-collar workers Sally s, Sally agreed that those changes were playing out a Zorba…

I told Sally that my mother had told me that Zorba’s was once a popular nightclub. There is/

was still a hatcheck room just off the entrance. Sally said that as a child her parents had often joined her uncle there for lunch.

 My mother told me that it had been a Gay bar before in the 1940s, but I have no idea why she knew that.

Cited in Matthew Baker’s March 1, 2005, paper page 7, Closeted Nightclubs: Why Doesn’t Portland’s ‘Gay Community’ Recognize the Gay Bar Culture? “…Second Foundation could realize its goal of creating a community center, it held its meetings “at Zorba the Greeks, a popular gay nightspot just off the South Park Blocks.” 

His paper stated: “…was during the war “that some of the earliest exclusively gay bars developed (Per historian Peter Boag). Portland would become, at least during the war, home to many servicemen and women at a time when “vice and gay bars … operated unchecked” a situation “aided by city and police corruption” (B. Smith Beka “Gay Bars, Vice, and Reform in Portland, 1948-1965.” MA thesis. Portland State U, 2002). Portland’s gay bars, following the pattern already established earlier in the century, were “clustered in areas with high levels of other categories of crime and vice … where they were less likely to draw … hostility” (B. Smith).

 The new working-class gay community which developed would meet challenges in Portland in the two decades following the war, challenges set forth primarily by two mayoral administrations. The first of these, Dorothy Lee’s from 1948 to 1952. The second was Terry Schrunk from the late 50s through the 60s and, more specifically, his efforts in 1964-65 bars downtown. His admitted aim was eradicating “sexual deviance” in the hopes of revitalizing a central city economy which had fallen into recession (B. Smith 1). Ultimately, each of these anti-gay bar efforts would meet with very limited success. The only bar that Schrunk was able to shut down was the Harbor Club; its owner moved his as the Riptide, the first of “several bars to colonize… SW Stark Street.” [David Kohl ‘s book A Curious and Peculiar People]

One aspect of this lessening division is the appearance by at least the early sixties of gay bars in the central business district men. One of these was Derek’s Tavern, which Portland police noted as being “frequented by homosexuals of higher class and means” (Smith). However, gay bars, both working and middle class, “varied little in location”, a pattern which was relatively unique to Portland (B. Smith 100). The fact that gay bars had begun to appear in the district and were beginning to cater to the middle classes suggests that, despite attitudes toward homosexuality which continued to be hostile, the middle-class gay community felt a need, or at least the ability, to present a more public face.

It was not until 1971 that Portland’s first “homophile organization, the Second Foundation, was founded. Its first president, Dave Fredrickson, “was a landscape architect with the Port of Portland” [Per Dave Kohl]. He was middle-class; he was also in the closet, unable to “breathe a word of his “weekend activities” to his [work] colleges. [D Smith]. The new society found the relative complacency of the gay bar culture to be a hindrance to their efforts toward greater equality. In 1973, the foundation’s then-president remarked that “it is hard to get the backing of the gays…They’ve never been hassled, so it is hard to explain to these people that there is a problem” (Peter Boag “Does Portland Need a Homophile Society”).

However, before the Second Foundation could realize its goal of creating a community center, it held its meetings “at Zorba the Greek’s, a popular gay nightspot just off the South Park Blocks” (Kohl). In fact tension within the community, during the 70s the bar scene and political movement could not avoid each other. The Oregon Journal, a local newspaper at that time, printed a series of articles on August 30th and 31st of 1972 on Portland’s gay community.