Portland vice scandal

The Portland vice scandal (sometimes called the vice clique scandal, the vice crusade in contemporary reports, or inaccurately the YMCA scandal) refers to the discovery in November 1912 of a gay male subculture in the U.S. city of Portland, Oregon, following the arrest and interrogation of nineteen-year-old Benjamin Trout for shoplifting. Trout told his interrogators that "he had been 'corrupted' by a number of men in town." This revelation prompted police investigations and led to the arrest of "dozens of men and youths for crimes ranging from so-called indecent acts to sodomy." The press used the term "vice clique" to refer to these men collectively.

Some members of the vice clique were prominent public figures, including some lawyers and physicians. Some lived at the local YMCA, which had the ninth largest membership of all YMCAs in North America, and which was supported by members of Portland's upper class. This prompted attacks against the YMCA, its sponsors, and the city's upper class, especially by the working-class newspaper The Portland News and its editor Dana Sleeth.

Walter Lafferty, Portland's U.S. Representative, vowed to bring the scandal to Washington's attention, though his efforts were short-lived.

The Oregon state legislature responded to the scandal by clarifying and strengthening the state's sodomy law, and by making sodomy punishable by sterilization. The sterilization measure was subjected to a referendum, and Oregon voters repealed the law by a vote of 56 percent.

The Oregon Supreme Court reversed the convictions of some vice clique members on legal technicalities.

At the time the scandal broke, Oregon's sodomy law merely said, "If any person shall commit sodomy or the crime against nature, either with mankind or beast, such person, upon conviction thereof shall be punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary not less than one year nor more than five years." Up to this point, in some U.S. states with sodomy laws similar to Oregon's, courts had ruled that these statutes covered anal sex, but not oral sex. These cases cited the 1817 English case Rex v. Jacobs, Russ & Ry 331.

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