Scandals

Scandals is the oldest continuously operating gay bar in Portland, having opened on SW Stark Street in 1980 and surviving every wave of gentrification, economic crisis, and social change that the city has experienced in the intervening four and a half decades. The bar sits on the SW Stark Street corridor that has been Portland's primary gay social geography since the 1970s — a stretch that once contained a concentration of gay bars and that has thinned over the years as venues closed and the scene dispersed, leaving Scandals as the survivor and institutional anchor. The bar is unpretentious in the specific way that old neighbourhood gay bars are unpretentious: affordable drinks, a mixed crowd of regulars and visitors, a layout that prioritises conversation and community rather than performance, and a physical space that carries the accumulated social history of 45 years of Portland's queer life. Scandals has been a gathering place through the AIDS crisis, the marriage equality campaigns, the political transformations of Oregon's social landscape, and the ongoing evolution of what it means to be queer in a progressive Pacific Northwest city. The bar is not the loudest or the newest or the most fashionable venue in Portland's gay scene, but it is the one that has been there the longest and carries the most institutional memory. For visitors who want to drink in a place with genuine historical weight, Scandals is the essential Portland stop.