Garrett Repp, 30, was arrested and quickly released for the arson at the May Apartment. They dropped the initial charges, but it appears that they are heading to indictment via grand jury.
Repp was in the process of being evicted from the May at the time for non-payment since pic.twitter.com/A7dPQdl27M
Portland Police spokesperson Sgt. Kevin Allen said Repp, 30, was arrested the day of the blaze because building management had reported him on May 9 for “breaking through the wall of his apartment” and tunneling into the vacant unit next door. Repp was charged with one count of first-degree criminal mischief and released later on May 16. The case has since been closed.
He was under a restraining order for allegedly stalking and pulling an incubus on an ex girlfriend who lived a few blocks away.
Repp was well-known to residents at The May apartments, according to interviews with three tenants, who said he had pulled the fire alarm for no reason more than a dozen times since he moved in last November and had chased female tenants with a sword or banged on their doors…
John Judge, a resident at The May, said he frequently saw Repp sitting on the front stoop smoking, with a “crazy look in his eye.”
In Portland this is called blending in.
Repp was one of many in Portland with mental health and drug problems living in subsidized housing (which is likely paid by disability benefits). His building seems to have been merely rent-subsidized by income, either the entire building or some number of required units, putting him in the same building with younger Portlanders paying exorbitant rent for the converted studios in the aging building. At the other end of the subsidy spectrum are transitional and longer term housing for the homeless, Permanent Supportive Housing, with services for them in the building and assigned case workers for residents. Rents subsidized as much as 60% can still be expensive here, and the chronically homeless who are managing to meet them have to be relying on income subsidized by disability payments. The building of these buildings of course also has to be subsidized, through a labyrinthian process of multiple funding sources, and a massive affordable housing bond passed by voters in 2016 has only produced two building so far.
The management of these properties isn’t always the best.
Judge said it was unclear why Repp was never arrested for allegedly pulling the alarm or harassing other tenants.
Rachel Elkins, a spokesperson for the building’s owner, SkyNat Property Management, said the company was not commenting on the matter at the direction of their attorney.
SkyNat filed an eviction order against Repp on Feb. 14, alleging he owed $3,400 in back rent and late fees. Repp failed to appear in court to challenge the allegation, records show, and on May 10 a judge ordered sheriff’s deputies to remove him from his third-floor apartment.
Later the building was looted. Skynat referred residents to their insurance companies.
“As I understand, everything is lost from my particular unit,” Ehrett said. “The only form of communication from them in the 3+ weeks was an email with no subject line, saying ‘You can list suspected arson in the cause for your renter’s insurance.’”
When I attempted to take a photo of the burnt-out building from behind the police tape a cop shooed me away. What about the occupied homeless tents inside the tape, I asked. He just gave me a look.
Calls to Portland Fire and Rescue have risen with the homeless population. The city only started tracking homeless camp fires in 2019; they’ve doubled since then.
Fires have risen along with homelessness. Portland’s free weekly Willamette Week has been filling the vast space between progressive hysterics and moderate liberalism in Portland (their competition The Mercury, its more vociferous and progressive competitor, recently had to abandon its print edition) and has been doing actual journalism. They reported on homeless camp fires in
…[n]early half of all fires in Portland now start in or near houseless camps—at least 2,048 last year, according to Portland Fire & Rescue data. It’s a remarkable number, given how five years ago, fires among unhoused Portlanders were hardly a blip.
Today, there are an average of six a day.
If you move about much in Portland you typically see or smell small fires often. The fires, stemming from things like makeshift heating arrangements, smoking addicts leaving lit propane torches about as they pass out and sometimes arson committed by other homeless, occasionally create larger problems. When the fire department had to sledgehammer their way through a concrete wall to rescue homeless from a fire they had started under Portland’s Steel Bridge, a vertical-lift drawbridge built in 1915, they found a little cave network that required shutting the bridge down while the dirt was filled back in to restore the structural integrity.
The Portland City Council just passed a ban on camping on city streets during the daytime. From 8 AM to 8 PM it will be illegal to camp on city sidewalks. The homeless will still be allowed to sleep on the street at night, but the effect of them having to pack their belongings and decamp by 8 AM daily, should enforcement succeed, is expected to greatly decrease their presence downtown.
Most notably, the ordinance bans camping outside between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and requires people to pick up all personal property before leaving an area.
It also prohibits camping within 250 feet of schools, shelters, and childcare centers, as well as within pedestrian zones like crosswalks. Campers are not allowed to use gas heaters in or around their campsite.
Anyone who violates the ordinance three or more times, or who has multiple violations within 24 hours, faces a $100 fine and up to 30 days in jail.
Where will they go? Those on the streets downtown now are the hardest cases, hopeless addicts and the mentally ill. The overwhelming majority of them are not capable or willing to accept the rules that come with any traditional long term shelter arrangements. Just providing an overnight shelter bed is a problem with many or most of these people due to mental health and drug problems. Not that the beds are there.
There are more than 6,000 people experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County, according to this year’s federally required tally of unhoused people. Of those, nearly 4,000 are unsheltered.
The county has around 2,000 shelter beds, according to county data.
Shepherding them into the Mayor’s planned mass camp sites outside the city anchors Wheeler’s plan but the city has yet to bring one of them online, much less demonstrate they will work. The city’s Safe Rest Village plan housing people by the tens in fenced-in tiny houses with community amenities is small and having its own problems managing residents.
So aside from the council’s vague plan what is its expectation? Any reasonable expectation is the ban will disperse the bulk of the homeless concentrated downtown to outlying areas. The law will apply throughout the city but an understaffed Portland Police Bureau can’t be expected to enforce it evenly throughout. Their focus will be on homeless concentrated on the downtown streets they’re trying to reclaim. Outlying Portland and adjacent cities can expect to absorb some of the displaced and the city is probably counting on it.
It’s an old trope in crime fiction: a serial killer is on the loose but the authorities don’t want to alarm the public and won’t give their Cassandra-like detective the resources he needs. Then he goes rogue.
— Christopher Philpott (@Chrisphilpott10) June 5, 2023
Speculation runs wild on Twitter.
SERIAL KILLER: SIX WOMEN FOUND MURDERED ALONG TRUCK ROUTES NEAR PORTLAND LOOK HARD AT TRUCKERS WHO TRAVEL ROUTE 205 TO ROUTE 18. FBI suspects that serial killers working as long-haul truckers responsible for slayings of hundreds of women nationwide. https://t.co/oTaRyRfIjhpic.twitter.com/elIijNbtuV
— Bill Warner Private Detective (@billdetective) June 4, 2023
One reason for the rumors is the women were drug users and/or homeless; at least one has a violent criminal record. A woman found dead in a tent in the Lents neighborhood police are not calling a homicide (the five others appear to have been dumped where they were found); police revealed one died of blunt force trauma but haven’t given the causes of death in the other cases.
People talking about a Possible Serial Killer in the Portland Oregon area. 6 women found in separate spots within months of one another.
1 of those females, Joanna Speaks found dead on April 8th is a CAREER CRIMINAL with numerous arrests in the past including conspiring with… pic.twitter.com/t5wKQylGVN
One of the victims was said to frequent Portland’s notorious fentanyl market downtown. One relative is accusing the police of misleading the public.
Portland Serial Killer 🚨🚨
New Information
Sister of murdered Portland woman says cops are trying to 'keep the public from being freaked out' about a serial killer after six female bodies are found within 100 miles of each other in space of three months
— Christopher Philpott (@Chrisphilpott10) June 6, 2023
It’s an unfortunate time for any authority seeking to establish trust with the public after the obfuscations of Covid and the daily gaslighting around race, sex and “gender”. The Portland Police Bureau has the added problem of having had its image thoroughly gutted by the last almost-three years since the BLM riots. Despised as Nazis by the left and feckless by the right. An interesting question that will never be asked is whether the flight of qualified cops from the Bureau over this time leaves it less capable to deal with either a serial killer or the standard mayhem they insist explains these cases.
The only real reason police have for discouraging “panic” about a potential serial killer is a high-profile media-driven case puts them on the hook.
Six unrelated murders of people who abandoned or were abandoned by society don’t register for the public; tie them together with the “serial killer” label and instantly the fascination with serial killers with which we’ve all been conditioned by film and television is conjured in us, and we come alive. Pardon the phrase.
I went to Target in search of pride; specifically to see for myself one of their “Pride Month” displays. The store just outside of Portland looked busy enough on a Saturday and the lines at the registers were long, though that may have been due to understaffing.
The Pride display was in the front of the store but so small and tame it took me a while to find it.
There were two smaller displays in the store that I found.
I visited a second Target that shared this model, a display up front with two or three mannequins, then one or two stations reminding us to “Celebrate Pride month” and “take pride”. Very subdued.
But what about the everyday, typical Target aesthetic? I took a lap around the store to sample that, weaving through milling Mestizo housewives having bored conversations in Spanish as they rooted out children’s underwear; they appeared oblivious to the models looming over us like icons in a church. Like me they aren’t represented there, despite all the clamor about how the iconography being offered celebrates, at long last, people like them in all their glorious mediocrity. They probably haven’t even heard this schtick, don’t care and weren’t asked about it anyway.
The world as represented and celebrated in Target is overwhelmingly Black!, female and overweight.
Where it is not that it is queer, sexually ambiguous, and racially ambiguous.
Beyond that there seems to be a trend in freckles, lots of freckles, in particular the freckles of the Black! “redbone” type, as the manifestation of diverse ancestry.
Also vitiligo. Because of course.
Fashion advertising has long had a thing for gap-toothed Black! women; here they seem to be deployed where the need for an explicitly heterosexual pitch (selling mascara to aspiring hoes, for instance) is tempered with race.
On my way out I lingered for a moment near the little Pride display up front, taking another discrete photo when a young couple–heterosexual, normal–working their way through the rows of clothing behind, stumbled into it.
“Gay.” One of them said, with a depressed revulsion, as if they’d been combing the beach and came upon a dead seagull. They turned about.
Whether or not the apparent easing up on propaganda for this year’s Pride Month is due to exhaustion I don’t know, but that exhaustion exists.
A recent poll of voters in Portland’s Multnomah County showed high support for a daytime city camping ban Mayor Ted Wheeler has introduced in an attempt to reclaim downtown this summer. The Oregonian:
Nearly three-fourths also back a proposal by Mayor Ted Wheeler to enforce a citywide daytime camping ban, which is scheduled to receive a public hearing at the City Council on Wednesday.
The poll was conducted by a Republican-friendly firm for “People for Portland”, an advocacy group set up by wealthy Oregon liberals to counter progressive excesses following as a consquence of the BLM riots of 2020.
Longtime Oregon political consultants Dan Lavey and Kevin Looper launched People for Portland in 2021. The group has since raised and spent more than $1 million, primarily from a clutch of wealthy — and mostly anonymous — donors…Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle and Harsch Investment Real Estate CEO Jordan Schnitzer previously acknowledged to The Oregonian/OregonLive that they’ve given money to the group.
Homeless advocates in Portland oppose anything but the present status quo: pursuing the ever-receding goal of “affordable housing” while they continue to apply the harm reduction model as applied to substance abuse (assisting addicts in “safe” drug use in opposition to criminalization or coercion) to homelessness broadly, and to continue being paid to do it without interference.
They also don’t want competition. Wheeler’s ban comes as the city moves forward with his plan to corral the homeless in mass campsites run by a controversial non-profit out of the Bay Area called Urban Alchemy; the outsider outfit signed a 50 million-dollar deal to operate them after no locals would offer a meaningful bid.
Urban Alchemy uses ex-cons (with some predictable results) to manage similar camps around San Francisco and broke out of obscurity when it used its contacts in city government to land a series of fat, no-bid contracts as the city and state started pouring money into homelessness in 2019. The ban on daytime street camping is intended to compel the homeless into Wheeler’s designated camping sites, the first of which is not yet up and running and will accommodate either 300 people or plots, it’s not clear.
Yesterday a public hearing was held on the camping ban, a six hour-plus marathon, dominated by opponents. At one point it was interrupted by a current cliche–a high outrage low information white woman chanting–with a twist: she accused the council of being “pedos”.
— Brandon Farley (Portland Journalist) (@TheRealFarley) June 1, 2023
“…thank you pedos…Ted…you’re only jealous because I’ve got connections all the way up to Obama, Biden…”
In May of 2017 Jeremy Christian stabbed two men to death on a commuter train in Portland. The case became notorious due to the mentally ill Christian’s “white supremacist” beliefs–presumed because he was verbally abusing a Muslim before his victims intervened (not unlike the Daniel Penny case). After the case went public a woman appeared to say she had encountered Christian on the train a day earlier, threatening her with racial slurs and giving her permanent eye damage after striking her with a “half filled Gatorade bottle”. Her story was never corroborated and video shows her macing Christian first after a verbal confrontation.
Nonetheless she was brought in as a prosecution witness (the defense declined to cite her criminal record) and then to give a “victim impact statement” alongside the grieving families of the murder victims, which she used to orate on “white supremacy” and the need to “dismantle this corrupt system”. Having shamelessly inserted herself into the high-profile case the fiery, inarticulate Hester became a minor star in the local BLM grift scene.
This is her testimony before the city council yesterday:
.”..now it’s houseless people, at first it was black people…be ready for what you had to deal with in 2020…be ready because we’re coming for your jobs, your houses, your cars…we’re coming for you Ted Wheeler…”
Demetria became a fixture at antifa rallies during the BLM riots. Here she is participating in a “counterdemonstration” against a right-wing rally in February 2020. A small contingent of rally-goers trying to leave downtown are in the parking garage and Hester’s group is manning the exits to harass them as they leave. Hester demands random citizens leaving the garage say “black lives matter” before they can pass (the white woman shadowing her is following antifa practice of whites conspicuously acting as bodyguards for Black! speakers at BLM rallies, as if they might be set upon at any moment by frothing-at-the-mouth white supremacists, in the middle of a BLM rally).
February 2022, untethered
February 2022, untethered
At five and a half hours in an Indian prayer song was offered. It did not appear to drive out the bad medicine:
A homeless man declaring himself “sovereign” was popular with the crowd:
Black! liberal councilman Mingus Mapps was called a “race traitor”.
It wouldn’t be Portland if this guy didn’t show up:
The “queer affinity village” he speaks of above is one of the city’s “Safe Rest Villages” dedicated to “queer” homeless (allowable discrimination, apparently). The SRVs are fenced-in camps of small shacks housing about thirty people. The city plans more of these, along with Ted’s designated campsite Wheelervilles of hundreds.
Some were salty.
Some were sour.
There was plenty of both.
A few came out to support the ban. A newcomer tells of his travails.
Defecating in a pizza box is a human right, Nazi
A longtime resident says police were unable or unwilling to arrest a violent homeless man in his neighborhood–“the Rock Man” went from shouting at women on the street to hitting one in the head with a rock–because it was “a homeless issue”.
The lone remaining radical on the council offered an amendment withholding funds that was voted down four to one, and the ban is expected to be voted into law.
“…based on white supremacy and police violence against the BIPOC…”
SouthwestSouthwestSouthwestSouth WaterfrontSouth WaterfrontSouth Park Blocks; site of toppled Teddy Roosevelt Statue (see below)Old Post Office, under demolition. Downtown.Nearby, Broadway Bridge
Oregon state Republicans are boycotting the legislature to prevent a quorum and inevitable passage of an aggressive “reproductive healthcare” bill requiring insurers to fund all manner of transgender treatment, allowing minors over 15 full access to abortion and “gender affirming” surgery without parental consent and requiring all colleges and universities to maintain facilities providing all reproductive health care, in the Orwellian sense, short of surgical abortion. The bill would also allow providing “reproductive health care information and services to any person without regard to the age of the person”.
[sec. 8 1](b) A physician, physician assistant licensed under ORS 677.505 to 677.525, nurse practitioner licensed under ORS 678.375 to 678.390, pharmacist licensed under ORS chapter 689 or naturopathic physician licensed under ORS chapter 685 may provide [birth control] reproductive health care information and services to any person without regard to the age of the person. (2) A minor 15 years of age or older may give consent, without the consent of a parent or guardian of the minor, to: (a) Hospital care, medical or surgical diagnosis or treatment by a physician licensed by the Oregon Medical Board or a naturopathic physician licensed under ORS chapter 685, and dental or surgical diagnosis or treatment by a dentist licensed by the Oregon Board of Dentistry[, except as provided by ORS 109.660]. (b) Diagnosis or treatment by a physician assistant who is licensed under ORS 677.505 to 677.525 and who is acting pursuant to a collaboration agreement as defined in ORS 677.495. (c) Diagnosis and treatment by a nurse practitioner who is licensed by the Oregon State Board of Nursing under ORS 678.375 and who is acting within the scope of practice for a nurse practitioner.
There are limits to minor consent, of course:
(d) Except when the minor is obtaining contact lenses for the first time, diagnosis and treatment by an optometrist who is licensed by the Oregon Board of Optometry under ORS 683.010 to 683.340 and who is acting within the scope of practice for an optometrist.
Much of the law is about enshrining abortion rights in state law in response to the overturning of Roe v Wade, greatly expanding access to contraception and abortion, shielding doctors in Oregon from lawsuits from other states and, in apparent anticipation, from charges of “assault and battery” for transgender surgery. It mandates colleges and universities maintain extensive contraceptive services and have readily available “morning after pills”, establishing an impressive oversight regime for implementation, mandating annual audits in perpetuity.
(2) No later than April 1 of each year, each public institution of higher education shall submit a plan to the authority. The plan must demonstrate how the institution will ensure its students have access to medication abortions, including having in place equipment, protocols, patient educational materials, informational websites and training for staff.
(3) No later than July 1 of each year, the authority shall determine whether each institution’s plan submitted under subsection (2) of this section is adequate in proportion to the institution’s capacity to provide services and, if the authority determines that an institution’s plan is inadequate, shall provide further guidance to the institution with remedial measures for developing an adequate plan.
Parents are legally left out of the loop:
SECTION 9. ORS 109.650 is amended to read: 109.650. (1) Except as provided in ORS 192.567, a physician…may not disclose to the minor’s parent or legal guardian information regarding the information and services provided to the minor unless the minor has authorized the disclosure in writing. (2) A hospital or a physician…may advise [a] the minor’s parent or legal guardian [of a minor] of the care, diagnosis or treatment [of] provided to the minor or the need for any treatment of the minor, without the consent of the minor.
As for runaways, juvenile delinquents and any ward of the state parental consent can be dismissed outright:
418.307. (1) A physician…is authorized to treat a child who is ward of the court or is a dependent or delinquent child in accord with the best medical judgment of the physician, naturopathic physician, dentist or responsible official of the hospital and without consent if: (a) Because of the general state of the child’s health or any particular condition, the physician, naturopathic physician, dentist or responsible official of the hospital determines that in the medical judgment of the physician, naturopathic physician, dentist or responsible official prompt action is reasonably necessary to avoid unnecessary suffering or discomfort or to effect a more expedient or effective cure; and (b) It is impossible or highly impractical to obtain consent for treating the child from the child-caring agency, the child’s parent or the child’s legal guardian.
An insurer will be required to accept “[a]ny combination of gender-affirming treatments”:
[sec. 20 (1)](b) “Gender-affirming treatment” means a procedure, service, drug, device or product that a physical or behavioral health care provider prescribes to treat an individual for incongruence between the individual’s gender identity and the individual’s sex assignment at birth. (c) “Health benefit plan” has the meaning given that term in ORS 743B.005. (2) A carrier offering a health benefit plan in this state may not: (a) Deny or limit coverage under the plan for gender-affirming treatment that is: (A) Medically necessary as determined by the physical or behavioral health care provider who prescribes the treatment; and (B) Prescribed in accordance with accepted standards of care. (b) Apply categorical cosmetic or blanket exclusions to medically necessary gender-affirming treatment.
(c) Exclude as a cosmetic service a medically necessary procedure prescribed by a physical or behavioral health care provider as gender-affirming treatment, including but not limited to: (A) Tracheal shave; (B) Hair electrolysis; (C) Facial feminization surgery or other facial gender-affirming treatment; (D) Revisions to prior forms of gender-affirming treatment; and (E) Any combination of gender-affirming treatment procedures.
Cosmetic surgery is taken as gender affirming therefore “medically necessary”, but then all trans surgery is cosmetic surgery, so the logic of including such as “facial feminization” surgery is sound, albeit based on the pseudo science of gender affirmation. The “[r]evisions to prior forms of gender-affirming treatment” locks insurance companies into funding the many corrective surgeries often necessitated by “bottom surgery”, ensuring the continuing growth of the gender affirming surgery market. Who knows what it will cost the insurance industry or, rather, its customers.
The only doctors who can say no to gender treatment are those already working for the trans movement (and not necessarily doctors). Insurers may not:
(d) Issue an adverse benefit determination denying or limiting access to gender-affirming treatment unless a physical or behavioral health care provider with experience prescribing or delivering gender-affirming treatment.
The language appears to be lifted verbatim from similar legislation in Washington state, recently in the news for its new law allowing the concealment of minor runaways and their state-funded treatment from parents who oppose it.
The bill will fund “federally qualified health centers” in “underserved” (and more conservative) rural areas (those areas represented by the Republicans staging the boycott). The centers “may not be limited to reproductive health care”; they will also promote and enable gender transitioning.
SECTION 29. (1) The Office of Rural Health shall administer a program to provide grants to two federally qualified health centers located in rural and medically underserved areas of this state to each operate a pilot project providing expanded reproductive health services to individuals living in a geographical area of this state where there is limited access to reproductive health care.
(2) The grants must include funding for technical assistance in the design and administration of each pilot project and be flexible enough to permit the federally qualified health centers to use mobile health units or other temporary or transitional structures. Grantees must demonstrate that their governance bodies are committed to expanding access to reproductive health services, including abortion, but the services offered in the pilot projects may not be limited to reproductive health care.
(3) No later than September 15, 2025, the office shall report to the interim committees of the Legislative Assembly related to health, in the manner provided in ORS 192.245, on the results of the projects and recommendations for expanding the program to additional areas of this state.
Unidentified Portland police officers left derogatory remarks on an anonymous survey seeking their feedback about online training regarding how to refer to and interact with people in the LGBTQ+ community.
The statements revealed “racism, ableism and white supremacy,’’ and the need for more and better equity instruction, according to city-hired consultants.
The bureau’s Equity and Inclusion Office, which works out of the police chief’s office, developed the training last year.
Dennis Rosenbaum of Rosenbaum & Associates, the firm monitoring the Police Bureau’s compliance with a federal settlement agreement, said the chief’s office was alerted about the problem during the second quarter of 2022.
Staff in the chief’s office and city officials promised to address the “problematic ideologies” expressed in the surveys, but the consultants said in their latest report that they had “yet to see a response.”
Rosenbaum said the police chief and city leaders must emphasize that such ideologies “have no place” within the bureau, while not infringing on any member’s First Amendment rights…
“None of that surprises me,” said Debra Porta, executive director of Pride Northwest.
To be freed from the settlement agreement and the accompanying federal oversight, Portland must be found in compliance and remain in compliance with the settlement’s terms for one year. The city in February 2020 was found in compliance for the first time since the agreement took effect in 2014.
But the Department of Justice and the independent group overseeing the agreement, found the police bureau’s forceful response to racial justice protests later that year exposed significant shortcomings and the city fell out of compliance.
Under the decree in 2015 the PPB created its Office of Equity and Inclusion which produced the queer policy online training. The OEI seeks to “center equity” and “lead with race”.
In alignment with OEHR and the City of Portland we believe that it is critical to lead with race. Centering on Race means that race is at the forefront of equity considerations throughout decision making processes. We center race because of the harmful history of color blind policy and lack of attention to the most marginalized. Centering race does not mean that the Equity Office does not seek to remedy other forms of marginalization such as sexism or homophobia nor does it mean we are not invested in positive outcomes for all peoples. It merely means that we purposefully focus the critical impact of race in our society.
But what about that OEI training video? It’s a doozy.
PPB’s masked, hapless Chief Chuck Lovell introduces the program using the full “LGBTQAI2S+ and queer community” description with the demeanor of a hostage. After he and three assistant chiefs genuflect in various ways, the EIO’s “equity training specialist” Lauren Rosenstein leads us through the identity labyrinth.
Queer: A word to encompass members on the LGBTQIA2S+ spectrum and sexual minorities such as people who engage in kink, polyamory, and sex work.
“I know there’s a lot of vocabulary here, but remember, the test isn’t if you got all of the letters of the acronym right or if you can recite the definitions, the goal is to respond with humility and empathy, when a person shares their identity with you…[L]anguage is a tool we can use. Theres nuance and it’ll change again at some point, and when it does, we’ll be there to say ‘got it, thanks for letting me know.'”
We are instructed eventually these identities will all be combined as “the Queer Community”. The only identity not included will be monogamous straight people without a sexual fetish or an arrest for prostitution. Officers are taught how to ask for pronouns and gently promise to work at it when they get it wrong. “We aren’t telling you to ask everyone for their pronouns. Best practice is to say ‘how would you like to be addressed?'”
Difficulties beyond pronouns arise. In one scenario police officers are investigating a trans “woman” who doesn’t want to be searched by a man, citing his legal right as a woman to request to be searched by another woman. Officers are instructed to radio for a female officer if one is not on the scene. In the scenario the no lady-cops are available to answer the call (imagine that). The male cops are instructed to proceed gently and apologetically. No word on whether female cops have been consulted or considered.
It begs a few questions: what about trans cops? Presumably a biological female suspect is allowed no such objection to being searched by a trans woman (and wouldn’t it be funny if one was produced for the suspect in the scenario to satisfy “her” request to not be touched by a man? I suspect our suspect would be more than a little disappointed). And if a female cop is on the scene, does she have to search any suspect claiming to be a woman? “Let’s go, officer, and be thorough…”
“Too much time and effort into a subject that is extremely rare, and uncommon. No class will change [over 30] years of English learning to call a singular person They.”
“I find the use of the house with a “Black Lives Matter” poster in the window highly inappropriate and offensive. This video is supposed to be about LGBTQ2+ and the presence of the chosen background is out of context and has no place in this video. Black Lives Matter is a political organization that funded the assault and attack of officers nationwide as well as officers here in Portland. The insertion of this background in this video pushes a political agenda and once again, is highly inappropriate. No officer or member should be forced to accept a violent political organization’s agenda or it’s representation to prove that they care about ALL people. In addition to inserting a political agenda this also undermined the messaging of the LGBTQ community who put themselves out there in an effort to strengthen relationships within the organization. The mere presence of that screenshot detracts from the true messaging of the queer members represented.”
“This training is vile, God made male and female. Not hard to figure out, Quit being sheep and placating to a few mentally disturbed, Pure stupidity.”
“The only thing this training does is hurt the transcommunity”
“This is the most ridiculous and demeaning training I have ever had to sit through. The assumption that I need to be TAUGHT this information because you think I am going to treat people worse or better due to their orientation is insulting. FYI it’s either male or female…period.“
“Stop wasting our time focusing on the emotional fragility of a minuscule population that’s offended by everything.“
“This socio political garbage is a waste of time. We have interacted with this community without issue for decades. This is a nonsense policy looking for a problem, and serves only to discipline officers. I also find it interesting that during the two animated scenarios, the only white male depicted is an ignorant bigot. This apparently is what you think of a vast majority of our members. Portland and the bureau is in a death spiral, and you devote how much time and money to this crap? DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC.“
This training seems to have a very condescending tone to it.
Condescension–and your reaction to it–seems to be the real point. As the man said, the point of communist propaganda is to humiliate. Woke propaganda, adopting modern means, also seeks to troll, and to use the reaction as pretext for more punishment. If the anonymous cops had just kept their thoughts to themselves, the PPB as a whole would not be coming under fire. It’s like in boot camp, where someone has done something wrong but no one will cop to it and the whole platoon is punished.
We can all anticipate much more condescension, and punishment.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland was created in 1935 by Angus L Bowmer. Its annual festival has long been a tourist draw. In recent years attendance has declined as, news accounts typically say, the theatre-going audience has “shifted”, which is a euphemism for the dying off of cultured white people interested in Shakespeare. The Covid scare and lockdowns devastated attendance further in early 2020 and, as everywhere else in Oregon, the George Floyd riots of that summer unleashed intensified pressure on the festival to “commit” to diversity and equity.
Nataki Garrett joined the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as its artistic director in 2019, taking the helm of one of the country’s largest arts organizations as a pandemic waited in the wings.
But it wasn’t just a world-altering virus Garrett would have to contend with – there would be weeks where the air was too smoky to breathe, fires bearing down on the small city of Ashland and waning theater attendance.
She’s also had to deal with a small group of naysayers who question her every move and the kind of harassment that requires her to travel with security.
About this last challenge, Garrett is clear-eyed.
“I’m a Black woman,” she said Thursday. “I’m Black-identified. I like being a Black woman. I don’t think that there was a mistake in my birth.”
“I don’t spend any time apologizing for it or making up for it in these ways that allow for white comfort. We live in a society in which it’s normal to consider me to be a kind of threat. And so of course my presence is threatening because it upsets the status quo just through my existence.”
Garrett reportedly had high hopes for raising 19 million dollars in public and private funding when she came in, and I think the OSF hired her in large part because they thought a Black! face might be more likely to succeed in that.
Then there is the question of staging new plays.
It was in the 1950s, Garrett said, when Angus Bowmer, the then-artistic director and founder of the festival, started doing new plays [“Green Shows” before plays, featuring Elizabethan song and dance].
“So this idea that Shakespeare should be at the center,” she said, “it’s not what I inherited.”
Why would you assume Shakespeare should be at the center of a Shakespeare festival anyway? So Garrett’s first full season in 2022 featured a slate of woke fare no one asked for.
Yet Garrett is moving forward. The current season is designed for “collective impact,” Garrett said. Besides The Tempest, King John and Confederates, there is also a production of the Tony Award-winning musical Once On This Island, here set in Haiti, and a raucous queer musical called Revenge Song by Qui Nguyen. Next season, Garrett will direct the company’s flagship Shakespeare production, which will be a Romeo and Juliet that’s inspired by the making — and the failings — of the American West.
Garrett’s own directorial contribution Confederates sounds like a Black! lesbian bodice-ripper that I’m sure has nothing to do with the vanity of either writer or director:
An enslaved woman turned Union spy and a brilliant professor in a modern-day private university are facing similar struggles, though they live over a century apart. This play by MacArthur genius award–winner Dominique Morisseau leaps through time to trace the identities of two brilliant Black women and explores the reins that racial and gender bias still hold on American systems today.
Prospero and Caliban; Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2022 production of The TempestRevenge Song: A Vampire Cowboys Creation
Marginalizing Shakespeare for being neither Black! nor a woman wasn’t quite enough to afflict the comfortable whites of Ashland, so, when the shut-down festival was offering digital fare, Garrett introduced a film called “Ash Land” that is–what else–“a meditation on race, history and identity as reflected in the life of a Black woman coming to terms with the past”, wherein the magnanimous protagonist learns to forgive the town for being neither Black! nor a woman.
In ASH LAND, we offer a portrait of a Black woman who has turned her back on herself, afflicted by a quiet, insidious malaise. Her once-beloved refuge is now a den for survival, and rituals that were once joyous have become militaristic attempts at de-stressing. Compounded by the pandemic, she can no longer outrun the internal torment. When an enigmatic spirit finally catches up to her, she cultivates an understanding of true restoration and rebirth that reignites her love of Ashland, Oregon.
In this film, our proposal to humanity is simple: We are the ones we have been waiting for. We must heal us. We must cultivate our own joy. We must inhabit spaces in the fullness of our truth. We must love ourselves inclusive of and not in spite of our mortal wounds.
Garrett, who took over the festival in 2019, was the festival’s first Black female artistic director and only the sixth artistic director in its 88-year history. She faced wildfires, a pandemic, criticism over choice of plays and casting, and racist harassment during her time in the most visible job at the Ashland theater company.
According to an Oregon Shakespeare Festival employee who attended, and who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to speak for the festival, leaders said at the time that they needed to correct more than 15,000 incorrect entries in its financial ledger, the result of antiquated systems that were not properly maintained. The leaders also told employees they’re still trying to precisely determine cash flow numbers, bills owed and overall expenses of the organization.
That left Garrett as interim executive artistic director and Anyania Muse — who was the festival’s manager for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility as well as its human resources manager — became its interim chief operating officer as well.
Fittingly, this artist’s Muse is a DEI consultant. In addition to using public money for security to protect her from theater critics and letter-writers, Garrett was said to be very generous in paying staff such as Muse–which only makes me more suspicious.
And flights of queer Black! indigenous angels sing thee to thy rest, Nataki.
Poison Parade
In 1905 as the city celebrated the centennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Portland luminaries created the annual Rose Festival (settlers introduced rose bushes into the region and Portland eventually became “the Rose City”). One of its features is the nighttime Starlight Parade, introduced to celebrate the new technology of electric light. It’s considered a “family friendly” event.
Poison Waters, a Portland drag artist who performs at Darcelle XV Showplace, has been named the Grand Marshal of the Rose Festival’s 2023 Starlight Parade.
Poison Waters is the stage name of Kevin Cook, one of Portland’s most well-known drag performers and a long-time friend of Walter Cole, also known as Darcelle XV, who died in March at 92. Poison Waters led the ceremony at Darcelle’s memorial at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall last month.
The city went into mourning when its oldest living drag queen, Darcelle XV, passed away, giving him the city’s equivalent of a state funeral. Poison looks as if he might be the current oldest drag queen in Portland.
“Of all the exciting things that have happened to me in my 35 years of being Poison Waters, this has GOT to be the topper!” Cook said Friday. “At a time where drag queens are under attack in other parts of our country, choosing me as the Grand Marshal for the CareOregon Starlight Parade is such an important moment for me and the community I represent, the Portland Rose Festival, our city and state! This is such an honor and very surreal!”
(…)
The Starlight Parade takes place after the Starlight Run, a costumed family-friendly 5K that starts at 6 p.m.
Deadnaming: Using the birth or other former name (i.e. a name that is “dead”) of a transgender person without their consent.
Gender Expression: External presentation of one’s gender identity, usually expressed through one’s name, pronouns, behavior, clothing, haircut, or voice.
Gender Identity: A person’s gender-related identity, appearance, expression, or behavior, regardless of whether the identity, appearance, expression, or behavior differs from that associated with the gender assigned to the person at birth.
Gender non-conforming: A broad term referring to persons whose gender identity or gender expression does not match societal expectations that traditionally correspond to their assigned sex at birth.
Intersex: A term used to describe people born with chromosomes, external genitalia, and/or a reproductive system that do not conform to a binary categorization of male and female anatomy.
LGBTQIA2S+: An acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and/or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Two-Spirit, and the countless affirmative ways in which people choose to self-identify. The acronym is increasingly being replaced with the term “Queer community.” In some spaces, the abbreviation LGBTQIA2S+ and the term “Queer community” encompass sexual minorities such as people who identify as polyamorous, sex workers, or part of the kink community.
Can’t leave out the just plain old kinky.
2.1. Acknowledging a Person’s Gender Identity.
2.1.1. Members may need to ask a person what their gender identity is to complete a police report, evaluate a bias crime, or for another official purpose.
2.1.2. When a member needs to determine a person’s gender identity, they shall respectfully ask the person how they identify in terms of gender. For example, “I identify as female and use she/her pronouns. For this report, what should I put for your gender?”
Some of it appears to contravene federal requirements:
3.3. Some government-issued identification cards (including Oregon’s) have sex identifier options such as X for non-binary, in addition to female and male options.
3.3.1. X is not a recognized sex identifier under federal reporting requirements. Accordingly, for some forms the only options are female, male, and unknown. For federal reporting, the “X” sex identifier will be reported as “unknown.”
untethered 