More than 450 packed into the pews of the First Parish Church in Portland in August 1984, listening to a reading of a Bangor police affidavit detailing the brutal murder of Charlie Howard.

The Rev. Richard Hasty then led a memorial service for Howard, whose violent death at age 23 galvanized Maine’s queer community, and community leaders condemned the victim-blaming headlines that had dominated the news in the weeks since Howard was thrown off a bridge while out for the night in Bangor with his boyfriend.

As the people who gathered for the service left the church, they were confronted by a group of hecklers. Instead of backing away, they began marching down Congress Street, becoming bolder as they shouted, cheered and sang throughout what many now consider Portland’s first Pride parade.

The First Parish Church and the events of that day in 1984 are now part of Stepping Out, a newly completed queer history trail in Portland. The 1.5-mile self-guided tour details 12 spots from City Hall to the Western Prom that are significant to local LGBTQ+ history, said Wendy Chapkis, a recently retired University of Southern Maine professor who led the project.

Some of the stops — including Portland’s first gay bar, Roland’s Tavern, which was destroyed by arson in 1981 — no longer exist. Others, like the Equality Community Center and Blackstones, are still significant spaces for the queer community. They range from a store that became a gathering spot to the hospital that was on the forefront of gender-affirming care in Maine.

“It was clear to me that if we didn’t deliberately teach the history of marginalized communities, that history wouldn’t be carried forward,” Chapkis said. “And I think it became especially vital that we be consciously preserving and disseminating our history when the current administration started to erase — literally erase — that history so federal websites no long have information about the LGBTQ community.”

A TINY SLICE OF HISTORY

While teaching an applied LGBTQ history class at USM, Chapkis noticed most students had no background in queer history, even though a third of the class usually identified as LGBTQ.

“Maybe they had heard the word Stonewall and they knew it had something to do with why there are pride celebrations every year,” Chapkis said. “Maybe they knew that Maine now has civil rights protections for queer people, or that same-sex couples could marry in the state. But they had absolutely no idea that it took decades to get those rights secured.”

In 2017, Chapkis was appointed the faculty scholar for the June Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine, working with the university’s extensive LGBTQ+ collection. Chapkis trained student researchers to record oral histories for the Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection.

In those interviews, people kept talking about locations in Portland that no longer exist, and Chapkis became worried they were “going to disappear from the public record unless we did something really specific to both document them and make that information widely available to the public.”

Several years ago, Chapkis secured funding from the Maine Humanities Council and USM to create a free, publicly accessible history trail about “a tiny slice of Portland queer history,” Chapkis said.

Chapkis recruited USM librarians Mary Holt and Megan MacGregor and a group of student researchers to help with the project.

MacGregor, who has since left the university, had long wanted to make a history trail like Stepping Out and was eager to work with Chapkis to make it happen.

“We don’t learn about it at school. Our history isn’t often put into museums,” MacGregor said. “As a queer person, you really have to go hunting for the history. A lot of us don’t have the idea that I can live in a place that has my history. We always assume it’s somewhere else and not here.”

To create the history trail, those working on the project relied on the LGBTQ+ archives, oral histories and new research. MacGregor said researching queer history can be challenging because it’s hard to find primary sources.

For each stop on the trail, the website includes a written history, photos and an audio recording, which can be downloaded so people can listen as they walk the trail.

DOCUMENTING THE PAST

MacGregor found it a bit surprising to see how much queer history there was just along Congress Street. She particularly enjoyed researching the Western Prom, where visitors can still find signs warning of fines for “cruising.”

Cruising, the act of driving or walking through an area looking for anonymous sexual encounters, has a long tradition in gay male culture that arose from a need for anonymity before homosexuality became legal. The oldest known cruising ground for men in Portland was Deering Oaks, but police in the 1990s began arresting people for indecent exposure and other criminal charges.

In 1993, the City Council banned cars in most of Deering Oaks, and cruising shifted to the Western Prom. But pushback from West End residents began immediately, and within three years, the city had passed an ordinance to halt cruising. Gay men reported they were being assaulted on the prom, and some said they were targeted by police simply for driving through the neighborhood.

The queer community organized to “police the policing,” but eventually cruising was pushed out of the area and across the peninsula to the Eastern Prom and outer Congress Street.

Ty Bolduc, a student researcher who recently graduated from USM, researched First Parish Church and the Matlovich Society for the history trail. Bolduc, who uses they/them pronouns, said they were drawn to the research the church after reading a sermon given there.

“I was so moved by how accepting and loving it was. It challenged my perception of the church in general,” Bolduc said. “I was really excited to learn more about the place of the First Parish Church in all of these Pride movements.”

Bolduc was also interested in the Matlovich Society, named for the decorated Vietnam War veteran Leonard Matlovich, who was kicked out of the military in 1975 for being gay and who died of AIDS in 1988.

The Matlovich Society in Portland opened in 1991 at 72 Pine St. to build community through biweekly lectures. It was active for eight years.

“It was a space where you could come to be who you are and have conversations with other queer people,” Bolduc said. “It wasn’t super long running but had a different goal than other queer spaces at the time that were focused on activism. It was really about the conversation and community building.”

MacGregor, who would like to see the history trail expand to include sites across the city, said “pointing out that we’ve been here before and you’re part of a larger picture can be very powerful and comforting in a lot of ways.”

“I think it’s also important to point out for the nonqueer community that we have been here — we were just under the radar.”