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Portland offers plenty of places and opportunities where queer, trans and nonbinary people are welcome and celebrated, thanks to the efforts of people who saw what wasn’t there and made it real. We found event and group organizers who say they invite new members to make community with one another based on common interests like sewing, playing music, watching sports, and engaging in political activism. While Pride season offers a temporary burst of especially queer things to do, these folks are here year-round to keep community together.
DIRTY BIRDS HOCKEY TOURNAMENT
Portland United Hockey League’s third annual Dirty Birds Hockey Tournament attracts nearly 300 cisgender and trans female athletes, as well as nonbinary and gender-expansive players, to the Portland Winterhawks’ Beaverton and Sherwood facilities over three days. Roughly 280 participants duke it out for top honors in the later morning, while participants can shop local vendors and play for raffle baskets along with watching the action on the ice. PUHL is just one of the organizations tabling along Pride Northwest’s LGBTQ+ Pride Festival booths in Tom McCall Waterfront Park, should spectators or interested hockey players want to say hi. sites.google.com/view/portlanddirtybirdstourney. July 25–27. Free.
BRASSLESS CHAPS
The all-queer brass band Brassless Chaps does indeed have brass players, along with woodwinds and percussionists, but founding member Lichen clarifies that it’s not a marching band. The stationary group began in 2022 after Lichen, who came to Portland from Seattle in 2019, was frustrated by the lack of queer musicians they would encounter in the brass scene. “I just put a call out, like, ‘Hey, do any queers want to be in a brass band with me?’ and people answered the call, and here we are three years later,” Lichen says. Brassless Chaps started out with eight members, but by now an average of 15 to 20 musicians gather for weekly practices and one or two monthly performances at community events and festivals. Membership rules are lax, requiring only that members bring an instrument and be ready to learn music. instagram.com/brasslesschaps
SINCERE STUDIO
If the next cast of RuPaul’s Drag Race still can’t sew, Frances Andonopoulos will teach them how to not only appease Mother Ru, but more of the valuable skills that used to be taught in school. Andonopoulos founded the sewing nonprofit organization Sincere Studio in 2020 as a way for its students to not only learn how to sew, but make and swap gender-affirming garments for one another and exchange skills and services. “Sewing was taken out of school curriculums, and that has made people more dependent on fast fashion, throwing things away, and we’ve lost this power to mend and make our own clothes,” Andonopoulos says.
The studio moved earlier this year into a new Eliot neighborhood space twice the size of the old studio that is already accommodating more students and supplies. Along with classes where students learn how to make, mend and refit garments and use sewing machines, Sincere Studio hosts gender-affirming clothing swaps and group sewing circles where people can work together on any of their personal projects. “Sewing can be a solitary craft,” Andonopoulos says. “A lot of people have it in their heads that sewing is super hard, but most people who do the classes are surprised how approachable it is once they get started.” 2134 N Flint Ave., sincerestudiopdx.org. Open by appointment.
TRIPLE THREAT
Dadi Iris has danced at “all-body” nights during her seven years as a dancer, and knows how a strip club’s environment changes for the better when queer, trans and nonbinary bodies hit the pole. But she heard that her peers wanted more than a couple of nights at a smattering of stages in America’s strip-clubs-per-capita capital, and found space for them. With her new strip club experience Triple Threat, which began earlier this spring at the Brooklyn neighborhood night club and art venue Process, Iris not only puts trans and nonbinary beauty on the main stage, but transforms the strip club atmosphere with specialized living room-style seating and customized tech. “It’s nice to not be in this cheesy, sterile environment,” Iris says. “It’s cozy and still has got that rave warehouse edge to it, but because it’s at Process the artistry is so dialed.” Triple Threat’s Pride edition, hosted by Hyra, will donate a quarter of its proceeds to the vogue ballroom group Rebound. Triple Threat at Process, 5040 SE Milwaukie Ave., processpdx.club. 8:30 pm Wednesday, July 16. $10. 21+.
BLACK & BEYOND THE BINARY COLLECTIVE
Babatunde “Zubbi” Azubuike founded Black & Beyond the Binary Collective, or 3BC, in September 2020 at the height of both the pandemic and Portland’s historic social uprisings. The nonprofit organization was able to collect and distribute financial aid and resources to people struggling with COVID-induced hardships in its early days, and still carries on this work to this day using Azubuike’s decade-plus of community organizing skills. But as the world opened back up, Azubuike saw a need to rebuild the communal connections that social distancing restrictions severed. “We want to serve people living at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and access,” xey say. “It has always been a passion of mine, coming from the deep south in Georgia with a strong legacy of civil rights and social organizing, wanting to bring some things I experienced there, here.”
3BC’s LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations make space for Black and brown queer, trans and nonbinary Portlanders to relax and get to know one another while still observing safety precautions for immunocompromised guests. instagram.com/2black4binariespdx
TRANS GUYS GATHER
Fans of Bravo hear “men’s group” and immediately think of the network’s approved masculine therapy methods: ayahuasca and screaming. Dionysus Chilcote’s social group Trans Guys Gather doesn’t offer that, thankfully, but finds ways for trans men to meet one another, share their experiences, and bond over group activities. Since it started last September, TGG has organized picnics, board game nights, and arts and crafts makers sessions around Portland, among other activities. Forty guys turned out for TGG’s first outing, but an average range of eight to 30 people can be expected—the youngest guests are teens, while the oldest have been in their 50s—with first-timers still finding their way. Chilcote, now 25, had a difficult time meeting friends when he was new to Portland and couldn’t go to bars. “I remember just having a very odd loss of community between 18 and 21,” he says.
Chilcote tries to make sure the activities he picks are low or no cost. He bought player cards for guys who couldn’t otherwise afford to go to Wunderland’s arcade, and sets up a room once a month for games at the library. “It’s not easy to spend $50–plus in a night,” he says. instagram.com/transguysgatherpdx
