The Dalles LGBT History Spotlight: Meet Lesbian Suffragist Marie Equi MD

LGBT History in The Dalles 

The Dalles area is a historical treasure trove with a well-documented history stretching back nearly 10,000 years- but there are holes in the narrative. Much of the history for the area comes from a Western culture perspective and often leaves out or even actively works to erase minority perspectives and historical figures from history.

But that doesn’t mean The Dalles doesn’t have any LGBT history.

Meet Marie Equi MD

Marie Equi (April 7th, 1872 - July 13th, 1952)

Marie Equi was a working-class child laborer who went from working in a textile mill to being a licensed medical doctor. She was a suffragist, a political activist, and a women’s and labor movement activist- and she also lived on a homestead in The Dalles and became something of a local sensation at the time.

Women from Equi’s time period were expected to conform to be quiet, good wives to their husbands and mothers to their children. Women could not even vote until 1912. So one might expect that Marie Equi’s story to be that of a closeted quiet mother and dutiful wife, filled perhaps with some speculation of closeted affairs.

But Marie Equi did not lead a quiet and closeted life by any standards. 

In fact, she lived her life in quite the opposite fashion and lived (somewhat) openly as a lesbian, in Wasco and Multnomah Counties in Oregon during the early 1890s. 

Originally from New Bedford, Massachusetts she was the daughter of Italian and Irish immigrants and came from a large working-class family. According to her biography, her father called her “overly enthusiastic about anything she set her mind (to).” In school her teachers considered her to be either “an earnest scholar” or an “exceptionally unruly headstrong girl.” She dropped out of school and began working at a textile mill at the age of 8 years old until she contracted tuberculosis at age 17 and had to go live with relatives in Florida and Italy to recover. 

"Equi once remarked on an aspect of character she shared with everyone else. “Aren’t we a crazy patchwork of ancestral and enviornal expressions?” - From Marie Equi, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions by Michael Helquist

In 1891 Equi’s high school sweetheart, Bessie Holcomb left Massachusetts to secure an Oregon homestead for the two of them by taking advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862. 

Bessie Holcomb described Marie Equi as “A noble, helpful, impulsive, generous, earnest, kind at heart, a woman of genuine religious feeling, and well-educated woman.”

Many western towns at the time were wary of Eastern settlers, but Holcomb secured a job teaching at an esteemed primary and high school, Wasco Independent Academy. Her employment there helped ease her entry into local social circles. Which was a good thing, as at the time The Dalles was a sometimes dangerous and restless place.

In 1892 Equi joined her sweetheart on the 121-acre homestead along the Columbia River, two miles west of The Dalles, OR. Equi later said that the wide-open spaces of the West had captured her heart. Their homestead reportedly sat near Chenoweth Creek atop granite outcroppings below a bluff with gorgeous views of the river and sat amongst gnarled oak, and bunchgrass. The two planted a vegetable garden.

Equi and Holcomb had a lengthy romantic relationship spanning more than a decade until the two separated in 1901. Equi and Holcomb’s time together transformed Equi’s life, she spent this time homesteading and then later studying medicine at the University of Oregon where she received her MD in 1903. 

The homestead remained in Holcomb’s family until 1945. A portion of the homestead sat near the end of what is now Pomona Street and was then later purchased in part by the original owner of Craig’s Office Supply. 

The Dalles Became the Sight of One of Equi’s Most Enduring Legends

She is a queen today. - The Dalles Weekly Chronicle, The Dalles OR

Only a year after she arrived in The Dalles, Equi, age 20 became somewhat of a local hero and celebrity in The Dalles, OR for a public confrontation with her girlfriend's boss, Wasco Independent Academy Superintendent and Baptist Minister Reverend Orson D Taylor. Taylor had refused to pay Equi's girlfriend, Bessie Holcomb, her promised teacher’s salary of $100. 

When Taylor refused to pay Equi took things into her own hands.

On July 21st, 1893, Equi was featured in the local newspaper, The Dalles Times-Mountaineer under the headline 'O.D. Taylor Horsewhipped’.

Equi, who sought wild west outlaw justice for the slight against her girlfriend, was reportedly seen stalking around Taylor’s office for over an hour daring him to show himself. A crowd gathered to watch and cheered her on. When Taylor tried to escape she reportedly began whipping him repeatedly with a horsewhip as the crowd grew to hundreds of people. (Taylor was not well-liked by locals as he had cheated and frauded dozens of local investors and landowners. Reportedly several men even broke up the fight so that they could get a few punches in themselves before letting Equi back at it.)

Equi was charged with assault and battery but the Wasco County Courthouse dismissed the charges and instead placed a $250 bond on Equi. Local merchants showed their support for Equi by raffling off the whip she’d used to beat Taylor to help her pay off her bond in full. In addition, many admirers sent Equi and Holcomb gifts including cloth for a new dress and bouquets of flowers.

The local newspaper the Times-Mountaineer suggested that Taylor had gotten his just desserts for refusing to pay Holcomb. The newspaper also called Holcomb a “scholarly and highly accomplished young lady…held in high estimation in this community.” and described Equi as “very much attached to her (companion) and her friendship amounts to adoration.”

The Mountaineer’s rival paper the Chronicle depicted Taylor as a surprised victim of a “young lady of Italian descent”. According to Helquist’s biography of Marie Equi, Taylor was a stockholder in the paper and his relationship likely influenced the Chronicle’s coverage of the event. The report suggested there was a “singular infatuation” between Holcomb and Equi.

The Times-Mountaineer interviewed Equi and Holcomb the next day and the article became one of the first public accounts of a same-sex couple living together in the West. The story also ran in the Morning Oregonian in Portland, the San Francisco Examiner, and the New York Times.

In the end, Taylor never did pay Bessie her teaching salary because he was arrested later in the week for embezzling nearly $50,000 and became embroiled in court cases that lasted for years.

After the dust had settled Equi and Holcomb moved to San Francisco in 1897, but Equi later returned to Oregon to finish her medical studies and the University of Oregon.

In 1903 she became one of the first 60 women to become a physician in Oregon.

“She became a model for what women could achieve. She was from a working-class background and she self-taught her way into medical school and became one of Oregon’s first 60 female doctors,” said Michael Helquist, author of Equi’s biography, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions told CCC News. 

“That was extraordinary in and of itself because women would become nurses but very seldom doctors. And even then they wouldn’t become involved in medicine as we know it today, they became more involved in alternative medicine. So Marie showed that women could do it and became very well respected for the medical care she provided.” 

Equi opened her first medical practice in Pendleton, Oregon in 1903 before relocating to Portland. She maintained a general medical practice and became a known proponent of women’s right to choose and began providing abortions to women as early as 1905, and was known to use a sliding payment scale to ensure that women of all social classes could access her services. She was an active member of the Portland Birth Control League and helped spread information about birth control to women despite the illegality of such activities. 

She was once arrested for handing out pamphlets on birth control in 1916 and in response she stabbed the police officer with a pin, telling him (falsely) that it was poisoned. 

She was never arrested for performing an abortion although a Multnomah County Sheriff’s office representative once confronted her about illegally performing abortions. In response to this, she called him out as a hypocrite, pointing out that he himself had brought a young woman requesting an abortion to her and she had performed the procedure. Despite the illegality of performing abortion she never faced criminal charges.

As a medical professional she was also recognized by President Theodore Rosevelt for her relief work during the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

As a suffragist, she pushed for women’s right to vote which passed in 1912. 

“She became more and more radical. She started sticking up for people in labor strikes and other protests. And professional people at the time didn’t do that. I mean it wasn’t done. People might donate money to social causes but they didn’t get out on the street and picket and they didn’t get beaten up by cops. So she was really showing what a woman of passion and conviction could do and that was something new,” said Helquist.

During her lifetime Equi also had several other romantic partners including the Olympia Brewery heiress, Harriet Speckart, with whom she adopted a daughter, whom they named Mary. It is the first known legal adoption by a lesbian in Oregon.  

“She became politically involved and the powers-that-be in Portland and in Oregon and the federal government started coming down on her because she was causing too much trouble, she was raising too many questions, some about the lumber industry, some about how business was done in Portland, then certainly about World War I and that’s when she got into Prison and the government tried to put her away,” said Helquist. 

At age 48 Equi protested World War 1 and was arrested for her public protest and charged with sedition under the Espionage Act, which had been newly revised to limit free speech in America. During this time Marie initiated an affair with a woman who was attempting to help her get out of the charges which than lead to her partner Speckhart leaving her and moving to Seaside. 

“She was charged with 3 years for sedition, and then Wilson reduced her sentence by half,” said Helquist.

Equi spent ten months in San Quentin State Prison and spent most of her time there providing medical treatment to inmates. 

Equi's life was full of radical politics and outlaw passions indeed. But in her old age, her health declined as she began to outlive many of her friends and family.

Equi died in Portland at the age of 80 years old. Her obituary ran in newspapers across the country.

Equi's friend, Julia Ruuttila said Equi was "a woman of passion and conviction (and) a real friend of the have-nots of this world."

Equi is buried alongside her lover Harriet Speckart who passed in 1927. The two are buried at Wilhelm’s Portland Memorial. Helquist said that presumably, Mary Equi Lukes arranged for her parent’s remains to be buried together.

In 2015 Equi’s first-ever full-length-biography was published by Oregon State University Press. 

Pictured. Marie Equi, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, a detailed biography of Marie Equi's life by Michael Helquist.

Marie Equi, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions, was written by acclaimed journalist and public historian Micheal Helquist. Helquist has worked in the anti-war, economic justice, social justice, and LGBT movements since the 1970s. 

Oregon ArtsWatch called the book a “Thoughtful yet page-turning account...of a remarkably gutsy woman (and) also an era of street-level activism.” The book won the 2016 Stonewall Honor Book Award and is now available for purchase from OSU Press or for checkout at The Dalles Wasco County Public Library. 

Helquist said the book took over ten years of researching and writing and that he first became interested in writing Equi's biography after reading about the horsewhipping incident that occurred in The Dalles. 

“I’m a Portland native and I grew up there. I went to the University of Oregon. I had a career in journalism and I was interested in history. I read an article about the horsewhipping incident in The Dalles on Gay & Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest and then I thought. Why hadn’t anything been done with this story?” I mean she was amazing, she was definitely a character but she was a remarkable woman for her times, being lesbian and relatively open about it was one reason. She was showing that someone that was living an alternative life, that was living with another woman could be successful and could be happy and prosperous and you know just live her life the way she wanted. Not that she didn’t pay a price for it later. But she showed what could happen if you lived your lie the way you wanted to and that it was possible to do as an LGBT person.” 

Author of Marie Equi’s biogrpahy Michael Helquist (left), author, and Dale Danley celebrate Marie Equi’s induction into the Rainbow Honor Walk of fame in San Francisco. This picture has been republished from Micheal Helquist’s Politics and Passions Blog.

This picture has been republished from Micheal Helquist’s Politics and Passions Blog.

In 2019 Equi was inducted into the Rainbow Honor Walk of fame in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood which honors LGBT people for their outstanding work in their fields. Other honorees include Jane Addams, Nobel Peace Prize winner, James Baldwin, American Novelist, George Choy AIDS awareness activist, Frederico Garcia Lorca, poet and playwright, Allen Ginsburg, Keith Haring, Harry Hay, Sylvester James, Christine Jorgenson, Sally Ride, and many more. 

Equi was a larger-than-life character of history. 

But her story leaves us asking the question: what other local LGBT history might we have missed out on the opportunity to know because of the historical oppression of LGBT people? 

“The reason why I started writing about her was that she really deserved more attention than the historical record provided,” said Helquist. “Equi’s history was not lost, but it was not remembered well. There really hasn’t been much written about LGBTQ+ history before World War II on the Pacific Northwest Coast, or even in Northern California or San Francisco. So here was someone in the early 1900s to live to be 80 years old and died in 1952. It’s not that nobody knew about Marie but most people at the time did not know about her whether they were in The Dalles, or Portland.”

Part of the reason for a lack of LGBT historical records on a local and national level has to do with the erasure of minority voices from mainstream history but also because many LGBT chose to live closeted lives as a matter of safety.

So was Marie Equi widely known as a lesbian when she lived in Oregon? 

“There were no words for it at the time. People barely knew the word homosexual,” said Helquist. “There was talk about how she lived outside of town in a small cabin with the school teacher Betsy (Bessie). So at some point certainly people did start talking and it was lightly referenced in the local newspaper of the time. And when they were in Portland they were a couple and they lived together and there’s not that Marie ever said, hey I’m a lesbian or I’m queer. It’s just that she lived her life as she wanted and people could deduct whatever they wanted to. So she was living openly as one could understand it in her day.”

Thanks to historians like Helquist, Equi’s story has not been lost to time. But stories like Marie Equi’s remind us that LGBT people have been around since the very first humans walked the earth. They are a part of our history and our culture locally and across the world and that their contributions to building the world we live in today deserve a place in history.

A Quick Look at some of the known historical context of LGBT History in Oregon and Washington.

Although it isn't as widely known, Oregon and Washington do have an LGBT history that stretches back all the way back to the indigenous tribes that lived here long before Western Colonizers and Pioneers ever stepped foot on the land. Unfortunately, many two-spirit stories from indigenous oral traditions have been lost (except for potentially a few mentions in Lewis and Clark's journals). Colonization resulted in the most local LGBT history being from a later post-colonization time period in the 19th Century.

1806 Lewis and Clark encounter two young men who have left their tribe to set up a home together. 

1893 Lesbian physician and women’s rights activist Marie Equi becomes a local celebrity in The Dalles, OR after she publicly humiliates a known money embezzler for refusing to pay her girlfriend’s promised salary. 

1903 Lesbian physician and women’s rights activist Marie Equi opens a medical practice in Pendleton, OR. Marie Equi then moves between Portland and The Dalles.

1906 Marie Equi fights for women’s suffrage. She is entangled in a front-page scandal concerning her girlfriend Harriet Speckart’s (An Olympia Brewery heiress) family inheritance coded language is used to imply their lesbian relationship as a reason for her girlfriend being alienated from her family. 

1907 Marie Equi and Harriet Speckart win second place for their float in the Portland’s Rose Festival parade. 

1913 Marie Equi serves as president of the Eight-Hour League of Portland, a labor rights group seeking an eight-hour workday. 

1915 Marie Equi provides contraception and abortions to patients despite illegality and legally adopts an infant girl named Mary. This is the first known legal adoption by a Lesbian in Oregon. 

1916 Marie Equi disrupts the largest parade ever held in Portland to protest World War I.  She was attacked by attorneys and members of the Knights of Columbus. 

1918 Marie Equi is charged with sedition for delivering an anti-war speech in Portland. She is arrested and bail is set at $10,000. Marie initiates an affair that leads to her partner girlfriend Speckart leaving her and moving to Seaside. 

1920 Marie Equi, age 48 beings her prison term for sedition at San Quentin. FBI director J Edgar Hoover prevents Equi from receiving parole or pardon. She serves ten months.

1927 Harriet Speckart, the former love of Marie Equi, dies in Seaside at age 44. 

1970 The Portland Gay Liberation Front forms. 

1971 Portland has its first National Gay Pride Week

1973 The first gay rights bill is introduced to the Oregon legislature but fails to pass by only two votes. 

1994 Oregon voters defeat Oregon Court of Appeals anti-gay ballot measure 13, which would have prohibited governments from extending anti-discrimination protections to LGBT folx. 

1996 Basic Rights Oregon Forms

2002 Salem legalizes transgender protections, the City Council votes to ban discrimination against people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. 

2004 Oregon voters pass measure 36, banning same-sex marriages. 

2005 Oregon Supreme court rules that same-sex marriages are illegal.

2007 On July 11th Wasco County becomes the only Eastern Oregon County to pass a non-discrimination ordinance before the state measure passes that same year. The ordinance protects people who seek jobs or housing from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Source. Oregon state bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation for those seeking housing, public accommodations and employment. Another bill allows same-sex couples to register as domestic partners. 

2008 Kate Brown becomes the first openly LGBT person elected secretary of state in the United States. 

2010 Goldendale elects Andrew Halm, making him Goldendale’s first known openly gay City Counselor.

2012 Tina Kotek America's first openly lesbian House speaker elected as Oregon's House speaker in 2012.

2014 On May 19th, Oregon legalizes same-sex marriages. 

2014 Hood River couple Samantha Meyers and Amanda Durnez become the first same-sex couple in Hood River County to marry following Oregon’s legalization of same-sex marriages.

2015 On June 26th, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down all state bans on same-sex marriage. Legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

2015 Marie Equi’s first full-length biography Mari Equi Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions by Michael Helquist is published by Oregon State University Press.

2016 Oregon State Gov. Kate Brown becomes the first openly LGBT person to be elected as a governor in the United States, as well as the second woman elected governor of Oregon.

2016 David Crown begins putting together a Pride event in The Dalles but passes before it can be completed. Sara Viemeister and Jodi TePoel put together the first Gay Pride in The Dalles.

2017 Columbia Gorge Pride Alliance hosts its first Gay Pride Parade in Hood River.

2019 White Salmon City Council denies a resolution recognizing June as Gay Pride month sparking local controversy. A rainbow flag is stolen from someone’s home and a group of individuals put together an initiative to give free Pride flags to businesses and individuals at Tarwater Tavern in White Salmon.

2020 Jim Ransier tells Columbia Gorge News he was first inspired to run for City Council after the council ran into controversy last year amid the failure to pass a resolution recognizing June as Gay Pride month.

Have something to add to our local LGBT History timeline? Email Us!

Sources and References:

Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest
Oregon Encyclopedia
Politics & Passions Blog
Marie Equi, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions by Michael Helquist
The Times-Mountaineer, The Dalles, Oregon, July 21- 31, 1893.
The Dalles Weekly Chronicle, The Dalles, Oregon, July 21, 1893.
Tom Cook, “Radical Politics, Radical Love: The Life of Dr. Marie Equi,” Northwest Gay and Lesbian Historian 1:3 (Summer/Fall 1996) and 1:4 (June 1997).
Nancy Krieger, “Queen of the Bolsheviks, The Hidden History of Dr. Marie Equi,” Radical America 17:5 (September-October 1983).
Sandy Polishuk, “The Radicalization of Marie Equi,” in “Biography – Equi, Marie,” Vertical File, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland.
Michael Helquist, “Portland to the Rescue: The Rose City’s Response to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, 108:3 (Fall 2007); 384-409.
Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.