For the better part of a decade, the knock on downtown Portland has been that it’s not safe to walk the streets at night.
Jeff Swickard says walking downtown at night was the first time he ever felt safe.
Thirty-five years ago, he and his friends—fellow undergrads of the University of Oregon—would get dressed up and pile into a car. The whole drive from Eugene to Portland, he’d feel nervous, slightly sick. Swickard was a young man slowly coming out as gay after a childhood in a small conservative town outside Sacramento. “Back then,” he tells WW, “it was like a big deal to go to a gay bar.”…