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LON MABON
AGE: 76
BEST KNOWN FOR: Asking Oregon voters to label being gay as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.”
It’s probably hard for people who weren’t there to imagine what a bogeyman Oregon Citizens Alliance leader Lon Mabon was in 1990s Portland.
“Polls suggest that 80 percent of Oregonians who know who he is would rather have a prison site in their back yard than have dinner with the director of the Oregon Citizens Alliance,” WW wrote in a 1998 cover story on Mabon, titled simply “He’s Back.”
The OCA first drew attention with an initiative called Measure 8, striking down rules against anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in state government. It passed in 1988, 53% to 47%.
Emboldened by this success, the OCA began work on its doomsday weapon, 1992′s Measure 9, a ballot initiative that would have added language to the Oregon Constitution labeling homosexuality as “abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse” and required the state to actively discourage it in schools and other forums.
Measure 9 was seen, not unreasonably, as an existential threat to human rights in Oregon and beyond. Defeating it was no slam dunk at a time when both our U.S. senators (and two of five congresspersons) were Republicans.
The measure was indeed defeated, 53% to 47%, but ask LGBTQ+ people who were there: The horror of your neighbors being asked to vote yes or no on whether you are unnatural and perverse is hard to shake.
“It was not an easy time,” civil rights activist Kathleen Saadat once recalled. “You go to the grocery store and wonder if the person behind the counter voted against you.”
Though the OCA would continue its anti-gay crusades into the 21st century, 1992 was the beginning of the end. Not only was its Death Star destroyed at the ballot box, but its finances were decimated in court when activist Catherin Stauffer won a $30,000 judgment stemming from a physical altercation at an OCA event in 1991. Mabon and company would resort to increasingly far-fetched legal strategies to avoid paying up, eventually asserting that Oregon judges could not compel him to do anything because there was a typo in the oath of judicial office. In 2002, Mabon’s refusal to cooperate landed him in jail for 42 days on contempt of court charges.
Mabon’s last “Son of 9″ initiative failed to qualify for the 2008 ballot. Since then, he appears to have dropped out of public life.
But not out of our deli sections. Today, Lon Mabon and his wife, Bonnie (the former secretary-treasurer of the OCA), are the principals of It’s The Famous LLC, purveyors of a gourmet salsa bearing that name. They founded the limited liability company in Salem in 2009, the state’s business registry shows. The salsa is a brisk seller, too; on a recent trip to the Hawthorne Fred Meyer, just two tubs of it remained on the shelves.
A recent call to It’s The Famous was answered by Bonnie Mabon herself, who agreed—perhaps a bit reluctantly—to pass our inquiry on to Lon. “We try to stay out of the news, after having been in it for so many years.” As of press deadline, Lon Mabon had not called back.