The gay-owned bar at 317 Northwest Broadway in downtown Portland has been described as "more gentlemen's club than night club" and "Northwest lounge-meets-library-meets-executive locker room". Willamette Week said the original Christopher David-designed club looked "like the private rooms where today's grandpas once held stag parties, with brown leather couches, Victorian wallpapered sitting rooms, Edison bulbs hanging from nautical rope, and dark, aqua walls covered in snowshoes and ancient oars and framed kitsch—plus a taxidermal white buck behind the bar." Vendors used to design the interior were "part of the community", according to the original owner Jerrick Hope-Lang, who said, "They wanted to have a very masculine, Pacific Northwest feel — a gentleman's club-meets-hunting lodge-meets-hot boys dancing in thongs." Stag is the second all-nude gay strip club on the West Coast of the United States, after Silverado, which is also located in downtown Portland. Unlike Silverado, which has a policy against bachelorette parties since 2012, Stag welcomes heterosexual patrons and bachelorette parties without "gaudy" accessories, in order to avoid distracting dancers and guests. Stag has hosted drag performances, including weekly drag-hosted brunches called "Testify". In his 2019 "overview of Portland's LGBTQ+ nightlife for the newcomer", Andrew Jankowski of the Portland Mercury wrote: "It could be due to the management change, but lately Stag has been celebrating bodies that stray away from the classic Magic Mike image. Drag queen MCs host different music themed nights—like trap, Latin, and pop—as well as a weekly amateur night and a drag brunch. Two nights a month, their stage exclusively features trans dancers of all expressions."
History
Hope-Lang and his business partner opened the club on May 1, 2015, in a building completed in 1912. He said of the club's origins: "I love the idea of other gay male clubs, but I didn't like the atmosphere. I wanted to create a space where I would like to hang out, a true gentleman's club. I talked with a couple of dancers from another establishment and the idea came about very organically." In 2017, Kim Chi hosted the second annual, three-day beach party as part of the club's pride celebrations.
Reception
In her review for Willamette Week, Lizzy Acker complimented the cocktails and said, "everything about Stag is a happy surprise". Furthermore, she wrote about her experience, "while the patrons are 90 percent male, not a single one side-eyed me, a woman, as I sat alone at the bar. By the time I left, someone had bought me a no-strings-attached drink and I had at least two new best friends. All in all, Stag might be my new favorite place in Portland." In 2015, The Huffington Post contributor Eddie Parsons wrote an article called "Portland in the Gay '90s vs PDX NOW". He said of his experience, in part, "I dropped into Stag and found the old Portland strippers have been replaced by Cirque de Soleil like acrobats but the vibe is good. The bar quickly filled up with people from all over the world without attitudes..."
