PrideScape Podcast

PrideScape is the official podcast of Pride Northwest, home of the annual Portland Pride Waterfront Festival and Parade and much more. Each month we will be bringing you the latest Pride Northwest updates, and important news and information affecting Oregon and SW Washington's LGBTQ+ community.

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Newest Episode

Community Resilience with Abby Ross

Published 9/30/2025

Season 4, Episode 3: Community Resilience with Abby Ross

In this episode, Executive Director of Pride Northwest and PrideScape Host, Debra Porta (she/they) sits down with PrideScape special guest, Abby Ross (they/them), a truly multifaceted guest. From academia, government, to the arts, Abby shares about their journey and how they ended up in Portland.

Debra and Abby discuss one of Abby’s recent blog posts, Authoritarianism Survival Kit: On Being Ready for the Long Run, and dive into a thoughtful discussion on current events, building community, and what community resilience looks like in today’s world.

After Tuning In:

Check out Abby Ross’ Sheathed Sword on Substack: https://sheathedsword.substack.com/

About Abby Ross (also Dr. Gordon Adams)

Abby is a working performer, stage actor, storyteller, and singer and a retired policy official. They have worked on stage in Washington, DC, Maine, and now in Portland performing classical and contemporary roles, including King Lear, Friar Lawrence, Polonius, Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and Constable Brown in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.  They were the lead in the Portland Revels in 2024 and will be co-lead in the Revels this year.  As a storyteller, they appeared in the September 2025 Portland Queer Arts Foundation “Spectacular,” telling story from a one person show in development on ancestry and gender.

Abby’s career, as Gordon Adams was in the national security and defense budget arenas. They are Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the School of International Service, American University, in Washington DC, where they taught national security and foreign policy processes, institutions, and resource planning. 

They served as Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton Administration between February 1993 and December 1997, the senior White House official for national security budgets. Before serving at OMB, they were founder and Director of the Defense Budget Project, a non- partisan research center in Washington D.C. which was one of Washington’s leading analytical institutions working on the defense budget, defense economics and defense policy issues. 

They have written or. co-authored books on defense contractor lobbying, national security budgeting, US military assistance to other countries, and European defense technology and appeared often in print, audio, and visual media. They are the author of a Substack blogsite, Sheathed Sword, writing on political, cultural, and spiritual issues and problems.

They live in Portland with their cat, Doc, near their granddaughter and proud parents.