How the pioneers of San Diego Pride helped shape the global movement

Above: Tony Shin’s July 17 report for KUSI on security measures for San Diego Pride.

SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — San Diego Pride is reflecting on and celebrating the past with this year’s parade and festival, as it marks the 50th anniversary of the first gay pride march in America’s Finest City.

Featuring the theme “Making History Now,” pride organizers have sought to honor the rich history within San Diego’s LGBTQ+ community as it fought for visibility and civil rights.

While much of the focus is on trailblazers’ work cultivating the gay pride movement locally, San Diego has also played a key role in advancing the pride movement on the world’s stage.

Pride celebrations as they are known today trace back to a demonstration in 1970, marking the first anniversary of a days-long uprising sparked by a violent police raid at New York’s Stonewall Inn.

The raid, which is referred to as the Stonewall Rebellion or Riots, was a watershed moment for a community who for years had to keep their true identity or orientation hidden out of fear.

“The Stonewall Riots had a rippling effect throughout the country, and the world really,” Nicole Verdes, managing director with the Lambda Archives, explained to FOX 5/KUSI. “Certainly there was a ripple effect that had an impact here in San Diego.”

In the year after the rebellion, San Diego State University students founded a local chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, an activist group described by historians as the “incubator” of the newly-invigorated movement pushing for LGBTQ+ rights.

The San Diego chapter of the Gay Liberation Front held protests and “ Gay-Ins ,” demonstrations against local law enforcement policing LGBTQ+ people’s lives. During this time, members of the organization also became involved in the broader civil rights movement sweeping the country.

Two leaders of the chapter , Stephen Bell and Jess Jessop, were among those who helped co-author the 1972 Gay Rights Platform in the United States, which was a guiding document for the movement, at the first-ever convention on gay rights held in Chicago.

After a few years, these demonstrations evolved into unpermitted marches. One of these unpermitted marches in 1974 is credited as being the city’s inaugural gay pride parade, despite San Diego’s first official “Gay Pride Day” having been held the year after.

Most of the marches were organized by ad hoc committees, according to San Diego Pride . That is until one community member, Doug Moore, founded the first local pride organization, The Lesbian and Gay Men Pride Alliance, which served the community for two years.

He also created its successor, the nonprofit Lambda Pride. A prolific collector of items from these early pride celebrations, Moore was similarly involved in creating the extensive collections of local LGBTQ+ history now housed in the Lambda Archives .

However, one of the lesser known, but just as significant contributions Moore made to San Diego Pride was helping to bring local voices to the forefront of work aimed at unifying grassroots pride movements in other areas.

Around 1981, as pride organizing continued to gain steam across the globe, Moore began to catalog local pride organizations outside of San Diego.

This record became critical when pride coordinators Rick Turner and Marsha Levine, of San Francisco and Boston respectively, sought to create a network for other leaders in this space, offering discussion and resources on shared obstacles.

Then called the National Association of Lesbian and Gay Pride Coordinators, the first meeting of the network was in Boston in 1982, with representatives from six pride organizations across the U.S. including San Diego. Another meeting was held the year after in America’s Finest City.

Now called InterPride , the network’s reach has become international, holding annual conferences at destinations all over the globe for over 300 member organizations spanning 60 countries. It was even granted Consultative Status at the United Nations in June of 2023.

“[Moore] was instrumental in our local pride movement, but he was also instrumental in having San Diego take its seat at the table, if you will, with international pride organizers,” Verdes said. “That was a local individual who saw that there was a benefit to connecting with prides all around the world and all around the country to make it a bigger movement.”

These origins still have a physical connection with San Diego: The Lambda Archives houses many artifacts from the early days of InterPride, including its original bylaws, buttons from pride events held by its member organizers and other ephemera gathered by Moore.

According to Verdes, the “ Doug Moore Pride Papers ” collection is the largest and most extensive in its care.

The spirit of Moore’s efforts has similarly shaped the philanthropic work San Diego Pride continues to engage in to this day, Fernando Lopez, former executive director of the nonprofit, said ahead of the 2020 “World Pride Forum.”

“San Diego should be really proud of the fact that our voices as queer San Diegans were in that room when those conversations were happening in the years following Stonewall to be a bigger part of this movement,” Verdes said.

The San Diego Pride Parade is set to take place Saturday, July 20 at 10 a.m. It will be followed by the two-day Pride Festival, held at Balboa Park’s Marston Point.

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