🌈🎁 It’s GIVING small
Leave a CommentDear Pride Family,
Who doesn’t love our vibrantly Fabulous Hillcrest community and all of our LGBTQ-owned small business community? All across the gayborhood and our region, QTBIPOC-owned businesses reinvest in our community by employing us, stewarding our career development, contributing to regional LGBTQ-serving nonprofits, and being key components of economic growth and empowerment in our community and movement.
I think of our annual Pride season and our events’ nearly $30 million economic impact, a great deal of which goes right back into our Hillcrest and LGBTQ community. So many of our favorite LGBTQ-owned businesses sponsor us during Pride season and throughout the year with cash and in-kind contributions. As I reflect on this, I can’t help but think of Chris Shaw and his legacy of entrepreneurial investment in cultivating the next generation of business leaders with whom he instilled a deeply valued culture of philanthropy.
At our Festival alone, this year we partnered with 260 small businesses and nonprofits. All throughout the year, we collaborate with organizations like Hillcrest Business Association, San Diego Business Association, Asian Business Association of San Diego, OUT Pro San Diego, San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce’s LEAD program, San Diego Tourism Authority, and Downtown San Diego Partnership. Through these partnerships, we train on LGBTQ cultural competency, find philanthropic sponsors, donors, and volunteers, partner on events and educational initiatives, drive tourism, and so much more.
These collaborations highlight how investing in our local economy and nonprofits fuels capacity building within our community. The success stories of these partnerships remind us that when we support local LGBTQ businesses and nonprofits, we invest in the very fabric of our community. These businesses have been there for us when discrimination and stigma kept others at arm’s length. They provide jobs, stability, and a supportive space for many in our community, especially during our most challenging times.
Small Business Saturday and Giving Tuesday are just around the corner. Let’s use these opportunities to give back to those who have continually uplifted us. By supporting these small businesses and contributing to a Giving Tuesday campaign, we’re not just engaging in transactions; we’re participating in a movement of mutual uplift and resilience that will help all of us Thrive!
With Pride,
Fernando Z. López
Pronouns: they/them/theirs
Executive Director
San Diego Pride
P.S. Please consider supporting the your-round programs of San Diego Pride by donating to this year’s Giving Tuesday campaign where every dollar we receive will be matched up to $10,000 by Tito’s Handmade Vodka!
The turbulent stories of our unique perspectives, vulnerable lives and heroic movement are worthy of being preserved and showcased. Visual and performing arts provide for us innovative advocacy and community building palettes where we are empowered to creatively bare out our hearts to find new empathic connections.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court voted to allow a ban on transgender servicemembers while the issue makes its way through lower courts, putting upwards of 15,000 trans servicemembers and their families at risk. Transgender servicemembers have been openly serving in the U.S. military for the last 30 months, and have always been a part of the armed forces, defending this country, and serving our nation with pride.
After the riots at Stonewall, we marched. After we lost Prop 8, we marched. The desire to gather and find community, to be seen and heard, to show collective power or express shared outrage is interwoven within the legacy of our movements for social justice. So much of our community, our organizations, and the programs that serve us can trace their origins back to these sorts of collective public actions. The publicity and word of mouth attention they receive help to spark the subsequent one-on-one conversations that are vital to shifting personal and public opinion.
The resistance to our oppression based on the spectrum of our sexual orientations and gender identities has taken on many forms over the years. Resistance has taken on the form of holding hands in the daylight with the person whom we love, demanding our right to serve openly in the military and legally marry, protesting in the streets, fighting police brutality, and so much more. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, Pride committee members worked diligently to re-envision a model of Pride that went from ad-hoc committees each year to a professional organization that was able to turn a profit from our events and then use those funds to reinvest in our community. Folks like 
Next year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, a moment in our history where we fought back against police brutality and the legal oppression of our community. Our community rallied together and commemorated that act of rebellion the following year with the Christopher Street Liberation Day March with solidarity events held in cities across the country. The number of solidarity events has continued to grow every year all across the world, as the global Pride movement now boasts nearly 2,000 identified Prides, organized by hundreds of thousands of people, connecting millions to resources, community, and the celebration of our diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.
From Stonewall to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, from the fight for marriage equality to LGBTQ youth and students rights and beyond, our transgender siblings have always been at the forefront of our movement. At the same time, our trans family members experience higher rates of bullying in school, familial rejection leading to homelessness, and have borne the brunt of hate crimes against our community. As hate crimes have risen against our community in the last two years, it’s the trans community, and in particular black trans women, who have been disproportionately impacted. 2018 is still on track toward being one of the deadliest years in history for our trans community.
Today is election day, and we know that the results of this election will have huge impacts on our community for years to come. Today is our opportunity to voice our views and to fight for our liberation from the top to the bottom of the ballot. Make certain that you give yourself the time to vote or to drop off your mail in ballot at a polling location or at an official ballot drop off location today.
In just the last few weeks here in San Diego, a gay Lyft driver was brutally assaulted by his passengers and an LGBTQ-supportive church in the heart of Hillcrest was vandalized—both bold anti-LGBTQ attacks. This comes at a time when residents, patrons, and business owners in the Hillcrest area are reporting an increase in hate speech, threats, and violence towards our community. These terrifying realities coincide with a national increase in violence towards the LGBTQ and other minority communities.
Our community has long known that when we are out and visible we are able to deconstruct the discriminatory prejudices that exist to oppress us. Today is National Coming Out Day, a time for us to proactively step out of our closets and honor that power and liberation we experience when we ask of ourselves and the world around us to embrace all that we are across the spectrum of sexual orientation and gender identity.
While for many of us in the US it may seem like the battle for marriage equality is over, on Monday the State Department began imposing a 
In my office hangs a copy of the first Pride budget. We had a deficit of one dollar. I love having that piece of history hanging next to me as I work every day. It reminds me of the legacy gifted to us by the pioneers of our movement – those early struggles and successes of our community as it fought legal oppression, societal norms, and too often internally. Yet, as our community does, we persisted and grew stronger as community members like 
When I first began working at Pride in 2011 we were not yet using photos to tell the story of our organization or community. While we had enjoyed LGBTQ employment protections for some time in the state of California – San Diego had the highest concentration of LGBTQ military personell in the country, and the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell had not yet taken effect. The risk was too great for our service members.
In 1969 the Stonewall Riots against legal police brutality towards our community inspired organizers in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to hold “Christopher Street Liberation Day Marches” in 1970: the origins of Pride events as we know them today. As Pride events began to sprout up in more cities across the country and the world, they evolved into more than just marches — they became opportunities for us to make community connections while building political power.
The anti-LGBTQ forces our community are currently fighting — the torture of conversion therapy, the rising suicide and murder rates which disproportionately impact trans women of color, illegal detention of LGBTQ asylum seekers, attacks on our basic human rights guised in the language of “religious freedom”— all feel too big to overcome. Personally, I look to our history for inspiration. The depth and breadth of our peril and progress is devastating and inspirational, as our lives have always held the spectrum of these — as a community and as a movement, we are both traumatized and resilient.
With an event as massive as Pride, it’s hard to distill down the highlights of what we all just experienced. The vast amount of collective physical and emotional energy that was spent by so many in our community to make this last weekend possible is immeasurable, and the gratitude we all feel is as unique as our individual lives.
San Diego Pride was once a program of The San Diego LGBT Community Center. Since the origins of our movement, many Prides and community centers were connected as they all sprouted from the same few people; those pioneers, those seeds of our movement. In the 90s Prides across the nation came under legal attack from anti-LGBT extremists and many Prides, including San Diego Pride, became separate entities in order to protect the 501c3 nonprofit status of our centers and the vital services that they provided. That’s what our community does; we defend each other and help one another succeed.
At a time when violence against our trans siblings is at an all-time high, and anti-trans legislation is popping up all over the country it can be hard to stay focused on the positive work being done to elevate the lives and voices of our trans community members and loved ones. Just last November, 8 transgender candidates won their election bids, and in 2018, an estimated 40 more trans candidates are running for elected office across the country.
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