Quick Take
Those who were present at the time look back in fondness at the first-ever Pride celebration in Santa Cruz, 50 years ago this summer, long before most cities in America began to recognize their LGBTQ+ communities.
It’s the early summer of 1975 — maybe you’re wearing platform shoes and bell bottoms, maybe you’re carrying a transistor radio, and maybe it’s playing “Jive Talkin’.”
You’re walking along the San Lorenzo River levee, and near San Lorenzo Park, you see a group of people in the river, laughing and shouting. It’s a tug-of-war, a small group of men on one side of a taut rope, a small group of women on the opposite side.
What are you watching? It turns out you’re witnessing history.
The tug-of-war across the San Lorenzo River was one of the highlights of the first-ever Pride event in Santa Cruz, and the culmination of a weekend that is the focus of a big and splashier Pride celebration half a century later.
“It was a blast,” said Larry Friedman, who was there for the tug-of-war. “The men won.”
Daniel Dickmeyer was also there, but he has a different view. “There was quite the debate about who won,” he said. “A lot of people got pulled into the water, but we never quite figured out who the real winner was.”
It’s easy to assume that in the long and ongoing struggle for LGBTQ+ rights, the year 1975 might as well have been the Dark Ages. After all, the closet was full to bursting with people afraid to declare who they were to a mainstream culture convinced that anything other than monogamous heterosexuality was some kind of mental disorder.
But some who were around at that time and who were also involved in what was then called the gay liberation movement tend to speak of 1975 in almost sweetly nostalgic tones — at least in Santa Cruz.
This year marks the 50th year of Pride in Santa Cruz County. Only major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and Los Angeles can claim a longer heritage with Pride. Santa Cruz might have, in fact, been the first small city in America to host an organized, formal, above-ground festival celebrating gay pride.
Like most anniversaries, this year’s activities also mark an opportunity to look at the past and to understand the circumstances that led a group of gay men and lesbians to celebrate their community and, by doing so, insist they had every right to live their lives as they saw fit, just as everyone else did.
To be sure, in 1975, queer people simply were not as free as they are today. That term itself, “queer,” was in those days a playground taunt that often led to bullying, harassment, even violence. Gay people didn’t have any protections in the realm of housing or employment. They were not allowed to marry. There is a danger in overromanticizing that era.
Still, just a few years after the Stonewall riots launched the modern gay rights movement, 1975, at least in Santa Cruz, represented a halcyon period as young men and women set about to build community through local organizations and businesses such as bars and restaurants. It was a moment in the sunshine before many dark periods to come, including Anita Bryant’s anti-gay activism, the murder of Harvey Milk, the Briggs Initiative (a California ballot measure that would have allowed school districts to fire gay teachers) and, most ominously, the HIV-AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
“It was certainly a more innocent time,” said Larry Friedman, 78, the last of the organizers of that first Pride event who still lives locally. “It was really a time for people like me who were fairly new coming out to find their people.”
The first Pride weekend was a four-day affair. Three of those days took place at Cabrillo College. That last day was a big picnic in San Lorenzo Park. There was no parade. (The first gay pride parade in Santa Cruz was a couple of years later. While the initial Pride celebration was relatively frictionless in terms of political pushback, the ’77 parade included a phalanx of hecklers and protesters, many of them waving anti-gay signs.)
Friedman had grown up in a traditional Jewish family in Detroit. He had moved to California, alighting in Santa Cruz as a young hippie in 1971. He witnessed firsthand the cultural transformation that UC Santa Cruz, which had opened in 1965, was having on an otherwise conservative town. It wasn’t until 1974 that he finally came to terms with being gay, and once he came out, he quickly found a thriving subculture of people he could relate to. He landed a job waiting tables at a deli owned by two gay men called The Solarium (where The Crepe Place is today on Soquel Avenue). He met people at gay-friendly bars like Mona’s Gorilla Lounge and a dance club called the Dragon Moon.
But his most meaningful social interactions took place within the setting of a Cabrillo College students club called Lesbian and Gay Men’s Union (LAGMU).
“It was a gay support group,” he said. “I became a part of that group and within a few months, we had about 20 people come to our group meetings and potlucks.”
David Paine was also there in the beginnings of LAGMU. “That was a wonderful experience,” he said, “because it was very community-based, with both students and non-students. And we found a couple of really supportive faculty members at Cabrillo who helped us.”
It was from the first meetings at LAGMU that the idea of a Pride celebration first began to take hold. What emerged was a four-day event that reflected LAGMU’s support-group foundation, a string of workshops and seminars on coming out, bisexuality, feminism, even poetry. In between was a classical music concert featuring Lou Harrison, a world-renowned figure in avant-garde music, and a big Saturday night dance. Then, on Sunday, an estimated crowd of 200 convened at San Lorenzo Park for the picnic that culminated in the tug-of-war that Paine captured on film. “Yeah, you can imagine all the long hair and the hippie clothes we were all wearing back in 1975,” he said.
The larger mainstream community was starkly divided between political figures and activists who supported the gay-rights movement, and those who clearly did not. “We were able to get the county board of supervisors to approve a proclamation declaring Gay Pride Week, but it was quite controversial and it was a very close vote,” said Paine. “And that brought out people who would buy ads in the Sentinel to lambast us.”
The first Pride event constituted a genuine risk for those who attended, said Rob Darrow, the principal organizer of the Pride 50th anniversary celebration this year. “It was a real challenge to be public for the first time, to come together as LGBTQ+ people.
Darrow has been putting together a series of podcasts, talking to people who were around in those early days, including the first out-gay practicing psychiatrist in Santa Cruz. “He talks about how it was a real act of courage to walk out and be in the parade among all these protest signs.”
David Paine remembers the time as a period of idealism. The years to come would bring tough times and anguish, but those first years were an essential time of emerging into the light of freedom for millions of LGBTQ+ people.
“When you’re young,” he said, “and you have some support, sometimes you feel pretty fearless. I really don’t remember being fearful about anything. I think we just felt like we were doing a good thing. It wasn’t like we were trying to pull a boulder up a mountain. We did have a lot of support. All we wanted to do was to encourage conversation.”
Young people who might assume the Dark Ages myth about the early gay-rights days don’t recognize the genuine differences between then and now, said Daniel Dickmeyer who now lives in Salt Spring Island just north of Victoria, British Columbia, with his husband, Paine.
“It was a magical time,” he said. “I mean, it was the best of times and the worst of times. It was pretty awful in a lot of ways. But there was real hope and change. Now, it feels much more free. But we’re in a very repressive era where we’re going backwards in a lot of ways. So, you can never take these freedoms for granted. You just have to keep fighting.”
For a full calendar of Santa Cruz Pride-related events, go to santacruzpride.org.
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