About 250 people from nearly 20 organizations are expected to stride, float, sing and dance through downtown Los Altos on June 4 in the city’s first-ever Gay Pride Parade.
“I think it is going to be a relatively simple, homecoming-like parade with groups of people marching and bands playing,” Henry Roux said last week. Roux is co-chair of the Los Altos Alliance for Youth, which is sponsoring the parade put together by the Los Altos High School Gay Straight Alliance (GSA).
Roux said members from the Foothills Congregational Church in Los Altos, the Billy DeFrank Lesbian and Gay Community Center in Santa Clara, the local Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and Gay Straight Alliances from local high schools, including Gunn, Palo Alto and Mountain View, have all signed up to walk in the parade, which kicks off on Third Street at noon June 4.
A few local bands will play songs from the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band while walking alongside students and local politicians, including Los Altos City Councilman Curtis Cole and Assemblyman Ira Ruskin, D-Los Altos.
Roux said a number of individuals within the Los Altos community have supported the parade financially, and the local GSA has raised $1,000 for the parade.
“These kids have been absolutely wonderful in terms of trying to bring to the community some awareness of what their life is like,” Roux said. “I think this is something that is important to our community, that we understand the challenges that are faced by GSA students and to make sure they understand they are accepted and respected by the community.”
The Los Altos High School GSA had battled the council to proclaim June 7 Gay Pride Day, and in February the council sidestepped the issue by banning any resolution addressing sexual orientation. Los Altos Mayor Ron Packard ironically paved the way for the parade when he suggested the GSA could hold a parade instead, which he said was their constitutional right under the First Amendment.
Shortly afterward, equal rights groups and neighboring city and county officials came out in support of the group, offering to help them join, among others, the San Francisco and San Jose Gay Pride parades. Santa Clara County Supervisor Jim Beall also pushed to declare June 7 the county’s Gay Pride Day this year.
Three-year fight
The local GSA has lobbied the Los Altos City Council to declare a Gay Pride Day since 2003, when council members approved their request two weeks after striking it down. Since then, the council has consistently refused to proclaim June 7 Gay Pride Day in Los Altos, a decision that strikes GSA adviser Ruth Gibbs as particularly peculiar since the council often designates other days and months to various themes, including Tennis Month, Al’s Barbershop Day and Eagle Scout Day.Instead, Packard offered to proclaim June 7 a Day of Tolerance and Respect, which Gibbs said the students rejected because “they don’t want to be tolerated. They want to be accepted.”
Gibbs said that although the students, who met last week to prepare floats, banners and signs for the march, are excited to host the parade, it would have been less expensive for the city to simply declare a Gay Pride Day. She said some community members disapprove of the parade because of the roughly $8,000 the city has to shell out to cover its half of the $16,000 cost of organizing the parade.
“If the mayor had given the kids the proclamation, it wouldn’t have cost anything,” Gibbs said.
Councilman Kurt Colehower has suggested that the GSA members should focus their volunteering efforts on issues that allow “opportunities to be recognized for what you do, not what you are.”
Yet, despite the city council’s decision to prohibit resolutions involving sexual orientations, the GSA members have pledged to continue their disputed fight for a Gay Pride Day proclamation next year.
“It really is discrimination, and these kids, they are not doing anything wrong,” Gibbs said.
