The upcoming Pride Parade and Festival will fill four blocks of Santa Ana’s downtown.

It’ll have a dazzlingly diverse lineup of performers, including a Latin-dedicated stage, a family fun zone, a teen space sponsored by a big gaming company, a trans central zone, health offerings, sponsorships from major corporations and a parade with marchers from all corners of the county.

The celebration of Pride in Orange County has grown and evolved along with the movement for the rights and inclusion it champions.

Today, an increasing number of groups in Orange County recognize the breadth of its LGBTQ+ community — that it’s ethnically and economically diverse, old and young and so much more means its organizations face a wide-ranging responsibility in creating safe spaces and networks of support.

ADDRESSING BARRIERS

Born of the desire to ensure the needs of the transgender and gender non-conforming community were not forgotten during the coronavirus pandemic, Alianza Translatinx is “focused on meeting basic needs, advancing equity and promoting inclusivity for our community members,” said Khloe Rios-Wyatt, president and CEO of the Santa Ana-based group.

“There’s limited access to health care services, there’s high rates of homelessness among the trans community in Orange County, there’s income disparities and educational barriers,” said Rios-Wyatt.

“The majority of our clients are identified as Latinx, undocumented individuals who endure racism, xenophobia and transphobia,” she said. “As the sole provider of services in a county with limited resources for trans and gender non-conforming people, we address critical needs which were exacerbated by the pandemic.”

Its drop-in center offers hot meals and groceries, it has specialists who can help with housing and health care, there are weekly support groups and help with overcoming the barriers for a trans person looking to change their names legally.

Orange County is also home to the largest population of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam, and the emergence of the Viet Rainbow of Orange County organization has helped address some of the unique challenges experienced by Vietnamese queer people.

Vietnamese American Uyen Hoang grew up in Garden Grove, closeted and Catholic, hearing comments like “being queer is a Western disease” and “that’s something that happens when you are here in America, but it’s not in our home countries.”

Now, as the executive director of Viet Rainbow, Hoang tackles questions like: “How do you tell your parents that you’re queer when you don’t even know how to say it in their first language?”

Hoang said going to college in Los Angeles helped her discover her multifaceted identity — Vietnamese, Asian American and queer — and become comfortable with it.

And it helped kick-start her activism, bringing that message of accepting multiple identities to others like herself. That’s why LGBTQ+ resources can’t disengage ethnic and cultural needs, she said. “We don’t need to put on different hats and hide certain parts of ourselves in order to navigate things.”

Viet Rainbow hosts several events throughout the year, including parent acceptance workshops, support groups and immigration forums.

“Oftentimes, in a lot of different ways, LGBTQ+ resources are a lot more accessible to folks who are not people of color,” Hoang said.

USING EXPERIENCE

Growing up in the Capistrano Unified School District, Flint felt “completely alone and helpless and isolated.”

“There wasn’t really a Pride movement. I didn’t know any other queer people,” Flint, who uses they/he pronouns, said. “I didn’t understand what I was feeling or what I was experiencing and I couldn’t contextualize it all.”

In a full circle moment, Flint now teaches high school English and film courses in the school district, actively working to break that cycle of students feeling alone. Openly trans and nonbinary, Flint has built a robust online presence of more than 200,000 followers on TikTok speaking out about issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community.

“I love having a platform to talk about the things that I love most, which are my community and supporting teenagers as they grow into themselves,” Flint said.

However, it has come at a price. Flint chooses not to share which school they work at or their last name because of bomb threats against their workplace and their home.

“All of the problems I have had have been from people who don’t know me or my school or my classroom,” they said. “My largest supporters have been my (students’) parents.”

Flint said school administrators have also ensured they feel safe on campus; at the height of the threats, school staff would escort them to their car and had additional check-ins.

Having lived in Orange County their entire life, Flint said it feels like Pride visibility has grown since the early 2010s.

Flint and their wife own a mostly queer roller derby team, High Tide, that will be rolling along with the rest of the parade participants on June 24. The parade steps off at 10:30 a.m. and the festival runs until 10 p.m.

They practice mostly in Garden Grove, and Flint remembers attending local City Council meetings to support flying the rainbow Pride flag.

“They settled on lighting up the clock tower rainbow for Pride, which we thought was very nice,” Flint said. “No one really had a lot of eyes on it because it didn’t seem like a big deal.”

But now, these small gestures mean a lot as the community feels under attack, Flint said. The OC Human Relations Commission report for 2021 said there had been an 83% increase from 2020 in hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people.

And while more Orange County cities are flying Pride flags this month in support of the LGBTQ+ communities, the majorities on the Huntington Beach council and the Orange County Board of Supervisors set policies this year that only government flags will fly on their government properties. That reversed two years of the rainbow flag flying at Surf City’s City Hall.

And though the leaders say their decision was neutral, it doesn’t make Flint feel welcome.

“Going into a city and seeing a Pride flag means that I feel comfortable holding my wife’s hand,” they said. “I’m probably going to be able to use the bathroom without getting harassed; my chances go up of feeling safer in a community.”

For Joseph Hecht, a Santa Ana resident, it’s been “really a big slap in the face.” The community’s response, he’s seeing, is to become more politically active.

“At the local level, it is just to get the acknowledgment that we exist, and we deserve the same rights as everyone else,” he said.

Come election season, Hecht said he will be working to make sure those elected “fully support” the community.

Stephanie Camacho-Van Dyke, director of advocacy and education at the LGBTQ Center OC, called it a  “very scary time.”

“It’s really important that we come together as a movement,” Camacho-Van Dyke said. “We need to acknowledge the importance of having a comprehensive, inclusive movement that addresses everyone’s needs and centers our most vulnerable populations.”

Craig Cooley, who started the nonprofit Laguna Pride, has been working to get a larger gay community back to Laguna Beach. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)

REFLECTIVE SPACES

Decades ago, when Chris Tebbutt was a teen living in Mission Viejo, he sought out Laguna Beach as a community where he could feel a bit more comfortable about being gay.

The raucous Boom Boom Room on South Coast Highway was the anchor of a one-block district of gay bars, and Laguna Beach was a place where Tebbutt said he met like-minded people and felt he could express himself.

At 46, Tebbutt moved back from New York City’s Upper Westside with his husband and twin boys with the thought that the beach town would be the perfect place to live freely as a same-sex family. But he didn’t find the gay vibe he remembered.

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Little Shrimp — a piano bar that later became Woody’s — the Boom Boom Roam and Main Street Bar & Cabaret formed a sort of protective cocoon for the gay community. The nation’s first openly gay mayor served on the City Council.

But just eight years ago, Main Street was the only bar left standing. And in 2022, it shut down for good.

Tebbutt, now 52, wants more for his community than just a place to dance and have fun. He wants to have his values and that of other LGBTQ+ folks integrated into the fabric of the community.

“I wanted there to be places where they could see themselves reflected in the everyday life such that we feel a sense of belonging and validation,” he said. “What comes with that is a feeling of safety about who we are and not having to hide.”

Tebbutt, with Craig Cooley, the former manager of Main Street who also founded Laguna Beach Pride 365, and Larry Ricci, who 10 years ago started Club Q Laguna as a place for gay seniors to meet, created the Laguna Beach LGBTQ Heritage and Culture Alliance. Its mission is the full integration into all things in the community, including policies, art, culture and celebrations.

“It’s changed since the days of The Boom, ” Tebbutt said. “We’re gay dads in the school district. We want to feel our kids belong there and that more families like ours can feel that their kids are included and seen.”

Like when he first returned with his family eight years ago, school forms had only “mother” and “father” spaces for contacts. Now, they ask for “parent or guardian 1” and “parent or guardian 2.”

Two years ago, the school district added a committee dedicated to diversity, equality and inclusion, which is focused on making sure all “marginalized” people are seen and represented.

Police Chief Jeff Calvert visited the alliance when he took his job and showed support in a “significant way,” said Tebbutt. “We really felt like he had our back and honored our community. Now, I see him and he gives me a hug. That’s what I want — is to be seen.”

Cooley, 71, is also focused on “bringing the gay back to Laguna” and does that with Laguna Beach Pride 365, he said. The nonprofit, which organizes yearly events, is working to make the city a choice destination again for LGBTQ+ visitors and works closely with Visit Laguna and the Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce.

He’s got a spot picked out on Ocean Avenue to bring an upscale gay bar back to town.

“The demand is there,” he said, adding that in 2017 when The Boom was opened for a revival night, the line to get in had a five-hour wait. “The gay community used to be willing to go into a backdoor into a seedy little space; now they want a nice place, and it needs to be gay. We need a safe haven and a home.”

A few months ago, the Laguna Beach City Council approved Cooley’s idea for the first rainbow-painted Pride lifeguard tower in Orange County.

“It will bring visibility back to the beach, with a message that everyone is welcome there,” he said. “The intent was to show that this is about diversity, and Laguna Beach accepts diversity. It will be a rainbow lifeguard tower of diversity.”

The Pride tower and the changes the alliance has been able to prompt, they encourage Tebbutt and help make him feel seen and honor the past, but it is important to “recognize the evolution of the LGBTQ in the county,” he stressed.

“We look different than we used to. It’s not just gay men trying to find a safe space,” he said. “Kids are coming out much younger. Gender identity sometimes comes out in grade school. Families look different with gay marriage and adoptions are becoming much more commonplace.”

Orange County cities and organizations, he said, need to make sure their modern-day LGBTQ+ people are reflected and seen.

“I want cities, schools and services to meet us where we are and not where we were,” Tebbutt said. “There is always more to do.”

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