San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. Pride’s “father of diversity” says past issues are still relevant today.
Diversity pioneer in 20th century says the issues then are still relevant today
Like a blast from the queer past, Ken Jones recently found a copy of the minutes from a San Francisco Pride Parade planning committee meeting he attended in 1978. Even though it was a different era in the fight for LGBTQ equality, Jones notes that many of the issues the community struggled with then are still issues that organizations like S.F. Pride are working to address in the present, including equal representation and police brutality.
In 1978, Jones was a 27year U.S. Navy veteran working as an outreach coordinator for San Francisco Pride, which hosted the then8yearold celebration. Historically, 1978 turned out to be a significant year for what was then called the Gay Freedom Day Parade. That year’s theme, “Come Out With Joy, Speak Out for Justice” attracted more than a quarter million people to the parade on Market Street. At the end of the route at United Nations Plaza, artist Gilbert Baker debuted the rainbow flag that would later become the symbol of the gay pride movement around the world. It was also the only year Harvey Milk would ride in the parade as a San Francisco supervisor before being assassinated with Mayor George Moscone by Dan White that November.
“I looked at the names on that committee list and every single person is dead but me,” says the 69yearold Jones.
Because of the devastation of the AIDS crisis on San Francisco’s LGBTQ community in the 1980s, in addition to the realities of aging, many of the queer activists from that era are gone. As San Francisco Pride celebrates its 50th anniversary this month, Jones is among the few left from those early days of the organization who remembers what it was like trying to create a major event for a marginalized community still fighting for recognition.
The parade committee meetings were major happenings in that era that would gather upward of 200 people, remembers Jones, including those now seen as pioneering figures like Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Cleve Jones, and other community leaders. He says that from the beginning of his time with San Francisco Pride there was a desire to make the event “more about education than just dancing and sniffing poppers.”
Jones was also one of the few people of color in the organization when he started more than four decades ago. As San Francisco Pride continues to look at how it can include more diverse voices and representation in 2020 in light of the nationwide Black Lives Matter movement and protests, Jones points out that the organization has long grappled with these same issues.
“In 1978, I was responsible for bringing traditionally under and
nonrepresented segments together for the organization,” says Jones, who currently works as a marriage officiant and leads an LGBTQ walking tour of the Castro that highlights his history in the neighborhood. “I was kind of the father of diversity. It was important to my committee.”
Parity and equity were already written into S.F. Pride’s bylaws, says Jones, but the group went beyond other organizations’ concerns primarily about gender representation. “We diagrammed what a multicultural program would look like,” Jones says. “We wanted the organization to look like the community.”
In the 1970s and early ’80s, the Castro was known as a gay mecca but also had a reputation for not having many women or people of color in the community. For instance, while Jones recalls feeling comfortable there as a neighborhood regular, many bars at the time were known for restricting entry to these groups. In the mid’80s, Jones was part of a series of demonstrations demanding an end to that discrimination, and eventually bar owners capitulated.
Author and activist Cleve Jones, who included Jones in his 2016 memoir “When We Rise: My Life in the Movement,” concurs with Jones’ sentiments, acknowledging that issues of diversity and racial justice have been a part of Pride “since the very earliest observations of the Stonewall rebellion here.”
“It’s our greatest strength and our greatest challenge — we’re (LGBTQ people) born into skins of all colors, faiths, all ethnicities, economic classes,” says Cleve Jones.
After his time as S.F. Pride’s outreach coordinator, Jones served as a unit cochair for the organization, then as board president from 1985 to 1990 — making him one of the few black leaders at any Pride organization of that era. During his board presidency, the LGBTQ community faced some of the darkest days of the AIDS crisis and moved quickly to evolve how S.F. Pride approached both politics and celebrations, like its parade, in light of the pandemic.
Last month, current San Francisco Pride Board President Carolyn Wysinger interviewed Jones, along with former S.F. Pride board presidents Jacquelene Bishop, Michelle Meow and former executive director Teddy Witherington, for one of the Pridethemed “Lavender Talks” copresented by the Commonwealth Club to share experiences from their their tenures. Wysinger, who is also black, said she talks to Jones often in the hopes that the organization can learn from its history.
“I speak all the time about the difference between being an elder and being an older person. An elder gives you wisdom and knowledge. An elder gives you encouragement when you need it, even if you didn’t know you needed it. An elder knows how to correct you and hold you up at the same time, because in the end they want to see you win,” Wysinger says. “Ken Jones has been all those things to me.”
During Jones’ S.F. Pride presidency, one of the biggest changes to the organization that he oversaw was getting it recognized as a taxexempt 501(c)(3) organization by the state of California.
“It was a horrible process, the state returned every document we sent,” Jones recalls. “It took years.”
While the organization waited for approval of its status, which would allow S.F. Pride different forms of fundraising and recognition from the city, Jones and others continued to figure out what the makeup of the equal leadership and representation should look like.
“We had difficult conversations,” Jones says. “One of the big things was allowing women to be visible and have more of a voice in leadership.”
Jones also remembers it took months to decide on what order the words “gay” and “lesbian” should be in the name of the parade and remembers the fight over the inclusion over the term “bisexual” later in the decade.
Then there was the police to deal with. San Francisco Pride was among the first to address the issue of community policing at the event given the LGBTQ community’s historically strained relationship with law enforcement.
“In those days, the police hated us and threw in interference wherever they could,” Jones recalls. “We didn’t want them present at the parade. Part of getting that 501(c)(3) status was about being able to take care of safety ourselves and being able to be responsible for training safety monitors and health monitors. The police put us through all these hoops for the parade. We had to be selfsufficient.”
Jones eventually left the organization to focus on working on police reform issues in response to the 1991 Rodney King beating, and served on the Citizen Review Board of the BART Police Department for a decade.
Looking back at his time with San Francisco Pride, Jones says he isn’t surprised by the parallels of Prides past and the challenges it faces now in its 50th year. But he sees progress.
“It’s like a garden. The work is never done,” he says. “I believe we’re moving forward even as we’re rehashing many of these same things. It’s an uncomfortable conversation, but one we have to have.”