InterPride, an organization made up of Pride coordinators from around the world, held its 41st annual conference in San Diego over Halloween weekend with hundreds of delegates from 32 countries representing over 150 Pride organizations. While San Diego hosts hundreds if not thousands of conferences each year, this particular gathering was an important reminder of San Diego’s significance to the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the past through today.

San Diego Pride has a unique structure with year-round programming and volunteer leadership compared to other Pride organizations. While Pride staff members, who support and coordinate those volunteers, have spoken about this model at InterPride conferences in the past, this was a chance to give a first-hand look at that model in action.

“We share that model with other Prides, but when they’re here, they get to see it in person. They get to meet our volunteer leaders,” said Jen LaBarbera, director of education and outreach at SD Pride. “We can’t afford to send all 100 of our volunteer leaders to a conference in Athens. So bringing everybody here, they get to meet and see and learn from all of those people.”

At the close of the conference, they hope volunteers made connections with people from small towns in Uganda, Thailand’s capitol and Mexican Pride organizations they might otherwise never know.

The conference, held from Oct. 25-29 at the Westin Gaslamp Hotel, was filled with voting sessions, workshops, mixers and opportunities to socialize. Mayor Todd Gloria welcomed the delegates at a reception at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Other events were held at Rich’s, Diversionary Theatre, the Westgate Hotel, The San Diego LGBTQ+ Center and Hillcrest. While many attendees came from similarly LGBTQ+-friendly areas,

some came from places where LGBTQ+ identities are criminalized, making these adventures in the city while meeting government, religious and business leaders especially meaningful.

“I think that’s been really empowering and really impactful for people,” LaBarbera, who is also the InterPride board’s vice president of global outreach, said.

HISTORY

In addition to showing off what San Diego has to offer, SD Pride wanted to host this year’s conference because it is the 40-year anniversary of InterPride, then only a national coalition of Pride orgs, holding its meeting in San Diego.

The first National Association of Lesbian and Gay Prides conference was held in Boston in 1982. Marsha Levine organized the weekend after a conversation with Rick Turner at a conference about the LGBTQ+ movement at UCLA. The pair were frustrated that not much information

was being shared about the Pride movement both were involved in on opposite sides of the continental US.

Levine asked Turner, “Wouldn’t be nice if we had a conference where it was just Pride coordinators and we all got together? We all talk about what we have in common and we all learn from each other? Because everybody’s at different stages and does things differently and maybe together we can build an effort.”

A year later she called him wanting to move forward but he was too sick to help her organize it. Turner provided funding though. Levine eventually got in contact with San Diegan Doug Moore, who had put together a mailing list of all Pride coordinators. She used the list to invite people to Boston for the first conference in October, 1982. The 16 attendees, representing Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, NYC, San Diego and San Francisco, pushed together three tables to form a triangle, then a symbol of the LGBTQ+ movement, and spent two days discussing multiple Pride-related topics. At the end, they suggested meeting again the following year. Moore offered to host it in San Diego.

Moore was also one of the 10 attendees that slept in sleeping bags on the floor of Levine’s studio apartment at the south end of Boston during the event.

When the conference came to San Diego the following year, it quadrupled in size.

“Our attendance increased from about 15 delegates up to 60 delegates and we were joined by a bunch of other cities. And that’s where we started some of our traditions,” Levine said.

Some of those traditions founded in San Diego still exist today, including holding a gala Saturday night. This year the gala was followed by the Halloween block party “Nightmare on Normal.” Plus, delegates began selecting a theme each year so all Pride organizations worked together on a united campaign, starting with “Unity and More in ‘84” and the latest theme “Thrive” in 2023.

“The reason InterPride was started in the first place is because if we’re all just trying to do the same thing, but we’re not talking to each other, then we’re not building a movement. We’re just all in silos trying to all do the same thing,” LaBarbera said.

InterPride had other milestones over the last 41 years, which included creating a mini-Pride march in Wichita, Kansas because Pride was outlawed there, taking part in a LGBT March on Washington, having Canadian Pride organizations join in 1984 then European organizations join in 1992 to make it an international group, and Long Beach and Los Angeles demonstrating Pride organizations collaborating by co-hosting a conference. More recent milestones include the first conference held in Latin America in 2022 with Guadelajara, Mexico hosting and the United Nations giving InterPride special consultive status this year.

Moore continued to attend the conference until it started to travel overseas, starting in Glasgow, Scotland in 1999, when it became too expensive then his health declined. After 20 years of missing the conference, he attended many of the sessions in San Diego and was excited to be back. It was bigger than he could have imagined.

“What we started for 50 states ended up affecting everything and everyone. We did something good,” he said. “I’m proud of San Diego’s history.”