This Saturday, Oct. 18, The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center (The Center) will celebrate 30 years of community service with a gala at the San Diego Convention Center. Organizers promise a gala like none other, with distinct “decade lounges,” each paying homage to the “history, strength and vitality of San Diego’s LGBT community.” To add authenticity and flair to the historic event, guests are asked to don something depicting a year between 1973 and 2003 (of course, retaining some semblance of formal attire beneath the retro façade).

San Diego is home to the second oldest and third largest GLBT community center in the country, serving approximately 12,000 people each year. At the 30-year mark, The Center is on solid fiscal footing and stronger than ever — with exciting new building renovations unveiled this year and one of the most committed, diverse and capable boards and staff in its history (not to mention some 400 dedicated volunteers).

However, like any community hub, The Center has had its ups and downs, surviving the ebb and flow of funding, public interest, site relocations and diverging community opinion. That The Center has survived three decades is testimony to its vitality and continued relevance to GLBT San Diegans.

Aptly, the theme of this year’s gala comes from co-founder Robert “Jess” Jessop: “Yours in the Struggle.” It may seem that this struggle has been vastly minimized in recent years — Gov. Gray Davis signed the country’s second most comprehensive legislation for same-sex couples a month before being unceremoniously ousted from office and gay and lesbians have become the toast of national TV. However, history has a way of repeating itself for those who do not take heed. A glimpse at The Center’s past not only serves as a valuable lesson, but as a potential bellwether of things to come as the GLBT community forges ahead in Jessop’s struggle.

The Center got its start in 1971 with two dedicated activists — Jess Jessop and Bernie Michels — and a telephone answering machine. A Vietnam veteran who refused to accept the Silver Star for heroic deeds over personal convictions, Jessop was serving as president of the Gay Liberation Front at San Diego State when he met Michels, a graduate student in social work.

Making his home in Los Angeles and witnessing the birth of that city’s gay center in 1971, Michels thought San Diego should follow suit and ran the idea of opening a gay center in San Diego by Jessop.

When Michels returned to LA that summer, he began volunteering at the gay center to learn all he could about its operation.

Over the summer of 1971, the Gay Liberation Front in San Diego disbanded, leaving Jessop despondent. Nevertheless, Jessop and Michels began meeting at Weichal Hall, a modest structure behind the Methodist Church in Golden Hill that housed the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). With renewed energy, Jessop transferred the hotline in his home to Weichal Hall.

“Jess again was enthusiastic,” said Michels, who now lives in Massachusetts. “He said, ‘Let me draw up a list of people who might be willing to work with us and we’ll have our first meeting.’”

Of six men who showed up at that first meeting, Michels said only Jessop, himself and a man named Jerry Peterson returned. Eventually, Peterson brought the first woman on board, Peggy Heathers, who later brought her partner, Cynthia Lawrence (then Cynthia Lawrence-Wallace), and two other key women, Pat Clutchy and Pat Byers. Michels then brought in his own partner, Thom Carey, whom he had been dating for about six months. The group, known as the Planning Committee (and later the Planning Committee of the Gay Center for Social Services) began meeting weekly at the home of John Senter in Point Loma.

A majority of the early planning committee and those involved with the formation of The Center were filled with the anti-war activism of the Vietnam War era, and admittedly tended towards the leftist, counterculture ideology of the period.

“The men had beards and ponytails — at least some of us,” recalled Michels. “We wore jeans and T-shirts…. Our ideals tended towards community, cooperation and equality. We wanted nothing to do with hierarchy, especially some of the younger women.”

As such, The Center deferred the appointment of official officers until bar owners donating money for a building insisted upon a more formal structure for the committee. Michels took over as the first acting director of the planning committee, while Carey became its first treasurer, and a man named Lloyd Dirk the organization’s first secretary.

Cynthia Lawrence, now a retired college professor, and her partner Peggy Heathers, a retired social worker, have been together for 31 years. The couple recalls those early meetings in Point Loma, where, absent of any formal structure, the underlying principal was that everything be agreed upon by consensus.

“Jess and Bernie insisted on consensus,” recalled Heathers. “We were there ’til midnight sometimes.”

“It was kind of nice, because it was following a feminist principle … that the majority can’t vote the minority into agreeing,” said Lawrence. “But it made the meetings very long.”

Issues that kept the planning committee burning the midnight oil included the budget, women’s issues, fundraising, sexism and racism.

“There were a lot of separatist women at the time,” recalled Lawrence. “Women who had been damaged in very serious ways by men in their life, so they didn’t want any men around when they were meeting.”

Michels said that as African-Americans, Lawrence and Carey also brought up issues of racism within the broader gay community. “This was right after the civil rights movement,” he noted. “African-Americans would often get carded at the dance bars.”

According to Lawrence and Heathers, fundraising was an oft-debated topic. “They might want to do a fundraiser with male strippers,” said Heathers. “Some people would say, ‘Well, our fundraisers have to appeal to everybody.’ Then some would say, “Well, the men have more money.’”

With a complete absence of corporate or government funding available to GLBT causes and organizations at that time, the planning committee relied heavily upon bar and bathhouse owners for its seed money, as well as any individual contributions they could drum up.

One organization that helped raise money for The Center’s opening was the Imperial Court de San Diego, which recently celebrated its 32nd anniversary.

Other early supporters included Frank Stiriti of Vulcan Steam & Sauna, Lou and Carol Arco (who owned the Brass Rail and Number One Fifth Ave.) and F-Street Corporation.

“There were no galas, there were no founder’s circles, none of that,” said Nicole Murray-Ramirez, president of the Imperial Court de San Diego’s board of directors and a former Center board member. “Most of the directors didn’t even know how to raise money. They were too busy trying to keep the services going.”

The organization’s official business title at that time was The Center for Social Services, because it was thought that a name with “gay” or “homosexual” in the title could have hurt the organization’s ability to receive nonprofit status (as happened a few years earlier with Lambda Legal in New York). Donors were also leery of writing checks to an organization with the work “gay” in the title.

Forging ahead, the planning committee began holding events at places such as the now defunct Unicorn Theatre in La Jolla. Lawrence, only moderately comfortable with her involvement in the committee, was tapped by Jessop to narrate a slide presentation giving donors a glimpse at The Center’s vision for its first drop-in center.

“At that time I was teaching … in the public schools,” Lawrence recalled. “I just wasn’t sure that I could be that out…. I got to work the next morning and someone said, ‘Oh, I heard you at that fundraiser, wasn’t that your voice?’ So I was out whether or not I wanted to be.”

In February of 1973, the committee held its first official fundraiser at the Unicorn, where they screened John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday. Another fundraiser, devised by Clint Johnson, co-owner of the long-gone drag club, Show Biz, had a “Carnival” theme. This event alone provided the committee with the funds it needed to open The Center, plus a few months rent. “With this success, many more people were attracted to our planning committee,” said Michels. “Having many new volunteers was both good and bad. We needed their energy and ideas, but we were structurally unprepared for their participation. Some meetings became large and unwieldy.”

Around that time, Michels and several others on the planning committee began losing steam. “I needed a break and made a decision to resign as executive director,” said Michels.

In mid-June, Jessop took over as the second acting director of the planning committee, and a search for a building that would serve as The Center began. “We looked at many, many buildings,” Michels recalled.

Finally, Jessop and his committee found an old and somewhat decaying house in Golden Hill in need of a little TLC and a makeover of “Fab Five” proportions.

In October of 1973, the same year the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental illness and Pride held its first parade, The Center opened its doors at 2250 B Street, a two-story, 10-room house in Golden Hill, with Jessop as its first executive director. Naturally, the answering machine was among the first items to be installed. Along with the phone came perhaps the most popular tale from The Center’s early history — that of the phone installer who curiously kept returning to assure the phone’s proper upkeep, eventually coming out as a gay man and joining The Center as a volunteer.

Lawrence recalled one early call in particular, from a woman who identified herself as a local newscaster. “She couldn’t tell me her name, but she said her whole family was happy and she was miserable, because she was in a marriage that she didn’t feel like she could get out of. She didn’t want to destroy her whole family, but she was attracted to women and just needed to talk to someone who would understand.”

Another call Lawrence received was of a more urgent nature. “This woman had put her wrists through every piece of glass [in the house], the bedroom mirrors, the bathroom medicine chest … to cut her wrists…. She’s bleeding, she sprained her ankle, she’s on the hotline hysterical, and I couldn’t get anything out of her, like her address. Peggy, having majored in psychology, … got on the phone and calmed her down and got her address…. She was in the Navy and couldn’t be out. She was in a lot of pain because somebody had just left her.”

The couple, assisted by another Center volunteer, finally located the woman’s home and got her to the hospital. “She did recover,” said Lawrence. “About two weeks later she called and wanted to give me everything she owned — her stereo and her television…. She was just so appreciative.”

Beyond the hotline, The Center focused heavily on military counseling. Local attorney Bridget Wilson had just moved to San Diego in 1973. Wilson, Jim Woodward and Gary Reese, who would become The Center’s second executive director, offered guidance to enlisted men and women who were gay or lesbian and had nowhere else to turn.

“San Diego really kind of wrote the book in terms of military counseling,” said George Murphy, who joined the planning committee in 1972. “Some of the things that were written here [by] Bridget Wilson and Jim Woodward are being used all over the United States by other gay centers…. How to get out? How to stay in? Do you say you’re crazy?”

Wilson had served in the reserves and was living in Omaha, Nebraska (the home of Offutt Air Force base), prior to arriving in San Diego. “There was this war going on (Vietnam), and a friend of mine was doing what they called draft counseling in those days,” Wilson recalled. “You know, largely … telling people how to avoid the draft…. The Air Police would come into the local [gay] nightclub in Omaha looking for people with military haircuts…. We would try to figure out a way to hustle out anyone who was military when the Air Police came in…. That’s how I got interested in it.”

Wilson recalled the initial group that got 2250 B Street up and running as “a jolly bunch of old hippies … scrubbing, painting, cleaning and hanging out…. I think we were so young and stupid we had no idea how risky what we were doing probably really was. It was a different time and place…. Sodomy was still a crime in California. Great social change was going on; we understood very clearly that we had to make institutions that took us outside of the bar systems….

“We were still fighting over things like whether or not homosexuals gathering at the same place was lawful,” continued Wilson. “Touch dancing in bars could get you arrested…. So, when we opened The Center, we really were all fearful we would be arrested … because we had all of these homosexuals associating with each other in one place…. This is less than five years after Stonewall…. We were all so thrilled to have a place that was not a bar that was gay, and a place in which the word ‘gay’ was on the front door. As Jess used to say, ‘When you look in the phonebook under gay, we are there.’ And that’s still true.”

Murray-Ramirez recalled The Center’s initial directors as being “very courageous. They not only were working in the trenches and trying to build The Center,” he said, “they were also being public spokespersons in that day…. I remember the first time I saw myself on TV addressing something and it said, ‘homosexual activist.’ I got calls — a lot of hateful stuff — and I remember The Center did get bomb threats.”

“You kind of got a mix of threats and obscene phone calls,” said Wilson, “but you also had lots and lots of desperate people looking for someone to talk to…. I think it’s still one of the primary functions of The Center — being a place where people don’t have to be afraid to be themselves.”

Reese, who became The Center’s second executive director in ’74, was at the time an officer in the Navy. “He went on a radio talk show here and mentioned that he had been separated from the Navy,” Wilson recalled. “Technically he was still an inactive reservist and they went after him and gave him an other than honorable discharge…. It was really nasty…. I’m not sure that wouldn’t still happen today.”

The Center also offered the community a plethora of discussion or “rap” groups, as they were called. “The Center really filled a big need,” recalled Murphy of the groups. “Guys got a chance to say we can learn about each other and it doesn’t have to be sexual.”

“I’ve heard more than one story of people saying that they drove by up and down B Street several times looking at the sign before they would have enough nerve to come in and come to a rap group,” recalled Jeri Dilno, who served as executive director from 1975-77. “I think those rap groups really helped a lot of people with the coming out process. There was really no other place at that time to find other gay or lesbian people who were struggling with those coming out issues.”

Of course, discussion groups let to a desire for formally trained counselors. “We had a problem locating therapists,” said Wilson. “Trying to find a therapist who wasn’t going to try to change people was almost impossible…. We were not far past people being put in mental hospitals because they were gay. That kind of thing was still going on.”

Also key in the formation of The Center was an ambitious, young volunteer named Don Johnson, who worked closely with Jessop and Resse on fundraising and planning.

“The history of The Center cannot be written without his inclusion,” said Murray-Ramirez. “He was almost calling the shots….Don Johnson was young, viable and energized. He took more of a professional approach…. In those days there was a lot of self-loathing — ‘We can’t be like the other centers.’ Don knew that we could and should be…. A lot of people didn’t like that approach.”

A native San Diegan discharged from the Air Force during an anti-gay witch-hunt in 1961, Jeri Dilno spent five years in Philadelphia during the early ’70s, helping found Philadelphia’s first Pride event. Upon returning to San Diego, she became The Center’s fourth executive director.

“I think I made $500 a month,” Dilno recalled of her Center salary. “I would not have been able to do it if it hadn’t have been for my partner at the time to help support me. The rent I think was about $500 or $600 on that old house…. [The Center] was almost living a day-to-day existence. Each month, it was [a question] whether we were going to have enough money to pay the rent.”

“My salary was paid — I guess it can be told now — through the United Way, [only] the United Way didn’t know they were paying the salary of the executive director of The [Gay] Center,” Dilno added. “There was a gay man who worked for United Way and hired Gary Reese and then myself as community outreach workers for Golden Hill…. He was our supervisor, so he handled all the reports and the pay. [On paper], we worked out of the Golden Hill Community Center, although I never went there.”

The last year of Dilno’s tenure as ED saw former beauty queen Anita Bryant come to the fore in Dade County, Florida, beginning her crusade to save the nation’s children from the “debauchery of homosexuals.” Bryant’s vocal opposition was among several key catalysts that rallied the gay community to stand together. When a San Diego man was murdered in an anti-gay attack in a San Francisco parking lot, for example, Dilno, Jessop and a handful of activists rallied the community to fill city hall, where they urged then mayor Pete Wilson to take a more proactive stance against antigay violence.

It was also during Dilno’s tenure that the police began to form a working relationship with the gay community, aided by former volunteer Fred Scholl. “There was a police officer on the Golden Hill beat [who] was pretty open to the gay and lesbian community,” said Dilno. “He would sometimes bring his recruits by. We would go downstairs and go over what The Center did and talk a little bit about the gay and lesbian community and get into some police harassment issues.

“It was pretty exciting because everything was always something new. It was all kind of figuring it out as you went along.”

Former Center board member Al Best, the first openly gay candidate in San Diego to run for city council, remembers his first interaction with The Center, in 1975. Best had moved to San Diego after a stint at New Mexico State University as a scientist and administrator.

He recalled entering The Center for the first time. “I walked into this room and suddenly realized I was in a room with people talking in sign language. One of the people spoke to me and welcomed me and said, ‘Please sit in, I’ll kind of translate for you.’ I don’t ever recall being so touched by one single group of people as I was at that moment…. I get choked up talking about it even now, and that was 28 years ago.”

Best began to gradually increase his involvement with The Center, joining the board of directors around 1976.

As for press coverage of The Center’s activities in those days, the prospects were grim. “The Union would not cover us,” Wilson said. “I remember Jess was told that the San Diego Union did not cover the public activities of ‘deviants and perverts.’ It might have been ’77 or ’78 before they would even cover a Pride event.”

Best remembered the first Center press conference at which the local TV stations showed up outside The Center, along with councilmember Maureen O’Connor.

“Somebody said, ‘Well how are we going to get them here?’” recalled Best. “I said, ‘I’ve got the greatest thing in the world — tell them we’re going to give out the names of homosexuals.’ We did. The names we gave out were like, Michelangelo…. It pissed them off and yet they were so goddamn fascinated.”

In early 1978, Richard Burhenne was living in Ohio when saw an ad in a local paper for the executive director position of The Gay Center in San Diego. He applied for the job and soon found himself “driving across the country from Ohio in my rusty, little, red ’76 VW Bug as an idealist.” (Burhenne now works in the field of alcohol and drug prevention for UC Berkeley.)

On Nov. 27, 1978, openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot to death. “For me, the journey from coming out in 1972 to [arriving in San Diego in] ’78 had been one of an increasing sense of freedom and power,” said Burhenne. “That assassination was just a terrible punch to the gut that said, ‘Oh my God, look how much farther we have to go.’”

1978 also saw the community rally to defeat Proposition 6. Authored by former Senator John Briggs, the initiative would have made it legal to fire gay and lesbian schoolteachers based on their sexual orientation. The “Save our Teachers” (“No on 6”) campaign found a regular home to organize at The Center.

Burhenne’s tenure was also marked by a shift in the GLBT community towards embracing a more professional structure in its organizations. The Center’s board of directors had committed to raising the funds to pay an executive director for the first time in 1978.

“I think to me the biggest challenge was … maintaining the interest in a commitment to social change, but moving away from a strictly sort of informal, volunteer, grassroots organization and becoming more professional,” said Bruhenne. “I think, actually, in the year or so that I was there it was probably a challenge that we didn’t meet, because the board and the community could not sustain a commitment to raising the necessary funds.”

The early ’80s were marked by lean times for The Center, including a period of almost two years when The Center was without a building. However, even during this period, the hotline was still active. After The Center lost its lease at B Street, Rob Shepard served a good portion of his time as executive director without a building.

Fortunately, in 1980, at the urging of Dilno (then board president) a man by the name of Mel Merrill and six other community members came along and formed a real estate partnership (the partnership included Jessop, Reese, Howard Marsa, Mary Jones, Lois Lippold and Fred Acheson). Together they purchased a lot in Golden Hill that contained several small commercial properties and an old house where The Center would rent space temporarily. The Center eventually found a home at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Robinson (behind the Brass Rail), where it would remain for the next 12 years.

Most notably, in 1981, a so-called ‘gay cancer’ would forever alter The Center and the GLBT community at large. Around 50 percent of the men involved in the formation of The Center would eventually be lost to AIDS, including Jessop, Resse, Johnson, Albert Bell and John Eberly, who served as treasurer during the mid-’70s (to name only a few).

Despite the Regan administration’s refusal to recognize the disease, numerous AIDS-related services in place today would begin to take shape in the ’80s, as the GLBT community began to galvanize around this enigmatic plague.

“Our ability to get funding is always limited by homophobia,” noted Wilson. “To be really honest, I think The Center would not be in as good a place as it is now were it not for the AIDS crisis. Kind of the bitter fruit of AIDS is that funding to help people who are affected by HIV has probably tremendously benefited The Center…. Even now the ability to get money out of so-called ‘straight’ foundations is not easy…. And in the ’70s and ’80s it was almost impossible.”

State Assemblymember Christine Kehoe, who began her career as a political activist and editor of the now defunct Gayzette newspaper, recalled her earliest memory of The Center as working on the campaign to defeat the LaRouche initiative (Prop. 64). Feeding off the hysteria and misinformation surrounding AIDS at the time, LaRouche’s plan would have required doctors to report the names of any infected persons, or persons believed to be infected, to a central agency. People with AIDS would be immediately fired from any job in which they would come in contact with a large number of people.

“We used The Center a lot for recruiting volunteers and meetings,” Kehoe recalled. “It was just always there. As Brad Truax used to say, ‘It was our gay city hall.’”

While at its home at Fifth Ave. and Robinson, The Center grew from a one-room office to 12 rooms with a staff of nine and 50 volunteers. The Center also officially changed its name to include the word “lesbian.” Largely spearheaded by Dilno — and opposed by Murray-Ramirez — the addition polarized the community, leading Murray-Ramirez and four others to resign from the board.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Murray-Ramirez. “I called for a revote.” Though there were plenty of women who thought the move separatist and preferred to identify as ‘gay,’ the name change was confirmed by one vote — that of Fred Acheson, who owned a lesbian bar called Diablos.

“No gay center that existed in the United States was named gay and lesbian,” recalled Murray-Ramirez. “This was the first one, which makes Jeri a visionary…. I understand it now, but then, none of us understood it.”

Third District City Councilmember Toni Atkins recalled her introduction to The Center in 1991.

“I swear I just can’t get that god-awful brown couch out of my head when The Center was behind David’s Place…. We were trying to get the Lesbian Health Project to be part of Pride and to provide a health fair.”

Atkins and fellow Lesbian Health Project organizers Renee Ricketts and Karen Marshall obtained a permit from Pride and ended up wheeling their examination tables in past religious right picketers outside the Pride gates that year. “They were just horrified,” recalled Atkins. “They could not imagine what we were doing with those exam tables.”

What they were doing was setting up a mini clinic, where women could get breast exams and pap smears. “I worked with The Center to pull that off,” recalled Atkins. “More than two-thirds of the women that came to us for services at the first lesbian health fair at Pride … had abnormal pap smears — and that was something that we tried to get out into the media.”

As the end of the ’80s approached, The Center had outgrown its building at Fifth and Robinson and was in need of repair and a new vision.

In 1988, Scott Fulkerson took over as executive director and began to formulate a plan for obtaining a new building for The Center.

During his tenure, Fulkerson worked on establishing the Holistic AIDS Response Program (HARP) and increased The Center’s yearly budget tenfold.

“The whole time was exciting for me,” recalled Fulkerson, who currently serves as executive director of the citizen’s review board on police practices. “I’d never worked so hard in my life, because it was an agency that was on its last legs…. When I took over The Center we had two rooms in that awful, tumbledown building behind the Brass Rail…. Some of the founders had gotten together shortly before I became executive director to talk about trying to take it back from the board and closing it down because it had become such an embarrassment…. There were broken windows, cracked plaster and torn, filthy carpets.

“The first thing I did was start networking, meeting with everyone I possibly could in the community…. When I finally was able to sit down and talk with Jess Jessop he got really excited and kind of tearful, because where I wanted to take The Center was exactly where he’d always wanted it to be.

“I was invited to a meeting at the mayor’s office,” Fulkerson continued. “There were several other people there — Jeri Dilno, Terry Cunningham, Jess Jessop…. One of the things that I told everybody about the vision was that The Center needed to own its own property, where when people walk in they could feel proud of themselves…. So I just kept pushing that issue.”

A good majority of the GLBT community had backed the city council candidacy of John Hartley at that time, Fulkerson recalled. “The morning after the elections when John had won, … he walked into my office at about 8:30 in the morning as a newly elected city councilmember to say thank you and to ask me what … specifically The Center needed. I told them two things — more help with the AIDS crisis and its own building…. John promised me that morning that he’d do something about that.”

“Hartley earmarked all the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) that was allocated to his district and, together with small amounts from other districts, put together a total of $600,000 for the down payment on the site,” wrote Dilno in the Gay and Lesbian Times in 1993. “The proposal was initially turned down by the city manager, but the political battle was won at city council when all nine members voted to award the grant.”

“John Hartley had just won with a lot of gay community support,” recalled Kehoe, who was working for him at the time. “He wanted to show his support, so he gave an enormous portion of his CDBG to The Center…. John actually went beyond what I felt was a balanced approach … but it did put The Center in a position where they were able to have the best building they ever had up until that time.”

The building, located at 3916 Normal Street in Hillcrest, had most recently served as the old Farmer Brothers Coffee warehouse.

The Center forged ahead with help from Mayor O’Connor and the Old Mission Beach Athletic Club (OMBAC). After locating another $100,000 in CDBG money, O’Connor helped secure a donation of time and materials for the remodeling of the building from OMBAC.

Center supporter and community activist Ben Dillingham (who began volunteering at The Center in 1979 on cleaning detail) went to work for O’Connor at city hall in 1986. “There was a marvelous day where Maureen was arguing with OMBAC to get this very straight organization to provide … hundreds of thousands of dollars of labor and materials to renovate this old building for the gay community,” Dillingham recalled.

Though OMBAC and O’Connor had been a big help, The Center was still short funds for the renovation.

In the end, the owner of Aztec Bowl, Edward St. Ville, loaned The Center $250,000 to refinance the building, though he only accepted $200,000 as payment. Others involved in the refinancing effort included Gay and Lesbian Times Publisher Michael Portantino.

The Center opened its doors at its Normal Street location in September of 1992, where it remained for almost seven years.

In 1993, Karen Marshall, who served as associate executive director under Fulkerson, took over as The Center’s executive director. Though things were largely stable in the early years of Marshall’s tenure, the debt on the Normal Street location continued to balloon until her departure in 1999.

“The Center did almost close then and there were some difficult times,” said Murray-Ramirez. “People like Ben Dillingham and [Club San Diego owner] Darl Edwards actually saved The Center.”

Requiring even more room for expansion, The Center moved again in July of ’99, taking over a building just one block away, at 3909 Centre Street (its current location).

In 1999, Art Thompson became interim executive director, and the following year, executive director.

“Coming from the private sector, I had never fully realized the sacrifice and dedication from those actually employed by nonprofit community-based organizations,” recalled Thompson, who now serves as executive director of the Denver-based GLBT Community Center of Colorado. “Certainly, The Center’s staff doesn’t do it for the money, and they consistently perform above and beyond what is written in their job descriptions.”

Thompson’s tenure saw a contentious community debate about whether or not The Center should open its board meetings to the community (The Center eventually decided to open the meetings to the public and still invites interested community members to attend). Several plans and proposals were also brought before the board for the possibility of a new building or renovations to the existing site. After several years of discussion and deliberation, The Center eventually chose to renovate its existing building.

Current Center Executive Director Delores Jacobs has been with the organization for a little over five years, beginning at The Center’s Mental Health Services building. She was serving as the director of Mental Health Services when Thompson stepped down from his position unexpectedly in the spring of 2001.

“I got a kind of a late night phone call from two or three members of the board and they asked, given that Art had resigned and moved on, if I would step up to the executive director’s position in an interim way,” said Jacobs, who rose to the occasion.

A few months later The Center started a national search for a person to fill the position on a permanent basis. Jacobs was ultimately chosen for the position and took the reins in January of 2002, after which things noticeably began to turn around for the organization.

“I think part of what was helpful is that two or three of the senior management team came on when I did,” said Jacobs. “We had spent two years sort of watching a growing budget deficit, growing sorts of community relations problems, real challenges with vision and strategy and implementing a clear plan to move forward. All of that had begun years earlier, but in those two years they had really challenged the organization. Patrick Loose (operations), Patti Plaster (facilities), Shawn Ingram (development) and John Stoner (finance) had all sort of watched that with me for a year, so we had a really good idea of what we were facing. With a quarter million dollar deficit, there was a real question about fiscal viability…. It was frightening that an institution this important after 30 years could really be in that much trouble. So I think the community was receptive to change and making it better, and willing to help.”

Once again, O’Connor came to The Center’s aide, with a matching grant that was announced at the organization’s 2001 gala, which began a vigorous new fundraising drive at the organization.

The Hillcrest Youth Center (Fourth Ave. and Robinson) opened its doors in July of 2000 as a place for youth to express themselves, meet others and gain access to crucial information and resources.

Though Toni Atkins moved to San Diego in 1985, she said she really didn’t consider herself a consumer of The Center until recently, when her 17-year-old nephew, Tommy, moved from Memphis, Tennessee, to live with her. “He goes to the Hillcrest Youth Center three or four times a week,” said Atkins. “He tells me everything, trust me. I learn everything about what they’re doing [and] their programs…. You know, he’s living with me today because he has more support and more structure here as a young gay youth…. He didn’t have a very good support structure in Memphis. We have that here in San Diego for our youth.”

Looking back to 1973, Wilson said a youth center would never have been possible. “In those days we wouldn’t have dreamed of having anything to do with youth, because they would have busted us on the spot. You know, for corrupting minors…. We told them they couldn’t come in. It was really one of the more bitter things I think any of us ever had to deal with.”

With The Center’s prospects for the future looking better than ever in its history, a few community members shared their thoughts on where the organization is at today.

“Thirty years is a real milestone for any organization, especially a social service organization that counts on funding services from the government and donors,” said Atkins. “For them to hit 30 years and be in the position they’re in now in terms of the stability and the programming … I think it’s incredible for our community.”

“I think the great thing about The Center is that it’s always shown the ability in crisis to come to the fore and find the pivotal people in the community that can make it work — and that goes for both the straight and the gay community,” added Dillingham.

“Here’s a kid who has struggled and has now reached 30 years and has just blossomed and matured and is quite respected outside and inside the community,” noted George Murphy. “I’m like a proud parent.”

“I’m just so pleased that it’s progressed like it has,” said Heathers. “It’s just a wonderful legacy. It’s a good legacy for Jess and Bernie, in particular, and then the rest of us.”

“They can have a million dollar building or a $25 answering machine, but they saved and changed lives from the beginning,” said Murray-Ramirez. “To me that is the legacy of The Center and the reason we should support it.”