Every community needs a gadfly, a critic to bite people on the ass and make sure they’re paying attention to important issues — especially the ones most people would rather ignore. At the same time, every community needs to be reminded of the good it does and to celebrate its successes.

Besides, it’s the holiday season. It’s traditional to spread a little cheer in between power shopping, gorging on holiday feasts and unwrapping presents. Even the Grinch is nice to all the Whos in Whoville this time of year.

Our community has a lot to be proud of. We just celebrated the 30th anniversary of The Center, and we’ll soon be celebrating the 30th anniversary of San Diego LGBT Pride. That means that for at least 30 years, not only has this community actively worked to ensure a central meeting place and clearinghouse for anyone seeking GLBT-related information and services, we have taken pride in our community and celebrated ourselves.

This year we saw…

This is where the list of our proud accomplishments was going to begin. But you’ll be hearing much the same thing from just about everyone else, so why should we follow the pack? And it was boring. And if we’re going to send a love letter to the GLBT community, there’s no sense being dull about it. So let’s examine some of our more esoteric accomplishments.

We throw damn good parties. We proved it with fundraisers and toy drives. We gathered and distributed nearly 1,000 toys through the Imperial Court’s annual toy drive. We raised several thousand dollars in just a few hours for victims of the October fires. San Diego Pride raised enough money to donate over $100,000 back to the GLBT community. And this year the women’s community got in on the fun with the first annual Women’s Night — promise San Diego’s lesbian community good food, good music and good burlesque, and they will come.

People like us; they really, really like us. Excepting those right wing lunatics, of course. From the GSDBA’s first Gay Business Expo, which quickly sold out all available spaces and attracted what seemed like every other non-GLBT business in the city, to “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” the broader community sees us, markets to us, and apparently wants to be us — or at least look like us.

We’ve learned to play nicely together and to share. When the misguided, and misleading, Prop. 54 — which falsely claimed to promote a “colorblind” society — was headed for the ballot, the GLBT community put a lot of time and effort into educating the broader community about what passing it would really mean. We also showed up at the polls in large numbers, helping to vote it down.

We work well under pressure. When Senator Pete McKnight attempted to reverse the domestic partnership rights we recently won with the passage of AB 205 by gathering enough signatures to put the issue to a vote, we rallied the troops and made it perfectly clear that he would have a fight on his hands. McKnight backed off and is now attempting to go through the court system instead.

We’re very family-oriented. More and more of us are having children, and Family Matters, San Diego’s educational and social group for GLBT parents and parents-to-be, is growing larger every year — offering popular parenting forums and resources on legal and medical issues. We’ve also been paying more (and well-deserved) attention to our seniors and youth, with a recently completed Senior Needs Assessment and plans to build a GLBT youth shelter.

No one can remodel like we can. The Center has been revamped, remodeled and reborn, thanks to the dedication and generosity of our community — as well as a great deal of hard work by The Center staff and volunteers.

And to top it all off, since the Supreme Court overturned sodomy laws, simply having sex no longer makes us criminals!

So whether you celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, something else or nothing at all, happy holidays.