More so than during any election year in history, gay and lesbian relationships have taken center stage. Major legislative battles and high-profile acts of civil disobedience have moved same-sex relationships beyond our ancestors’ ineffable murmurings and yesterday’s status as the hot button du jour to a level of earnest and omnipresent discussion.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, activism is described as “the use of direct, often confrontational action, such as a demonstration or strike, in opposition to or support of a cause.”

This past weekend, about 120 people hit the streets of Boston and its adjacent suburbs to educate voters on the Bush Administration’s proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The same day, the public policy department of The Center in Hillcrest sent a modest 12 people out to ring doorbells, register voters and discuss marriage equality in the gay-friendly community of University Heights.

The Center, in coordination with Equality California, a statewide gay rights lobbing group that opened shop in San Diego this year, plans to send volunteers out twice a month, ramping up efforts as the election draws near.

“We’ll see how it goes and how we need to tweak it for next time,” says AJ Davis, The Center’s director of public policy. “We’re hoping to reach the majority of San Diego County…. As we begin to get more volunteers and refine our message, we’ll be expanding outwards from here, going into neighborhoods that are not necessarily LGBT-identified.”

A same-sex marriage forum took place at the Malcolm X Library on March 29, sponsored in part by The Center and the San Diego chapter of the NAACP. Davis says similar forums in other parts of town will follow in the coming months.

Despite such plans, Michele Madrigal, a member of the progressive activist group Activist San Diego and president of the GLBT student union at City College, says she feels the community’s efforts to educate the region’s broader populace on its issues is woefully inadequate.

“San Francisco really has their act together; San Diego doesn’t,” Madrigal says. “What is very upsetting and disappointing and embarrassing for me is that the LGBT community in San Diego – which is Hillcrest – does not think outside of the box. All they do is preach to the choir and they don’t do any outreach. You know where the real homophobia is? Right next door, a mile away – South Park, North Park, East San Diego, Skyline.”

A resident of Mid-City, Madrigal has worked voter registration drives in Southeast San Diego. “I’ve been outside my community and I’ve educated and mobilized people,” she says. “If anything I learned more than they learned from me – and that’s what organizing and being an activist is about. … Don’t fear your neighbor; do some outreach.”

Danielle Siembieda, also a member of Activist San Diego, agrees with Madrigal’s assessment. She says the activist climate in San Diego is mild overall compared to other cities. “Since this whole issue of gay marriage has come into California, San Diego’s done nothing … to promote it, to talk about it, to bring it to the general population,” she says. “The LGBT activism doesn’t leave Hillcrest. … I can guarantee you that there’s no activism going on regarding LGBT issues at all [in areas like City Heights]. That’s the most diverse population in the entire nation and they’re not even touching it. … I’m a community organizer and I’m out in the community every day. … The population I see every day is immigrant, low-income, African-American, Latino, and I can guarantee you that there is incredible amounts of homophobia and ignorance. I have all these youth that I work with come to me and say, ‘What’s up with gay people marrying?’ They don’t understand it because there’s definitely no outreach into those communities at all. … This goes for all activism – if you want to change social opinion, then you need to go beyond your comfort zone.”

“It’s the big ‘C’,” Murray-Ramirez agrees. “Gays and lesbians are very comfortable.”

Despite any perceived complacency since the time San Diegans banded together en mass to try and defeat, unsuccessfully, a ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in the state four years ago, Davis and others say San Diego’s capacity for activism is steadily increasing.

“I think as more San Diegans, both LGBT and non-LGBT, get educated on some of the important issues, we’re going to see even more involvement,” Davis says.

“San Diego has a reputation of being a conservative military town, but we really do have an active group of people that … may not call themselves activists, but live it every day,” says Jeffrey Mittman, special projects coordinator for Equality California and head of its San Diego office. He cautions against buying into San Diego’s reputation as a conservative town. “I think there’s sort of a reputation that certain parts of the country are more activist than others and a lot of it is more perceptual,” he says. “Several people asked me, ‘What do you think about coming to San Diego, it’s so conservative?’ In fact, the reality is very different. When you look at San Diego and the political makeup … the conservative [sentiment] is not as overwhelming as people would have you believe or people can sometimes fool themselves into believing. … I’ve found a highly politically active group here in San Diego and they don’t strike me as that much different from any of the politically active folks I’ve known in San Francisco, New York or Georgia.”

In terms of political activism, Craig Roberts, a National Stonewall Democrats board member, puts San Diego in the “upper echelon” of the country, with only Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia surpassing it.

“When I think of other large cities where you’d think there’d be some pretty good political organizations — Chicago, Phoenix, Atlanta and Miami — for whatever reason there isn’t. It’s not like they haven’t had some successes there, but they’re just not as far along in the evolutionary process as you would think they would be for a metropolitan area of their size and an LGBT community of their size.”

Roberts says that while San Francisco, West Hollywood and New York may have “a more vocal and broader base of activism,” it boils down to economies of scale. “There’s so many LGBT people in those metropolitan areas that naturally you’re going to have more activists and more people donating money to political causes.”

“Our issues are so front and center right now that it’s hard to say that we’re not being vocal enough,” says Todd Gloria, who serves on The Center’s board of directors and as district director for Congressmember Susan Davis. “Probably on a more individual level we could do more. … I think a lot of us look to The Center, to the San Diego Democratic Club, to do the work for us. … If all of us could do something individually — not every day, but every so often — things would change probably even quicker than they already are.”

Jess Durfee, who worked as an activist in Portland and Washington state before moving to San Diego, equates the placid activist waters of San Diego with the basic law of physics. “San Diego is just not a hotbed of activism from either direction,” he said. “While our community and other progressive communities aren’t that aggressive about our activism, neither are the extremists who are opposed to us. … The gay community sort of lets San Francisco and L.A. take the lead for activism; the far right community tends to let the folks from Orange County or the Pete Knights or folks from other parts of the state take the lead. … The far right puts the challenge forward and then we meet the challenge by organizing against it.”

Longtime activist Gloria Johnson, a two-term past president of the San Diego chapter of the National Organization for Women, agreed that San Diego is doing well politically, having three open lesbian representatives and one openly gay male judge. However, she said she wishes grassroots activism were stronger.

“I wish more people would be involved,” Johnson says. “I think we have 375 members of the San Diego Democratic Club right now — I think we should have 500 members at least. That is the group that’s really out there in the political arena working to get lesbian and gay people elected.

“Very frankly,” she adds, “I’m very disappointed about the lack of involvement of lesbians … as political activists. When we have a fundraising event, it’s wonderful that the gay men are there, but sometimes it’s like 85 percent gay men and a handful of us lesbians that go to everything. … I don’t know if lesbians have other interests other than political, that they’re more home nesting, I just don’t know what it is. … It’s somewhat of a mystery to me.”

Davis said younger lesbian and bisexual women tend to make their voices heard in different ways. “They do Dyke March, they do VAGINA Fest,” Davis said. “They go out in communities and flyer, they vote and they … write and they do spoken word. It seems like their activism manifests itself in a different way.”

“I know there’s a lot of people that come to the Dyke March,” Johnson said, “but I mean … actually spending more than a couple of hours out of the year attending an event. I mean actually getting involved.”

Regardless of the intergenerational dynamic, said Davis, both sides must continue to bridge the gap so that the older generation’s wisdom is not lost. “The younger women who have lots of energy and maybe some more time on their hands can then take that torch and keep going with it,” she said.

Roberts says he didn’t become an activist until he was 31. “When I first got involved, I felt like it was something I had to do,” he recalls. “It was like swallowing a spoon of cod liver oil – at least that’s what I thought it was going to be like. I was doing it because I felt like I’d reached the point where it was necessary. I wasn’t prepared for how much I was going to enjoy it and how much a part of my life it would become.

“People who aren’t involved in anything in our community other than trying to stay buffed or watching ‘The L Word’ once a week … need to realize that they can devote a part of their lives to something that matters – something that’s not going to benefit them directly perhaps, but it makes them a better citizen of our community, of our city, of our world,” Roberts continued. “It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden by adding a bit of seriousness to their lives that they’re going to stop having fun. … You’re not going to become instantly boring if you get involved in something.”

Given San Diegans’ busy lives and work schedules, Mittman said the best way to attract activists is to offer them a sense that their time will be used efficiently. “The San Diego community is very pragmatic,” he says. “We live in this incredible environment and that’s why we’ve chosen to be here; we have full lives. So if we’re going to take away time from something else, we need to know that’s it’s useful. … If somebody’s going to work 40 or 50 hours a week, it’s my job when they come to do volunteering that I’m using their time wisely and where it’s needed most. If you do that, people will always come.

“I don’t want to have an LGBT community where our whole life has to be devoted to always organizing to protect our rights,” he added, “because what have we earned? I want a community where we get to lead our lives the way everybody else does.”

Whether the climate in San Diego is as conservative today as some may believe, its reputation is well founded in the annals of history. While militant groups like Act Up and Queer Nation were welcomed and flourished in San Francisco and New York during the thick of the AIDS crisis, Murray-Ramirez remembers leaders in San Diego’s fledgling GLBT community as leery of their arrival here. “People were very upset with Act Up and Queer Nation’s way of activism,” he recalled. “They thought it was too out there, too confrontational.

“If there was a silver lining to the AIDS epidemic, it was that it awakened our community to political activism. … Before AIDS hit, when I would raise money for politicians, I’d be lucky if I got a $25 to $50 check. After AIDS hit, people realized that we had to get involved politically, because it was the officeholders who … could make a difference in funding and the government’s response to AIDS. So all of the sudden, you saw us go from having $25 events to $500-a-plate dinners. People who had never given before … became activists.”

While there have been several local events that have spurred the community into action — such as the printing of the names of gay men arrested for lewd conduct in the Union-Tribune in the 1970s, the anti-gay Brigg’s Initiative and Proposition 22 — Murray-Ramirez cites the two most significant rallying points from a nationwide perspective as Anita Bryant’s crusade against homosexuality and President Reagan’s inaction during the AIDS crisis.

Murray-Ramirez and other activists say President Bush’s move to codify antigay discrimination into the U. S. Constitution has spurred the third great wave of GLBT activism in this country. “This will probably be on the same level as Anita Bryant and the Ronald Reagan AIDS situation,” Murray-Ramirez says.

“I think that’s definitely true,” says Johnson, noting that the threat to reproductive rights further adds to the volatile climate. “A lot of young women I work with have been taking reproductive choice for granted because it happened before they were born. Roe vs. Wade happened before most of these kids were born and they tell me out on campus that it had been taken for granted. A lot of them are looking at what’s happening with the Bush Administration now and they’re going to be out there making sure that we don’t lose reproductive choice – and I think it does take something like that.”

“We actually are in a position to lose many of the gains that we made in the ’60s and ’70s – not just LGBT people, but people of color and women,” says local activist and educator Pat Washington. “We fought for some things and we thought we had taken care of business and could move on to something else. In this particular period we are fighting to hold our ground, fighting to keep things a particular way that we thought were assured, like the right to safe, legal abortions…. I mean the idea that the President of the United States would actually write discrimination into the Constitution I think was unfathomable in the ’70s. … So there’s a big difference [today], because how do you give up something you’ve already fought for and won?”

Pat Washington became the first African-American to serve as president of the San Diego Chapter of the National Organization for Women March 24. The first African-American to serve as the national president of NOW, Aileen Hernandez, was in San Diego to give her the Oath of Office. Standing on a stage last Wednesday, before banners for NOW and the NAACP, Hernandez referred to the proposed constitutional amendment as “The constitution going backwards.”

Washington, an open lesbian who also works with the NAACP, stressed the significance of those two banners appearing side by side, touching on the barriers that exist between the African-American and GLBT civil rights movements.

“What we have is this mythology … that black people and gay people are separate and LGBT people weren’t there for black people when black people had the civil rights struggle, so why should black people be there for us now?” Washington said. “I think that has to be interrupted. You had a lot of black LGBT people in previous generations who were in the thick of civil rights struggles and who were willing, for the time and for whatever reasons, to suppress their need for LGBT liberation. We need to go back and remind people that some of those people they thought were just black, were black and gay. … On both sides of the fence we need to be reminded of our common ground and we have to bring that common ground to the forefront. … Black people in particular, I’m just really perplexed at why we think we own civil rights. We borrowed many of our strategies, our tools and our philosophies, from Gandhi. It’s an international movement, yet you still have to wrestle with black people who say, ‘you can’t use civil rights language for your gay rights struggle.’”

Though Washington said the NAACP has progressed a great deal on GLBT and social issues, she said, “We still have a small little faction that is very loud that is giving us a hard time.”

Al Best, a longtime activist and the first openly gay man to run for San Diego City Council, said some youth might be dismayed because they’re not seeing reciprocal support from other groups: “I bet you if you went to an NAACP meeting and took a poll, that over 50 percent of them [would not support] GLBT marriage,” Best said. “What’s used in that community is, ‘Well, we didn’t suffer for civil rights.’ Excuse me? We still suffer for civil rights. I remember 16 years ago – we didn’t call it hate crimes then – but I got my head bashed in and it took two neurosurgeons five and a half hours to extract about three pieces of my skull. The fact that I’m walking, talking and coordinating as well as I can today … says that, yes, we have suffered equal to blacks. … Slavery can occur in many ways.”

“I think people of color more than ever need to step out,” Murray-Ramirez said. “We need so many more people of color activists. … We’re going to need the people of color support on this civil rights issue. While we’re sitting back and feeling, ‘Oh, we’re progressing so much in California,’ this progression can stop if we do not educate which is basically a very religious, conservative people of color community. People of color must come out and take leadership roles and educate their own communities.”

Murray-Ramirez criticized a town hall forum on marriage equality held at The Center recently. Though the event was well attended, the panel of speakers included no people of color. “Sometimes they’ll say, ‘Well, we have someone involved in the Martin Luther King Day Breakfast or the Chavez parade,’” he notes. “Well, there’s more to it than that. We cannot expect people of color to support us when we don’t support their issues. When the Latino community was fighting the governor to make Cesar Chavez Day a state holiday, where were the editorials in the gay press in support of this? Where were our state and local organizations? A simply symbolic gesture of support for a man who was one of the first to … come out against Anita Bryant. People absolutely should be educating themselves about other people’s movements — what immigrant workers go through, what …different ethnicities and [people with] different religious backgrounds [go through]; men need to understand women’s struggles. We’re all much stronger working together than not.”

Though many parallels between miscegenation laws and prohibitions against same-sex marriage have been made, many people of color scoff at the comparison.

Gloria recalls a story his grandmother told him recently about his grandparents being denied a marriage license because one was Native American and the other Filipino. “It was interesting to hear that story and to think about it in today’s context of what we’re fighting for in terms of gay marriage,” he says. “I obviously take great exception to the people who say that there’s no comparison – different experiences, yes, but there’s so much commonality there that you can’t divorce the two. It is still about civil rights. … My grandparents were denied a marriage permit two generations ago and now if Jason and I were to go down to the county courthouse we’d be denied as well. … There’s enough commonality there to remain inspired and to stay involved. I don’t disagree that we have a diversity problem in our community, but I think many of us are trying to engage on that more and I think that we’re becoming more sophisticated in understanding we need to reach out to those other communities.”

After having worked in upstate New York as an AIDS lobbyist, Eric Banks, a political director for SEIU Local 2028, says he finds the climate in San Diego much more progressive.

“In the town I lived in for many, many years, being the first openly gay man to run for my church council was considered activism, whereas when I moved here I began attending University Christian Church and it was really no big deal to be gay,” he says. “There are many more options, many more outlets for people [to become activists]. … It’s a safer environment.”

Banks, who is also a member of Pride at Work, a labor organization that supports GLBT workers in the labor movement, sees the importance of the GLBT community working side by side with labor. “We’re trying to bridge those gaps and help people understand that … some of the basic benefits that we fight for every day at the labor union for individuals … aren’t necessarily translated or extended to myself or my partner. … We all pay the same taxes, we all do the same jobs … and put in a hard day’s work, [but] some of us do go home and, depending on who we are and who we choose to love, have better protections. That’s something on many levels that some parts of labor are struggling with, particularly some of our more conservative brothers and sisters from the CIO [Confederation of Independent Unions], but I think it’s something that’s actually coming forward and being recognized.”

Perhaps the biggest criticism of the community is not the quality or amount of work GLBT activists are doing, but that’s it’s always the same group doing the work. A palpable fear that this activist base will not be replenished exists for many. “As a person that’s been around now close to 35 years, my concern is that it’s always the same people,” Murray-Ramirez says. “We need a new generation of leadership. We older activists have to take a responsibility to mentor new people.”

“A lot of our young people are from here; they’re raised by conservative people and I think there’s that tendency sometimes to accept less than what we should accept,” Best says. “Older people need to be mentoring more younger people – I don’t think we do enough of that. In that process, younger people need to realize that we’re very far away from being there. In fact, the ship’s barely out of the harbor.”

Best’s advice for youth? “Don’t accept it unless it’s equal; and always ask questions.”

Gloria cites longtime activists Jeri Dilno and Herb King as being strong mentors to him during his formative years as an activist. Still, he feels there is not a strong tradition of mentoring in the community. “For too long, youth were not the people I think the general community could associate with because there were too many stereotypes that would come into play,” he observed. “I think people were rightfully concerned about consorting with youth. I would hope that with some of this newfound freedom that we’ve been able to win for ourselves, that we can start working with youth more often and … teach them how to be activists. You know, it’s not a skill that I had right out of the womb. It’s really something that I learned and developed through working with people like Jeri Dilno and Herb King and making those connections. … You know, I came out as HIV/AIDS was winding down. My experience really isn’t colored by that. I really rely on the stories of people who are older than I am to understand what that was like for them.”

Roberts notes that getting more youth and young adults involved can be challenging given the reality of their place in life.

“Being an adult in and of itself and all the choices that you have for the first time are all very new to people,” he says. “They’re just finding out for themselves what kind of adults they want to be. This is just one of dozens if not hundreds of choices in their lives. … Sometimes you will see people that are very young that instantly know they want to be involved in politics — like some of the young women at the NOW event [March 24]. For many of us, it just takes a lot longer.”

“We do have so many people in the community that have been doing this work forever, like Chris Kehoe, like Toni Atkins, like Jeri Dilno, Gloria Johnson,” Davis says. “They’re still here in the community and they’re still doing the work and they’re helping me and other people in my age group and younger to know the history of the movement in San Diego and what works and what doesn’t. So I think that there is mentoring going on, but I do still think we can increase that.”

As a starting point for involvement, Davis suggests a coalition of organizations called San Diegans Against Marriage Discrimination. “That’s an easy way to get into an activist coalition where you can get information and experience on how to do this. You don’t have to know how to write a letter to the editor or how to go and meet with an elected official to volunteer, we’ll teach you. … It’s much easier than you think. You just have to tap into those already existing organizations. We’re ready and we’re waiting for more people to come and help us out.

“The easiest thing people can do to be an activist,” said Davis, “is vote.”