This Sunday, San Diego’s annual LGBT Community Tribute Banquet will honor local attorney Bridget J. Wilson. Wilson has worked as an activist and advocate for the LGBT community for more than 30 years. The attorney was active in the development of The Center originally, and has in recent years become an expert on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military issues.

Wilson moved to San Diego in the early 1970s after graduating from Creighton University, a private Jesuit college in Omaha, Nebraska. Her original plans included moving to Chicago, but on an impulse she changed her plans and headed for San Diego.

“I got very tired of snow,” said Wilson in a recent Gay & Lesbian Times interview, “if I told you that wasn’t a big part of it I would be lying.” She added: “I knew I had to go to a city that was slightly less scary about gay people than Omaha at the time.”

Though she was out in college, Wilson did not become involved in activism in the GLBT community until after moving to California and attending lesbian rap groups at the YWCA.

“It was kind of a good way to network, because at the time there just was not a whole lot except bars,” she said. “It was probably through that, that I got wind of The Center developing and that’s really where my first community activism was. Of course when The Center opened we sort of scrubbed floors and painted walls and that kind of stuff.”

As an attorney, Wilson has made a name for herself as an expert on the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and is a frequent speaker on the subject. Wilson also has had works published in the Clark Boardman Callaghan practice manual Sexual Orientation and the Law, and has also successfully represented and advised numerous clients in military cases, at administrative proceedings, court martials and before the discharge review and corrections boards.

“I don’t think I ever dreamed I would spend my entire life doing that,” Wilson said of her military work. “I lived in military towns. Omaha was the home at the time of the strategic air command. In those days, we would hustle Air Force friends out of the bars when military investigators came into the bars looking for people. And when I got here, I started running into much of the same thing. It was very hard in the early days because of such strong anti-war sentiment to get people in our community to be very friendly about the issue.”

In addition to counseling service members at The Center during its early days, Wilson also became involved in a wide range of issues throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

“As much as my activism has focused on the military issues,” Wilson said, “I’m also very pleased to have shared history with a lot of people, a good number of whom are no longer with us, and being on Pride committees and working the infamous Briggs Initiative. … To have been very involved in the AIDS crisis in the ’80s which was a huge crisis for this community.”

Despite her history of activism and involvement, Wilson said she is in awe of what the GLBT community has become in such a short amount of time.

“Here’s the really neat thing about the gay community today,” Wilson said. “I can walk into a place like The Center and unless people happen to know me within context, they don’t know who I am. There are so many people involved that you don’t have the same 200 people, all of whom know each other, doing all of the same stuff. That’s really neat. That’s one of the best things about the growth of this community, that we have the tremendous breadth and depth to the kind of things we do these days.”

She added: “When I came out, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, homosexuality was a crime in every state but one, and that state was Illinois, and they had decriminalized sodomy by accident… So the world has changed and the fact that we are discussing marriage in my lifetime is just an amazing thing. It just goes forward – we still have, and have had in the past, really wonderful people who helped collectively create this community and without the collective effort it doesn’t happen. … And we had a lot of fun because the task was huge and the options were few and we were making our own community. What a wonderful thing to be involved in.”

The 2004 San Diego LGBT Community Tribute Banquet will be held at the U.S. Grant Hotel, located at 326 Broadway in downtown San Diego this Sunday, July 11. There will be a cocktail reception starting at 6:00 p.m. with dinner at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $75 and all proceeds will benefit the Ben F. Dillingham III Community Grant and the Toni Atkins Lesbian Health Fund. For table reservations or further information call (619) 254-6372.