In 1974, Pat Washington says she was just your average 20-something, though that’s a little hard to believe.

“I was probably some wild 20-something,” says Washington, who will receive one of Pride’s Champion of Pride awards. “I’m pretty sure I was sexually active. I was probably pretty self-absorbed. I thought I was immortal. I was a single mom who wanted to live beyond her community’s expectations.”

But she was also a bookworm.

“I read everything I could get my hands on,” says Washington.

One thing she wasn’t, says Washington, is political. Yet.

“I am sure I was aware of sexism,” says Washington. “I knew on some level that the men always had the best seat in the house and in the car. I was definitely aware of classism, since I lived in a mixed-income community where I was often reminded that I was not as good as the family across the street who lived in the brick house, had two parents, had 2.5 kids and a dog. But I wasn’t politicized.”

Washington explains the concept of being “politicized” as something that world-renowned sociologist Yuri Kochiyama explained to her. Kochiyama says she knew all about the “isms,” but it was well into her 60s before she finally got it into her mind.

While she may not have been as political as she is today, she was just as feisty.

“From the time I was a very little girl, I hated that people could decide for me what I was going to be,” explains Washington. “I always wanted to prove them wrong.”

By all accounts, Washington has gone a long way toward doing just that.

“I am the first person in my family to have even graduated high school,” says Washington. “Neither my mom nor her siblings got past 10th grade. And the fact that I did it as a single mom was a minor miracle, really. Everyone simply presumed my role to be that I would continue to have one baby after another.”

Instead, Washington went on to obtain one degree after another. And it wasn’t just anger that drove Washington forward. In fact, it was the very antithesis of anger — it was love.

“I didn’t do it just for me,” says Washington. “I did it for my daughter. I wanted to show her a role model who could rise above poverty and live and grow beyond the presumed limits of one’s community.”

“I grew up on welfare,” says Washington. “I was expected to always be on welfare. Even my family projected those expectations. You never expect your own family to be part of the group that wants to deny you your rights.”

Going beyond the limits and boundaries is something in which Washington takes a great deal of pride. Washington was recently appointed by Mayor Dick Murphy to serve on San Diego’s LGBT Advisory Board.

“I have lived and done things beyond even my own wildest imagination,” explains Washington. “I would have never thought I would travel outside of the U.S., for example. I have surpassed my wildest dreams.”

Washington is quick to stress that her realizations did not come on her own. While she explains that once she set a goal, she was bound and determined to reach it, there were other forces at work.

“Often, my dreams didn’t come full circle by themselves,” she says. “Other people held me in their hopes. They pushed and pulled. Mostly, they were teachers who had a dream in mind for me before I had even dreamed it. They saw me going to college, on to my master’s, and going on for my doctorate, before I even saw myself filling out the college application.”

Washington, who ended up a professor herself, both at the University of Missouri-Columbia and at San Diego State University frequently speaks on the power of knowledge. In particular, Washington believes in the power of self-knowledge.

“When I interviewed for the SDSU position in Women’s Studies, I had just come from an experience in Columbia, Missouri, where they thought they were getting a heterosexual black woman for their sociology department,” explains Washington. “When a black lesbian showed up with her white girlfriend, things went downhill from there. So, when I applied to SDSU, one of the first things I said was, ‘I just want you to know up front that I am a black lesbian grandmother in an interracial relationship.’ Interestingly, at first, there was no clamming up. Later, I was told to only come out to graduate students and not undergraduates.”

Washington says this was very difficult for her.

“It didn’t make any sense,” says Washington. “Here I am teaching about the significance of who you are as a person and how that influences your reactions to text and to the authors of the text and influences the way you respond to the text and author. It was like this veneer of acceptability.”

Author of The Political Consequences of De-Racing Same-Sex Sexuality, Washington has been published on homophobia in communities of color, as well as on the re-victimization of GLBT sexual assault survivors. She is currently the president of the San Diego County Chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the education chair of the San Diego branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and co-chair of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s (NGLTF) People of Color Institute.

And Washington is still a bookworm. As for her favorite book?

“The Color of Purple,” says Washington. “It forced me to let go of some pain. …

The pain I had as a little girl who was destined to be something I knew I could be better than is part of what drives me. So many people just thought that certain desires — like education, travel, owning property — that these are middle class values. They aren’t just middle class values; these are human values. I would submit that poor people have these same values, these same desires.”

Getting people of every color their rights is one of Washington’s biggest projects right now.

“I cannot stress the importance of getting gay people of every stripe to get to the polls and vote,” says Washington. “A lot of gay people are in the closet and they self-identify as registered voters. But they are not actually voting. One of the burning issues right now is, how do you activate the silent majority? How do you activate those people who are LGBT, who are people of color, who are women? In the last election, something around 46 percent of all registered voters actually voted. I know that many of those people who do not vote are people who would not deny me my rights.”

The way Washington sees it, she’s here, she’s queer … and she’s black and she’s a single mom and she’s a grandmother and she’s in a biracial relationship.

Oh, and she’ll be voting come November.