Every July, San Diego’s streets fill with the colors and noise of Pride, and every July, someone somewhere will ask the question that never quite goes away: What is Pride actually for? Is it a celebration? A protest? A party? A market? A riot?
The answer, if history is any guide, is that Pride has always been a negotiation — not just between the community and the outside world, but within the community itself. And one of the most revealing chapters of that negotiation happened right here, in the mid-to-late 1970s, over a fight most people have never heard of.
The Socialist Workers Party, a left-wing organization that grew out of the anti-Vietnam War movement, was a visible presence at San Diego’s early Pride marches. They showed up in large numbers, they carried signs and they were vocal about their support for gay rights.
And a significant portion of the LGBTQ+ community wanted them gone.
The concern, documented in San Diego Pride’s own historical archive, was that the SWP’s numbers were large enough and their banners prominent enough that the march risked looking like a recruitment drive for a fringe political party rather than a community assertion of queer identity.
By 1976, the conflict had become so heated that major organizations — including the Metropolitan Community Church of San Diego, the Imperial Court of San Diego and the San Diego Tavern Guild — threatened to withdraw from the march entirely.
A flyer meant to correct misinformation on the Pride Parade being cancelled in 1978. (Flyer courtesy Lambda Archives)In 1978, opponents of the SWP went so far as to circulate fake flyers throughout bars and clubs declaring that Pride had been cancelled, trying to suppress attendance rather than let the Socialists march.
Pride happened anyway.
But here’s what that history is actually telling us, 50 years later: The socialists were not wrong to show up. The discomfort came from a question that has a clearer answer than the community was willing to give at the time: Whose issues are queer issues?
The community said This is about us, our identities, our lives. The SWP said, Your liberation is connected to a larger struggle.
War is a queer issue. The AIDS crisis taught the LGBTQ+ community what it means to watch a government shrug while your people die. The current resurgence of military aggression, drone strikes on civilian populations and the normalization of endless conflict falls heaviest on the most vulnerable — which has always included queer and trans people, migrants and Black and brown people.
The toxicity of capitalism is a queer issue. The fight for the right to exist openly has always been entangled with the fight for economic survival: housing, healthcare, employment, the ability to leave dangerous family situations without landing in poverty.
Patriarchy is a queer issue, perhaps most obviously of all. The same systems that enforce rigid gender roles and police women’s bodies are the systems that punish gender nonconformity, criminalize transness and treat queerness itself as a threat to the social order.
Worker’s rights and living wages are queer issues. LGBTQ+ people are disproportionately represented in the service industry, in gig work, in underpaid care work.
Rent control is a queer issue. So is universal childcare. These connections are no longer fringe ideas.
The Socialist Workers Party in 1978 carries a banner opposing the Briggs Initiative, or Ballot Measure 6, which would have banned gay men and lesbians from teaching in public schools. (Photo courtesy of Gary Gulley Collection of Lambda Archives)Last November, New York City elected Zohran Mamdani as its 112th mayor. A member of both the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani campaigned on a platform supporting fare-free city buses, universal childcare, a rent freeze on rent-stabilized units, and a $30 minimum wage by 2030 — and he won, decisively and against the Democratic establishment.
Less than a year into his term, Mamdani endorsed and campaigned for three progressive candidates over incumbent Democrats in House primaries. All three won, prompting the New York Times to call Mamdani a “kingmaker.”
The politics that were once considered disqualifying, offensive, too radical to stand next to at a parade, are now winning elections in the largest city in the country.
This is what history does. It shows us, sometimes gently and sometimes with a jolt, that the wall between the unthinkable and the mainstream is more porous than it appears.
The San Diego community members who circulated fake cancellation flyers in 1978 to suppress socialist presence at Pride were not bad people; they were people shaped by their moment, doing what felt necessary to protect something fragile and hard-won.
And some of those same people, or people very much like them, have spent the decades since watching the world shift: Watching gay marriage become law, watching trans people serve in elected office, watching a democratic socialist get sworn in as New York’s mayor by Bernie Sanders in front of 40,000 people.
Things that once seemed threatening have a way of becoming ordinary. Things that once seemed impossible have a way of arriving.
So as San Diego marks another Pride, it’s worth sitting with that 1976 moment, not to re-debate it, but to reckon with it. Socialists were right to see queer liberation as inseparable from a larger struggle.
And the community that tried to keep them out was doing what frightened people do: Drawing a circle around the things they could control, in a world that offered them very little control at all. That impulse is understandable.
It is also a trap. Every time we narrow the definition of what counts as a queer issue, we do the work of our opposition for them.
This is a time of war, of rent that working people cannot pay, of trans kids being told by their own government that they do not deserve to exist, of billionaires rewriting the rules of an economy that was never built for us.
Pride was born a riot. It was carried forward by people who understood, in their bones, that you cannot separate the fight for dignity from the fight for survival. Socialists at that 1976 march knew it. The question is whether we know it now.
We don’t need to remember that moment so we can feel good about how far we’ve come. We need to remember it so we can stop making the same mistake.
Respectability never freed anyone. It just made the cage more comfortable.
Nicole Verdés is the former executive director of Lambda Archives, a community archive preserving local LGBTQ+ history.
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