“Horrible customs,” Father Geronimo Bóscana wrote when he discovered that among the Indians of Alta California men were permitted to marry men, and some males dressed and behaved “so that in almost every particular, they resembled females.” Father Pedro Font vowed that “the Holy Faith and Christian religion” would eradicate such “nefarious practices” among the natives. Some eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Spanish explorers and missionaries professed to be appalled by their discovery that indigenous people up and down California were “addicted to the unspeakable vice of sinning against nature,” as Captain Pedro Fages declared in 1775. Prejudice against them has not been totally eradicated, yet their successes in battles to become first-class citizens have been truly remarkable.Ĭalifornia’s history of persecution of people who did not conform sexually or in terms of gender goes back long before statehood. But in the 1970s, they began to understand themselves as an oppressed minority, and as a community they formed organizations to fight for their rights that fight has been on-going. LGBTQ San Diegans had long been victims of widespread discrimination born of ignorance, and they suffered persecution under local and state laws.
