In South OC, Laguna Beach is by far the "gayest" town in OC, and has a fairly long history of LGBT influence. The Mayor of Westminster was very vocal in his support of LGBT participation in the parade. Westminster just had their Tet Parade about a month ago, and the Viet Rainbow organization, who were initially banned from participating was allowed to participate for the first time in the parade's history. I don't see OC as homophobic, it's not West Hollywood or the Castro, but there are lots of areas where gays will fit in quite well. OC Pride Festival set for August 10 in Downtown Santa Ana | New Santa Ana Here's an article that mentions the problems with the first OC Pride festival, but is about last year's festival in downtown Santa Ana. I was surprised that there would be a gay bar there. We were there last December and stayed with friends (a gay couple) and they took us to a gay bar in downtown Santa Ana. One gay man at my company who was a Director went as far as to have a "fake wife" for work purposes, and hid the fact that he lived with his partner. Also, gay people in OC still were overwhelmingly "in the closet" in work places. I refused to raise children in such an environment. When our local high school started a "gay/straight" alliance, it was a huge mess with protesters. I felt like our children would have problems with other kids, due to the conservative environment. We weren't into going out to gay bars, so it didn't matter that there was really no "gay nightlife" anywhere near us.īut once we decided to have children (via surrogacy), I didn't want to live in OC anymore. At that time we didn't have children, so we mostly kept to ourselves, and that was ok. Some neighbors would refer to us as "roommates", and about three different neighbors made sure we understood that they didn't approve of us.
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There were very few other gay couples around us. Our experience (my partner and me) was that we were tolerated in our neighborhood as a gay couple, but not really accepted.
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But today, I don't think there are any gay bars still operating in Laguna. So OC doesn't have a reputation of being gay friendly, outside of Laguna Beach. I know that back when they had the first OC Pride parade, things went quite horribly (reported that people through dirty diapers at people in the parade, and anti-gay banners were flown behind planes overhead), and gay bars in Garden Grove were run out of town and patrons were harassed by police (I believe this was in the late '80s). I'm gay, and moved away from OC 9 years ago.