UCI Welcomes Gay-Lesbian Festival but Housing Still for Marrieds Only

With students in the background protesting what they call discrimination against homosexuals, organizers for the Gay and Lesbian Festival said Friday that UC Irvine officials have agreed to allow the controversial fair to be held on campus this year.

Students continued to camp out for a third day in a shantytown of cardboard boxes and sheets of plastic to protest a university policy that bars unmarried and gay and lesbian couples from university housing for families. Fifty yards away, festival organizers announced plans to hold the fair and parade at UCI on Aug. 11-12.

Some of the student protesters charged that the university was being inconsistent.

“Gay and lesbian couples cannot get (university) housing, but we can have a parade here,” said Michelle Richards, a sophomore English major who slept overnight on the rumpled blankets outside the administration building to support the protesters. “There seems to be an inherent contradiction.”

University spokeswoman Linda Granell said Orange County Cultural Pride, the group of volunteers that staged the gay festival last year in Santa Ana, was invited to hold the event at UCI by the campus Gay and Lesbian Student Union.

“The timing makes it so these two issues are viewed together, but they’re really completely separate,” Granell said. “One is a legal issue and the other is a student activity.”

Granell said the Gay and Lesbian Festival is welcome at UCI. But she said university family housing, which is moderately priced, is available only to legally married couples. Unmarried gay and lesbian couples cannot live at the 860-unit Verano Place apartments on campus, she said.

The first Gay and Lesbian Festival encountered virulent opposition last September when it was held at Centennial Regional Park in Santa Ana. A tense shouting match between fundamentalist Christians, and gays and lesbians erupted into a fist-swinging fracas that ended with six people arrested, from both sides.

Fundamentalist Christians subsequently launched a recall effort against six of the seven City Council members for allowing the park to be used. Petition organizers have until mid-March to get a recall ballot, said City Councilman John Acosta, who publicly opposed the festival and thus is the only council member not targeted by the recall effort.

The fair will not be held in Santa Ana because a new city law bans large public events that charge entrance fees, said festival spokeswoman Janet Avery.

Organizers said they believe the second festival will not generate as much controversy, in part because of the new location.

“It will take us a few more annual events before we’re allowed to go and do our thing” without bringing out counterdemonstrators, predicted Connie Long, president of Orange County Cultural Pride.

Leaders of the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition, which mobilized the Christian demonstration last year, would not say whether they would demonstrate at this year’s event, according to Steve Sheldon, the son of the group’s founder, the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon.

Security at the festival will be tightened this year, Avery said. She declined to be specific, but said police drawn from many of the nine UC campuses will cover the event.