Sunset Street Fair Brings Diverse Neighbors Together

The emcee, a young woman sporting chic black sunglasses, surveyed the audience that surrounded the music stage Sunday evening on Sunset Boulevard: gay couples, youths in punk-rock outfits, Latino families, senior citizens. Then she gestured toward the band behind her and laughed brashly.

“You want to get up and dance?” she asked the crowd. “Then just do it.

“Do anything you want to have fun. Sunset Boulevard is yours for the asking.”

More than 300,000 people took her up on the offer.

After a decade of forging through some rough financial, legal and political waters, the Sunset Junction Street Fair finally may have found its groove.

The two-day block party was founded in 1980 to promote understanding between gays and Latinos in Silver Lake, Los Feliz and Echo Park. After a low turnout in Echo Park last year, the fair resumed its usual setting last weekend along seven blocks of Sunset Boulevard between Fountain Avenue and Edgecliffe Drive.

The result, organizers and police agreed, was an unusually peaceful affair marked by wildly diverse people, music and revelry.

“I liked the site better in Echo Park--it had the water and the gardens--but we didn’t get the crowds,” said Manuel Pumphrey, an Echo Park youth group counselor who was working at a booth at the fair. “And having it on Sunset gives it the true feeling of a street fair.”

John Daniel Manzo, 13, and Fernando Saavedra, 11, were two of nearly 100 local youths, some of them gang members, who volunteered as monitors at the fair. During a break Sunday, the two ate a salary of free pepperoni pizza. But the job’s best benefit, they said, was the authority to scold adults for drinking beer outside designated “beer gardens.”

For Isaac (Little Bear) Urquidi and other Urban Indian Council officials, the fair was an excellent forum for handing out literature and selling Indian fry bread. Other activist groups, ranging from ACT UP/LA to Atheists United to the Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Forum, distributed petitions, buttons and condoms.

Fair-goers needing more than food for thought feasted on corn on the cob, Cajun chicken, Thai noodles, Greek gyros and burritos offered by dozens of vendors. Many ate only after they had enjoyed carnival rides or the laser light show.

“They’ve got a lot of great booths here, a lot of different foods, and you can see the latest dances,” Tyrone Dunn, a 30-year-old amateur photographer from Pasadena, said as he took photos of a makeshift, canvas-covered disco, where gay and straight men and women danced. The fair has not always operated so smoothly. The 1985 event was marred by brawls. The 1986 fair was canceled because insurance costs were too high. And in 1987, organizers filed a $500,000 discrimination lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, alleging losses in revenue and reputation after police forced them to end a Labor Day weekend fund-raising concert a day early. The lawsuit is still pending, according to Micheal McKinley of the Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance, the main organizer of the fair.

Last weekend, some fair-goers complained about the diversity of the crowd and said they preferred the event in Echo Park.

“I don’t like it this year. I thought there was going to be more kids and more entertainment,” said Stephanie Basquez, 12, who on Sunday accompanied her mother at the fair. “It was better in Echo Park because there weren’t that many gays and lesbians.”

But for the most part, visitors, organizers and police seemed pleased with the festivity. About 60 officers were dispatched from the Northeast, Rampart and Metro police divisions to cover the fair. On Saturday and Sunday, many could be found sitting nonchalantly in chairs or on the hoods of their cars, watching calm crowds pass by.

Officers said two minor fistfights broke out during the affair but there were no arrests.

“The biggest emergency we’ve had was a lost parent,” one officer said Sunday as he monitored a medical tent. “And the biggest problem we’ve had to contend with is the heat.”

“It’s taken a lot of work to get to this,” said John Brown of the Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance. In 1980, “there were some real fears and tension about what was going to happen. But now you’ve got transvestites, transsexuals, people in leather, you’ve got gay and lesbian couples, senior citizens, Latino families.

“It’s not a blending,” Brown said. “It’s more of a mosaic. And that’s what the street fair is all about.”