Organizers Hope Area’s First Gay Festival Will Foster Openness : Activism: Between 500 and 1,000 are expected at Sunday afternoon’s event. Entertainment and booths will be featured.

During the June gay pride parades and festivals in Long Beach and West Hollywood, members of the South Bay Lesbian/Gay Community Organization marched and operated information booths.

But on Sunday, the 2-year-old group will stage its own South Bay Lesbian and Gay Festival in Redondo Beach. The event is the first time gay pride has been formally celebrated in the South Bay, an area where lesbian and gay life traditionally have been private and low key.

While the West Hollywood festivities drew 360,000 people, the South Bay group is expecting between 500 and 1,000 for an afternoon that will include food, entertainment and booths operated by gay-oriented political organizations, AIDS support groups and sellers of T-shirts, crystal and china.

The festival runs from noon until 5 p.m. at the Redondo Beach Community Resource Center at Knob Hill Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway. Admission is $5.

“It’s a beginning,” said organization board member Mary Lee Coe. “It says the South Bay is finally (joining) the rest of the communities in Southern California” that take time out to celebrate the gay liberation movement and its birth in 1969 at the Stonewall bar riot in New York City.

The festival also marks the second birthday of the South Bay group, which has a storefront center on Artesia Boulevard in Redondo Beach. It offers monthly socials and discussion meetings for men and women, rap sessions and brunches and dinners in ethnic restaurants.

Topics discussed at the monthly meetings have ranged from AIDS to group travel for lesbians and gays. A gay traffic school, a recovery group for overeaters and a Metropolitan Community Church also meet at the center.

Dottie Wine, who helped found the center along with nine other women, said the group was born of frustration.

Wine, who is president of the organization, said people are tired of driving to Long Beach and Los Angeles for organized gay activities, “or not doing anything if they didn’t drive.”

Even after two years, some members say the group is still developing, and struggles to make its $1,500-a-month expenses through donations and fund-raisers. More significantly, they say, it has yet to make an impact on the South Bay lesbian and gay population.

“Only a few are involved in the organization in relation to the community’s size,” said one member, who asked not to be identified.

According to Wine, the group has a mailing list of 1,000 and draws 75 to 150 people to various monthly events.

Some say the existence of the group is a sign that South Bay gays are becoming more open and interested in events in their own back yard. A previous effort to start an organization in the early 1980s failed.

However, Marla Horn, another founder, said there is continued caution among many South Bay gays because of their traditional lifestyles and jobs. “They tend to be people who are more professionally oriented, and they may think it’s too dangerous and stay in the closet because of their work,” she said. “This is not true, but there are people who believe that.”

For her part, Wine said the group’s biggest accomplishment “is simply finding each other, finding out you’re not alone and making an avenue to connect with other Lesbian and gay people.”

The group hopes to make more inroads with Sunday’s festival. Said Horn: “It will bring people together who have accidentally heard about it.”