Gay Pride Celebration Opens With Police Officers, Without Controversy : Festival: About 2,500 attend Orange County event. For first time, uniformed members of the CHP and local law enforcement agencies participate.

The third annual Orange County Gay and Lesbian Pride Celebration opened at UC Irvine on Saturday with music, dancing, cultural awareness displays--and for the first time--informational booths representing several city police departments and the California Highway Patrol.

About 2,500 people attended the first of two days of festivities at UC Irvine’s Aldrich Park. The celebration will wind up today with a noon parade scheduled to proceed along Campus Ring Road.

Saturday’s events were without the controversy and violence that erupted at the first gay pride celebration in 1989, when police were called in to quell a disturbance between gay activists and fundamentalist Christians who had gathered to protest the festival. That year, about a half a dozen people were arrested.

This year, an area that had been cordoned off on a hilly slope overlooking the festival entrance remained empty of demonstrators, although earlier a Long Beach-based church group had told police that it would protest the weekend festival.

UC Irvine police handed out pamphlets detailing freedom of speech rights and remarked on the efficiency of the festival organizers.

“This is one of the most coordinated and responsible groups we’ve worked with,” said Assistant UC Irvine Police Chief Dennis Powers. “Everything went smoothly last year and we were expecting the same this time around.”

Also, this time around, most of the police officers visible at the festival were among the participants.

Uniformed officers from Cypress, Garden Grove, Laguna Beach, Buena Park, Placentia and the UC Irvine police were represented and non-uniformed officers from the Seal Beach Police Department were allowed to hand out informational material.

None of the departments were recruiting because most are under hiring freezes brought about by budget cuts, officers said. A few departments, such as Costa Mesa and Fullerton, citing budget constraints, declined requests to provide even a minimal presence.

But organizers were clearly pleased at the officers’ attendance, which attracted only scattered interest from festival-goers.

“We got a tremendously positive response from the majority of departments,” said Scott Liles, a board member of Orange County Cultural Pride, the festival’s sponsor.

“Their presence here serves a dual purpose, developing a closer understanding between the officers and the community and addressing the fact that there are gay and lesbian officers,” he said. “It really gives them an opportunity to develop an improved image of law enforcement.”

Liles said the perception that police are intolerant of homosexuals was exacerbated when Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates decided to ban off-duty officers from wearing uniforms at a recruitment booth during a street fair in a neighborhood populated by gays.

However, officers at the Orange County celebration downplayed the Los Angeles controversy.

“People ask why we’re here, but we don’t have a reason not to be here,” said Kathy Tautkas, a Cypress Police Department personnel and training officer. “This is treated like any other festival or public event.”

“It became a sensitive subject, but it has been our practice to recruit people from all walks of life,” said Capt. Dave Abrecht of the Garden Grove Police Department. “Our chief’s position is that we have such a culturally diverse population that we must treat all with dignity and respect.”