LAGUNA BEACH : Visionary Leader for Gay, Lesbian Causes

While he has caught little glow from the limelight, friends say Laguna Beach resident Dan Wooldridge is a pioneer without peer, a visionary leader with a keen sense of politics who has steadily advanced the causes of gays and lesbians in Orange County and across the nation.

“I don’t know of anybody who has molded and directed the growth of this community any better than Danny Wooldridge,” said Santa Ana attorney Georgia Garrett-Norris, who with Wooldridge was a founding co-chair of the Elections Committee of the County of Orange, a political action committee for gays, lesbians and feminists. “I really don’t think there is anybody even close.”

Garrett-Norris credits Wooldridge with realizing more than a decade ago that the gay and lesbian community needed its own political action committee and then helping to shape it.

“He was very careful about how it was set up,” she said. “Under his direction and his leadership, he made certain it was nonpartisan and co-sexual. These were quite revolutionary things to do at the time Danny and I started this.”

Pat Callahan, another former ECCO co-chair, praised Wooldridge’s leadership qualities.

“He is one of those strong, silent types,” she said. “He doesn’t have to be in the limelight, but he has just always been there. . . . Even to this minute, he’s probably on the phone with some young leader.”

Soft-spoken and with a slight Mississippi accent, Wooldridge has trouble seeing himself as a pioneer, saying, “I never owned a bean field.”

His accomplishments, however, are notable.

In addition to his work with ECCO, Wooldridge has served as coordinator for the Coalition for Human Rights, a now defunct group formed in the late 1970s to protect the rights of gays and lesbians; board chairman of the Gay and Lesbian Center of Garden Grove; and Laguna Beach Democratic Club president.

In 1980, he became the first openly gay delegate to the Democratic National Convention, and he has been on the steering or finance committees of AIDS-related propositions statewide.

Wooldridge is currently a Laguna Beach planning commissioner and intends to run for a seat on the Laguna Beach County Water District in November.

Friends describe him simply as “an extraordinarily nice human being.”

While he is quick to toss the credit to others, Wooldridge said he thinks the gay and lesbian community has made “tremendous progress” since the early 1980s when the “moral majority and religious right were on the ascendance.”

“We went from a place where only a few public people in those early days would identify with or support the community, whether they were gay or straight,” Wooldridge said.

“These days, when you have the leader of the free world and congressional leaders . . . saying the words gay and lesbian 20 times during congressional testimony, I almost feel like, ‘OK, I can relax. Now maybe I don’t have to do so much.’ ”