Laguna Chamber Votes Support for Gay Festival : Business: The action is taken as concern grows and despite opposition from 68 of 71 people who telephoned.

With concern growing over the city’s first gay and lesbian festival, which kicks off tonight, the Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce voted Thursday to endorse the event.

With business down in Laguna Beach, the festival posed a dicey dilemma for the chamber’s board of directors. Naturally inclined to encourage an event that could lure 6,000 visitors to the city, they also knew some residents feared that Laguna Pride Weekend might redefine Laguna Beach as a gay mecca rather than an art colony.

Chamber office manager Jan Jurcisin said 71 people called the office about the festival Thursday, 68 of whom opposed it.

“Anything that helps business in Laguna Beach, we’re going to be for,” Jurcisin said before the board’s vote. “But anything that will hurt the community as a whole, as it appears this is turning out to be, the chamber really needs to consider that.”

Doug Reilly, co-chairman of Laguna Outreach, a gay and lesbian group sponsoring the festival, reminded the chamber board Thursday of the festival’s financial benefits.

“We are trying as much as possible to generate people coming into the city who will spend money here,” he said.

The chamber voted 11 to 3 to endorse the event.

“It’s clear the subject of this festival has hit a lot of hot buttons in town,” board member Jim McBride said. He urged organizers to make sure the event is a well-run, positive experience for Laguna Beach. “Otherwise, you’re going to set your own cause back centuries.”

At a meeting of the City Council on Tuesday night, about a dozen residents had railed against the festival, which will start tonight with a party at the Boom Boom Room, a gay bar. The festival itself will be held at the Festival of Arts grounds on Saturday and Sunday.

Much of the concern involved activities related to the festival, including well-publicized parties at gay bars near Mountain Street and South Coast Highway. Residents there say it is a constant strain to live near the bars and that they dread the thought of a new wave of revelers.

Even council members Kathleen Blackburn and Wayne L. Peterson, who had joined their colleagues last month in giving the council’s blessing to the festival, were less approving Tuesday night. Both objected to the emphasis placed on, as a festival flyer put it, “three days of parties!”

Neither voiced objections to the festival itself. Peterson, in fact, is scheduled for duty at one of the festival exhibits for the Log Cabin Club.

On Tuesday, the council unanimously approved a temporary use permit allowing festival organizers to erect a large tent in a liquor store parking lot, from which 393 exhibitors can display their wares. Food will be served in what is now an unused commercial space adjacent to the Boom Boom Room. City approval is not needed for activities on the Festival of Arts grounds.

Reilly has claimed the endorsement of both the city and the chamber since last month when chamber board members, who did not have enough members present to make a quorum, voted 7 to 2 to support the celebration.

Chamber director Joe Orsak said Thursday that he gave Reilly permission to do so because he intended to poll other chamber board members by telephone to get the one other vote needed to make the quorum. However, he was called out of state on a family emergency.

Orsak said some members of the gay community also are business owners and “a good number of them are members of the chamber.” A chamber vote for or against the festival has no practical effect on the weekend’s activities.