Honey Mahogany lives in San Francisco and was a keynote speaker at an event in Santa Cruz. Following that event, our podcast team traveled to San Francisco to interview Honey, an out transgender woman who helped found the Transgender District in San Francisco.  She serves as the Director of the office of transgender initiatives for the City of San Francisco, one of the first cities to have a department focused on supporting transgender people. 

The Transgender District spans six blocks in the southeastern Tenderloin and was founded in 2017 by three Black trans women, Aria Sa’id, Janetta Johnson, and Honey Mahogany.

Honey was also a Grand Marshal for San Francisco Pride in 2023, which always takes place the last weekend in June.

Marilyn Mariposa Bernstein is one of the founders of the Santa Cruz Dyke March that began in 1994. The event morphed into the Dyke Trans March and takes place on the Saturday prior to the Santa Cruz Pride parade. Mariposa discusses the reasons why the Dyke March started in Santa Cruz.

Tobin was born in Washington D.C. to a military family, later living in Hawaii, and moving with his mother to San Diego. At a young age, he became very interested in art, which acted as a creative outlet for him. He later moved to Oakland to attend art school at California College of Arts and Crafts, and found refuge in the LGBTQ+ and arts communities in Oakland and San Francisco. He moved to Santa Cruz in 1985, and has lived here ever since. He has been teaching art at Cabrillo College since 1990 and at the same time further developed his own art style — most notably his portraits on glass plates that explore both the transparent and opaque parts of personality. He has displayed his art in art shows around Northern California and curated many shows.  He is also the founder of the Lavender Graduation program at Cabrillo College.

Bob Correa and Denny Carroll moved to Santa Cruz in 1998 after retiring from jobs in San Jose. They had met in San Jose through an activist group that Denny co-founded called the High-Tech Gays.

After moving to Santa Cruz, Bob and Denny began volunteering at the Diversity Center and joined the board shortly thereafter. Bob became the first paid executive director at the Diversity Center. In this podcast we discuss the importance of maintaining a physical space for organizing and community building, the fundraising that goes into it, as well as some of the programs and resources that the Diversity Center provides. 

The Diversity Center continues to serve Santa Cruz’s queer community today because of the leadership of Bob and Denny in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Stuart Rosenstein is chair of the Queer Youth Task Force and organizer of the Queer Youth Leadership Awards. The Queer Youth Task Force works to foster a vibrant community where every youth thrives in their expression of their sexual orientation and gender identity. 

Stuart grew up in San Antonio, Texas, as well as lived in Los Angeles, before moving to Santa Cruz in 1997. He graduated from UCSC in 1999, majoring in American studies and has lived in Santa Cruz since then. After a chance encounter, Stuart became involved in the Queer Youth Task Force as a notetaker, before eventually leading several projects and shaping QYLA as we know it today. He is driven to advocate and support young people because of his own experiences with bullying as a child and learning how to deal with being Jewish and gay.

Dr. Jen Hastings has been a pioneering force in transgender health care. Jen launched the Transgender Health Care Program at Planned Parenthood Mar Monte in Santa Cruz and led the initiative for two decades. Jen’s efforts have played a key role in advancing inclusive health care practices and influencing policy at the local, state and national levels.

In addition to Jen’s clinical work, they serve as an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Jen trains future physicians in providing compassionate, inclusive care and remains a strong advocate for reproductive rights and safe opioid practices. Jen's contributions span numerous publications and continue to shape progressive health care conversations.

In this episode, you will hear from Margaret Leonard and Claire Sheils, two activists who have been serving the queer community in Santa Cruz County for decades. Margaret grew up in Santa Cruz, attended Harbor High and worked as a lawyer for most of her career. Claire grew up in New York, moved to Santa Cruz in 1982, and began working alongside Margaret in public relations and media relations, and later as a legal assistant. The two have been together ever since. Margaret and Claire share their own experiences with the changing legislation and legalization of same sex marriage in Santa Cruz and California, and discuss how they were able to provide legal aid to other couples facing similar struggles. They shed light on the work that goes into reaching landmark achievements like marriage equality, and describe the process of raising $1 million dollars for the Diversity Partnership Fund at the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County in 2005 that continues to provide funding for County LGBTQ+ causes today. 

In this episode you will hear from Sandy Stone who has been an out transgender woman living in Santa Cruz since the 1970s.  Sandy moved to the Santa Cruz area in the 1970s as she was transitioning from male to female. Sandy also worked as sound engineer for Olivia Records, a radical feminist lesbian separatist music collective and still volunteers her time today as a sound engineer for the radio station KSQD.

As Sandy came out as a transgender around Santa Cruz, she began hanging out with various female identifying groups when one group questioned her identity. The group actually voted whether or not to allow Sandy to be allowed in women’s spaces - the group voted 49-1 to be inclusive. At this time in her life, Sandy learned about the term, TERF, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. TERFS believe that transgender women are men and is considered a derogatory term today.

Sandy went on to be an academic and working as a professor at the University of Texas, Austin and her other passion as a sound engineer for various recording studios and musicians including Jimi Hendrix, David Crosby and Graham Nash.  She has been a filmmaker, rock 'n roll music engineer, neurologist, social scientist, science fiction author, cultural theorist, and performer.

In 2024 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame as the first transgender woman to have this honor. She continues to live in the Santa Cruz area with many friends and family members.

John Laird moved to Santa Cruz in 1968 from Vallejo, and attended University of California Santa Cruz, just 3 years after the university’s founding. He majored in politics and took part in early LGBTQ+ organizations on campus and graduated in 1972. In the late 1970’s, he joined the gay men’s group, which regularly met at the London Nelson Center and then helped to found the Gay Men’s beach volleyball group. He was part of the early LGBTQ+ organizations in Santa Cruz and served as the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz AIDs Project in 1991.  He was elected to the Santa Cruz City Council in 1980 and later, became the first openly gay mayor of Santa Cruz in 1983. He would later be elected as a Cabrillo College trustee, State Assembly member, and State senator, a position he has held since 2020. He also served as California Secretary for Natural Resources.  John lives in Santa Cruz with his spouse, John Flores, who is a photographer. In this podcast, he talks about the many obstacles he faced from a heteronormative political and social climate, and how he worked to change this. 

Larry Friedman helped organize the first Santa Cruz Pride events in 1975. Larry moved to Santa Cruz in 1971 during what he called the “hippie era” for meditation, yoga and vegetarian living. As Larry was discovering who he was and making ends meet, he got a job in 1973 at the Solarium, which was a deli with a patio in the back. This space today is The Crepe Place on Soquel Avenue. At the Solarium, queer people would meet up and connect with one another. Hear about how Larry was part of LAGMU - the Lesbian and Gay Mens Union - the group that organized that first Pride event in 1975. Larry was interviewed by Amber, a student at Harbor High.