Lee became president of the San Diego Museum, president of the Balboa Park Commission, director of the Natural History Museum, and a leading civic figure. Transplants from the east, they settled in San Diego in 1902. Shepard and Tonner remained a couple until Shepard’s death in 1927.Ī female couple, Alice Lee and Katherine Teats, were also among San Diego’s early upper crust. Together, in 1886, they moved to San Diego at the invitation of two wealthy real estate investors, William and John High, who offered to build them a mansion-Villa Montezuma-in which Shepard could hold musical salons for the elite of the city. In 1885, Jesse Shepard, thirty-seven years old and an internationally known pianist, met Lawrence Tonner, a young man of twenty-two. Yet despite draconian laws that threatened to sweep up anyone hapless enough to be caught in a homosexual act, same-sex love flourished in San Diego, even in the city’s highest social circles. For example, in 1917, a sweeping local ordinance addressed fornicators of all stripes, criminalizing any sexual behavior outside marriage with a fine of up to $300 and/or 150 days in jail. Those found guilty of oral copulation (cunnilingus as well as fellatio) would be sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison. A 1915 law also targeted sexual acts between women.
Gay pride san diego pictures code#
The 1872 Penal Code of California confirmed the punishment. The penalty for those who committed sodomy was set at five years to life in prison. In 1850, when California became a state, a statute was immediately adopted which aimed to eradicate such behaviors among everyone. “Horrible customs,” Father Geronimo Bóscana wrote when he discovered that among the Indians of Alta California men were permitted to marry men, and some males dressed and behaved “so that in almost every particular, they resembled females.” Father Pedro Font vowed that “the Holy Faith and Christian religion” would eradicate such “nefarious practices” among the natives.
Some eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Spanish explorers and missionaries professed to be appalled by their discovery that indigenous people up and down California were “addicted to the unspeakable vice of sinning against nature,” as Captain Pedro Fages declared in 1775. Prejudice against them has not been totally eradicated, yet their successes in battles to become first-class citizens have been truly remarkable.Ĭalifornia’s history of persecution of people who did not conform sexually or in terms of gender goes back long before statehood. But in the 1970s, they began to understand themselves as an oppressed minority, and as a community they formed organizations to fight for their rights that fight has been on-going. LGBTQ San Diegans had long been victims of widespread discrimination born of ignorance, and they suffered persecution under local and state laws.