Photo/Illustration by Morgan Grana.

A sea of students will move through the UCSC campus, flowing from college to college, to support the LGBT community this Saturday.

The seventh annual PRIDE event, this year titled Kresge Presents: The Colors of Pride, is a celebration of the queer and allied community at UC Santa Cruz.

Organized by the Kresge Multicultural Education Committee and the PRIDE Committee, the event will feature a campus-wide parade, culminating in a festival held in Kresge Lower Street.

“When you see everyone wearing the same colored shirts, you get this feeling of, ‘Yeah, I’m not alone in this,’” event co-chair and third-year Mark Corre said.

The two-hour march, beginning at noon at Quarry Plaza, will be led by volunteer and first-year student Ryan King. The throng will travel through each of the 10 colleges, picking up more and more students along the way.

PRIDE is the biggest queer-affiliated event on campus, with an estimated attendance of 500 at the festival, which takes place after the parade.

Each college features a unique activity, including a dance at Merrill College and an ice cream social at College Eight. For the first year, Family Student Housing will participate by handing out homemade refreshments to marchers and joining the parade, King said.

Volunteers will distribute free items like shirts and water bottles at each stop.

The march ends at Kresge Plaza at 2 p.m., where the festival begins. There, UCSC student groups like ImPower and community organizations like the Santa Cruz AIDS Project will host activity booths with free face painting and other fun activities.

Aloha Grill and Saturn Café will provide free food, including vegetarian and vegan options.

Committee co-chair and fourth-year literature major and education minor Emily Navas said, “various activities accumulate to the excitement and fun that each person can hope to experience and remember in years to come.”

Performances by UCSC Cheer, Acquire, the Hightones, Slugs in Fishnets, and bands Beaver Fever and Feed Me Jack, among others, will perform throughout the afternoon, Navas said.

The festival will feature a guest speaker, Aurora Guerrero, director of “Mosquita y Mari,” a film about the coming of age of two Chicanas and their intimate friendship. PRIDE collaborated with El Centro to have Guerrero speak at the festival.

“Guerrero’s speech is sure to make a lasting impression at the festival,” Corre said.

Members of the queer and allied community will unite and form a single body of support. Corre said with Family Student Housing’s participation and a new keynote speaker, the growth of PRIDE shows the growth of the queer community at UCSC.

“[PRIDE] connects everyone, no matter who you are,” Corre said. “If you’re queer, if you’re allied, if you’re from a different college — it doesn’t matter. You’re there for one cause.”

Illustration by Leigh Douglas

Four months ago, a few friends thought it would be a great idea to create an outreach program for LGBTQ youth in Santa Cruz County. What began as a casual conversation has become an up-and-coming organization set out to do just that. They call themselves ImPower.

ImPower is the first program at UC Santa Cruz to reach out to LGBTQ-identified high school students. The group was created in January 2012 and is currently comprised of 15 members, with new members joining weekly.

Simone Vincent, a film and digital media transfer student and one of the founders of ImPower, talked about the group’s mission.

“ImPower holds an inclusive safe space for LGBTQ youth to be celebrated and recognized — they are not alone,” Vincent said in an email interview. “We want to be able to provide an outlet that showcases higher education as an option for everyone. Our own members have each taken unique paths to be able to attend UCSC and we feel passionate about making it an obtainable option for all.”

ImPower is currently planning an unnamed event for May 19 that will bring high school students from all over the county to the UCSC campus. It is one of many LGBTQ events in May, including the seventh annual campus-wide Kresge Pride march and festival also on May 19.

On March 10, in order to gather student input for their May 19 event, ImPower tabled and held a Q&A workshop with high school youth at the Safe Empowered X-traordinary Youth (SEXY) Conference at Soquel High. A voluntary survey asked high school students questions to help ImPower structure the event.

Vincent said feedback from surveys would be seriously considered in determining the course of the event.

“We want to bring the students up and give them a college and social justice tour of the campus to learn about each department and what it has to offer them as potential UCSC students, as well as the LGBTQ resource centers on campus such as the Cantú Queer Center,” Vincent said. “We will have a couple of LGBTQ-identifying students and/or faculty guest speakers attending and will finish the event off in participation with Kresge Pride.”

In addition to attending the SEXY conference, ImPower joined and was asked to speak at other local events. On April 20, they rallied together with other Santa Cruzans downtown at the end of the national Day of Silence, an LGBTQ event to protest against harassment and abuse in school.

Vincent and fellow ImPower member Joel Vann were asked to speak at the rally. Vincent sang “Crazy For You” by Adele. Vann shared a personal story of a time when she was bullied in high school.

Ginger Haggerty is a fourth-year transfer student and a founder of ImPower. She said ImPower has progressed since its beginning.

“The group itself has grown in size steadily and has become a place where UCSC students come together around a common cause that we all believe in,” Haggerty said. “Many people in the group had never really been involved in a campus organization, but we have all steadily grown together and we all take responsibility for the work that ImPower is doing.”

Though ImPower is still in its infancy, members regularly attend every two-hour Thursday night meeting.

“Our Thursday meetings are sometimes the highlight of my week,” Haggerty said.

The May 19 event will set the stage for the group’s success and establish a foundation for the members continuing on next school year.

Chris Blessing, a fourth-year legal studies and politics double major and a founder of ImPower thinks that reaching out to high school students is especially important.

“So much of high school depends on the sense of community that one has,” Blessing said. “Kids who are ostracized, especially for reasons of perceived difference, often have terrible high school experiences. By reaching out to queer youth, we broaden their sense of community and help validate the individuality that might otherwise be met with derision. We want students to be excited about pursuing higher education. The more they know what that experience will be like, the more likely they will be to pursue it.”

Students gathered at Kresge College on Saturday afternoon to celebrate PRIDE. Photo by Morgan Grana.

Kresge College presented PRIDE, a festival celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans (LGBT) identities and their allies, on Saturday, May 22. The event coincided with California’s first Harvey Milk Day, which was made official in October 2009 after Governor Schwarzenegger signed a bill dedicating the day to Milk’s honor.

“Today, we celebrate the legacy of a pioneer and, unfortunately, a martyr for gay rights — Harvey Milk,” said Jesse Bernal, the first openly gay student regent, in his keynote speech at the event.

The rainbow-clad crowd packed into lower Kresge listened intently as Bernal, who traveled up from Santa Barbara for the event, spoke about the recent acts of racism and homophobia at the UC before ending on a determinedly optimistic note.

“My expectation is when you look back on these years … you will see a time in which we finally recognize relationships between two men or two women as just as real and admirable as relationships between a man and woman,” Bernal said.

A horde of volunteers decked out in red PRIDE T-shirts worked to make Kresge into the space that Bernal envisioned. Armed with handmade signs, volunteers Kameron Myles and Angie Wootton went to “queer” the nearby bathrooms.

“In the spirit of PRIDE and queering gender and making a space for people who don’t fit into the gender binary, we’re putting up gender neutral signs so that anyone can use any bathroom,” said Wootton, a second-year Kresge student. Wootton also tabled for Delta Lambda Psi, UCSC’s queer coed “frarority.”

The frarority was just one of several groups that supported the event. Safe sex supplies and information abounded between the Condom Co-Op and Student Health Outreach and Promotion (SHOP).

After the speech, a number of acts went on to perform beneath a rainbow balloon arch. Acquire Acapella sang a crowd-pleasing version of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” Delta Lambda Phi put on a drag show involving a boy scout uniform, shaved legs, and tight fitting dresses that left little to the imagination.

“Someone yelled ‘Beeeeaver!’ out of a bus at me,” said Justine Beaver,* speaking of the recent fame her act, which she performed with Luda Christine* at PRIDE, has brought her.

“I have a blast, I love looking fabulous,” said Jeff,* who performed the Spice Girls’ hit “Spice World.”

The event was not limited to Kresge students. Students kicked off the event at noon, snaking their way around the UCSC campus, bringing visibility and picking up supporters at each college. At Oakes, a car drove donuts around the entrance to the college while pounding dance music and flying rainbow sheets from its roof. Students making buttons and carrying banners shouted their appreciation.

Once PRIDE had gotten well under way, students and staff joined together to sing “Happy Birthday” to Harvey Milk on what would have been his 80th birthday.

It was a birthday party he would not have wanted to miss.

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*Names have been changed.