Santa Cruz County Queer History Podcast

G Schulz grew up mostly in Dallas, Texas and attended the University of Texas in Austin where he obtained a Bachelor’s of Architecture degree.  After coming out in 1978 and graduating in 1979, he took a road trip west and landed somewhat by happen-chance in Santa Cruz. There he found a very active gay community, engaging in a gay men’s rap group (that drew upwards of 90 men every week), Gay volleyball  in front of the Dream Inn, two gay bars and a very active social life. He has now been living in Santa Cruz for over 46 years. G has been involved in a variety of groups including the radical faeries and the Rainbow Sangha meditation group. He also attended the 1987 March on Washington for lesbian and gay rights in Washington D.C.  

Shane Hill was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has worked most of his life as  a clinical psychologist, mindfulness teacher, community facilitator and artist. He moved to Santa Cruz in the 1990s. Shane has been involved in a variety of activities across Santa Cruz County including organizing therapists and counselors to better serve LGBTQ+ youth, supporting the Queer Youth Leadership Awards, founding and facilitating the Santa Cruz queer camp for queer youth, has taught at the Rainbow Sangha sits at Insight Santa Cruz in the Buddhist tradition. He co-founded most of the transgender mental health resources in Santa Cruz over 25 years ago including the Trans Families support group, trans support groups at the Diversity Center, facilitated Trans trainings for mental health therapists through the state, and co-founded and supervised the Gender Specialists Consult Group in Santa Cruz for 10 years. He has been part of the Radical Faeries in Santa Cruz since 1992 and continues to be involved today. He published the book, “Faerie Magick” which is about the Santa Cruz Radical Faeries and their creative performances for Pride and other events often organized to make money to support queer youth. 

Patti Maxine is a musician who plays the lap steel guitar. She began her lifelong love affair with lap steel guitar and Hawaiian music as a young girl in Roanoke, Virginia and then moved to Santa Cruz in 1970. She played and sang at the first Santa Cruz Pride in 1975 and has continued as a solo artist and as part of many collaborations around Santa Cruz County. She continues to play music around Santa Cruz County most every weekend.  She celebrated her 75th birthday in 2013 by inviting her closest friends to Kuumbwa Jazz Center and performed to a sold out crowd. Patti lives with her wife, Marilyn, in Felton where she continues to create and record music. Patti was interviewed by Levi, a recent graduate of UC Davis. 

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.

Adam Spickler was the first out transgender man elected to public office in California when he was elected to the Cabrillo College Board of Trustees in 2018.  Adam came out twice in his life, first as gay in his teen years and then as transgender later in life in 2010. His first job was as a preschool teacher and later as a legislative aide for John Laird and then Bill Monning. Adam transitioned while he was working for State Senator Bill Monning,and in the process educated everyone who worked in the County of Santa Cruz office building.  Adam currently works as a senior analyst and public information officer for the County of Santa Cruz. Adam was interviewed by Annabelle who is a student at Cabrillo College. 

Monica Martinez became the first out and first Latina to be elected to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors in 2024. She began her new position in 2025. Monica shares here coming out story and what it means to be one of the out supervisors in Santa Cruz County. Monica was interviewed by students from Kirby School

Gail Levine was Vice Principal at Santa Cruz High in 1996 when some students asked to start the first gay straight alliance. She guided the students and established the Rainbow Alliance - the first student LGBTQ+ club across Santa Cruz County. Gail was interviewed by Levi, a recent graduate of UC Davis and former student at Kirby School in Santa Cruz.

Hear gay therapist Jerry Solomon talk about how gay men were entrapped by the Capitola police in 1980 and how the community responded at a Capitola City Council meeting in 1981.

Jerry Solomon was the first out gay therapist in Santa Cruz in the 1970s. He talks about what that was like and how he brought people together so support one another.

Santa Cruz Pride was one of the first smaller city Pride events in the U.S. and began in 1975. Understand the context of SC Pride within the larger LGBTQ+ rights movement. Chair Rob Darrow shares the historical context and many reasons why the 50th Anniversary of SC Pride is important to celebrate.

Santa Cruz Pride Chair Rob Darrow, and college students Mars Redmon, Levi Kreisa and Maddie Hall share about the history of creating the podcast and what to expect from future episodes. New episodes will be released each week on Tuesdays throughout 2025.