The Votes Are In!
2024 Readers' Choice is back, bigger and better than ever!
View Winners → Community Dec 01, 2022
John Stephen Dwyer at English WikipediaCC BY-SA 3.0
by
share with
The Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce announced Thursday that it will honor legendary drag queen and queer activist Jose Julio Sarria with the 453rd Star on the city’s Walk of the Stars.
The new star will be unveiled at 2 p.m. Dec. 12 in the Downtown Palm Springs Park, 230 North Museum Drive, chamber officials said.
“As the `mother’ of the gay community, he gave birth to a political movement as well as an entire community, while teaching us how to live our authentic lives as equal members of our society,” said Founder and Chair of the Jose Sarria Foundation Gene Brake in a statement.
Sarria was a political activist from San Francisco who became the first openly gay political candidate for public office in 1961, according to chamber officials. He was additionally dubbed as the Nightingale of Montgomery Street for his `operas’ in drag at the Black Cat Cafe in San Francisco from 1949-1961.
Sarria moved to Palm Springs in 1996, where he lived until he died in 2013.
“As Jose neared the end of his life, he feared people wouldn’t remember his contributions and many of us committed to make sure that wouldn’t happen,” Brake said in a statement. “This helps make good on that commitment and the star’s location near his favorite actress, Marilyn Monroe, is perfect.”
Prior to his death, the Jose Julio Sarria History Makers Award was created by the San Francisco Pride Board to honor LGBTQ+ members’ newsworthy accomplishments, chamber officials said. After his death, he was honored on San Francisco’s Rainbow Honor Walk and was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor as one of the inaugural fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers and heroes.”
