Photo by Brittny Ulate/Daily Titan Detour Editor

By Derin Richardson
For the Daily Titan

Children of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender couples are given a new found type of support with the help of a photo exhibit at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Anaheim.

“Love Makes A Family” is a touring photo-text exhibit presented by Family Diversity Projects, a non-profit organization from Amherst, Massachusetts, that aims to quell the biases and prejudices by exemplifying families with lesbian, gay, bisexual,or transgender members in a positive light.

The objective of the project is to show the public that the caring properties of a family, regardless of sexual orientation, culture, race or other definitive factors, are no different from family to family.

The photo exhibits feature portraits of several different families alongside excerpts from the interviews conducted with them and give substantial background information on the trials and joys of what they have endured.

Dawn Usher, event coordinator and member of the Unitarian Universalist Church, is a lesbian and found the church a year ago when she and her partner of 26 years wanted to get married, feeling that no other church would accept them.

Usher ended her affiliation with First Presbyterian Church of Anaheim in the late 1960s due to “a split over racial tensions,” when her parents were involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the era.

According to Usher, the decision of the UUC’s welcoming congregation to foster a supportive environment for the LGBT community by endorsing the photo exhibit was not difficult.

“Anything that can further the cause of equal justice for these disenfranchised lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender people is something that is very important to us,” Usher said. “Any social justice issue is important to us, and this one in particular because of Prop 8.”

Lee Marie Sanchez, consulting minister of the church, has served the Anaheim location for nearly four years and is greatly appreciative of the image the exhibit places upon the LGBT community.

Sanchez served as the director of religious education for 12 years at both the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Laguna Beach and Salt Water Unitarian Universalist Church in Des Moines, Washington, and is proud that her current church receives new members all the time. “It’s very exciting to be here now,” she said.

Sanchez said that church has been active for over 52 years with a track record of being involved in the fight against social injustice.

“It started as an Orange County congregation in response to the very conservative political and theological atmosphere of the OC, where a number of people who were liberal in their politics and theology and wanted to look for something where they could all be together, but were not all necessarily Unitarian Universal,” Sanchez said.

According to Sanchez, it wasn’t until a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the church, Louis McGee, came along and helped organize their perspectives and ideologies that the congregation officially spread its roots into the ground.

Despite the split of the 300-member congregation due to the Vietnam War, the OC chapter of the Unitarian Universalist Church remains active and growing.

“There were people in the church who were working in the defense industry who didn’t want to be known as opposing the war and then there were a number of people who were strongly opposed to the war, and that made all the difference in the world,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez said that the church has never gone back up to the number that it once was.

“I think the church is great because part of what they believe is taking in people as human beings,” said Jimmy Ramos, English as a Second Language program director for the church.

The exhibit will continue until Nov. 5.