File:Rainbow Community Center, Concord (9219466639).jpg

English: In the Bay Area, the huge LGBT community in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley often get all the attention, but in reality LGBTs and their loved ones are spread out throughout the region, as is the case everywhere else. Including Concord, which actually had the galls to throw out an anti-discrimination ordinance back in 1989. (Today's Concord is a lot more cosmopolitan, and more accepting - and California state laws now prohibit discrimination against LGBTs statewide.)

Rainbow Community Center is located in Concord's historic city core. While it occupied only one room when I was living in Concord back in 2000, today it occupies the entire upper floor of this building, sprawling over nearly a dozen rooms.
I am stopping by to have a last-minute rendezvous with a local activist friend, with whom I had worked on LGBT rights issues back in 2000 (including opposing Proposition 22, the original gay marriage ban). It was my first rendezvous with her since those days - well over a decade had passed - and to make it happen on the weekend of California finally getting marriage equality once and for all, was a very special feeling. Even more noteworthy is that my friend is herself heterosexual, and she was a staunchly pro-gay straight person well before it became "cool" or "trendy," getting the local League of Women Voters chapter to come out strongly in favor of LGBT rights.

At the entrance I see the rainbow flag for gay pride, as well as a blue-pink-white flag for transgender pride. The more visible emphasis for transgender issues, and the recognition that transphobia IS homophobia, is another great change in recent years.