PRIDE is often thought of as a June affair. But here in the South Bay, we’ve always kept our own calendar — Silicon Valley marks the occasion in the last days of August — and this year our Cultural Field Guides program joins the season with an afternoon made for exactly this moment: Gather and Belong, led by LaDonna Silva, LMFT (she/her).

First, a little history, because it’s closer to home than many of us realize. The South Bay didn’t borrow its queer life from San Francisco; it built its own. In 1981, a year after county voters repealed housing and employment protections for lesbians and gay men, the community answered by opening the Billy DeFrank Center — a two-room storefront on Keyes Street that grew into a home for coffee houses, support groups, sports teams, and decades of chosen family. That lineage runs right through downtown today, where the Qmunity District on Post Street — anchored by Splash, one of San Jose’s oldest gay bars — carries the tradition forward. Ours is a history made in storefronts and backyards and around shared tables, by people, many of them living ordinary lives in the suburbs, who refused invisibility and insisted on belonging where the wider world hadn’t yet made room.

Gather and Belong is an afternoon in that tradition. In LaDonna’s Santa Clara backyard, over a potluck, a small circle of local LGBTQIA+ therapists will share what it’s like to live queer in this particular body, at this particular time — the joy as much as the struggle, told plainly and in their own voices. This isn’t a lecture or training. It’s a living room. You won’t sit in an audience; you’ll pull up a chair as a guest, bring a dish to pass, and belong there for an afternoon.

There’s a professional heart to this, too. Many of us sit with LGBTQIA+ clients every week, and the deepest cultural humility doesn’t come from a slideshow — it comes from proximity, from having been a guest at someone’s table and truly listened. An afternoon like this feeds our work as much as our spirits: it lets us receive a community’s story the way it’s meant to be received — in person, over food, without agenda.

That approach is the whole heart of Cultural Field Guides. If you’ve joined us before — for our Ramadan immersion this spring, or Saskia Lucas’s Nature Restore and Reset in May — you know the program isn’t cultural competency from a textbook. It’s a first-person welcome into a community by the people who live inside it, offered on their own terms. This installment continues that spirit, carried by LaDonna and the circle she gathers.

The gathering is intimate by design, capped at about 25, so early RSVPs are wise. The suggested donation is $10–$100, pay what you can, with proceeds going to The LGBTQ Youth Space — the program that has cared for queer and trans young people since it began, fittingly, in a single small room at the Billy DeFrank Center. Now run by Caminar in downtown San Jose, it still carries that origin forward: the place we honor that day is the very place this work was born, and the young people it serves are the next link in a chain that reaches back to that Keyes Street storefront.

When the afternoon closes at 6pm, those who wish will step out together and carry the evening downtown — to dance at Silicon Valley Pride’s Night Festival, a few miles from where we started. From a quiet backyard into the bright public square: the whole arc of how this community has always moved, in a single day.
Members, friends, and fellow mental health professionals are all warmly welcome. Not a member yet? Come anyway — and consider joining us.

Gather and Belong · Saturday, August 29 · 4–6 PM · a private home in Santa Clara. Bring a dish, bring your whole self, and let’s gather.