‘Jesus loves me and my boyfriend’: how one gay-friendly town repelled homophobic protesters

Jake Hamlin lives within earshot of a group of protesters who have set up on the main street in downtown Guerneville, California, for the past several weeks. They probably park themselves outside Smart Pizza for the central location and because of the rainbow flag draped in front of the restaurant.

"We can't get away from it. We can hear them in our living rooms!" he said, adding that they repeat the same chants. "'This town is gonna burn! There's more sin here than in San Francisco!'" He said the town will occasionally draw small groups of anti-gay protesters who set up tables with pamphlets, and generally behave politely. But these protesters are different. "The group is very active," he said.

So locals like him are also taking a different approach to counter-protest, and appear to have succeeded in driving the protesters out.

As the protesters descended from out of town, always on Wednesdays, harassed passersby, and told locals not to eat at Smart Pizza or other LGBTQ+-friendly businesses, according to Hamlin and fellow townspeople Suzy Kuhr and Dax Berg, they have been met by the self-named Pizza Box Brigade. The Brigade is made up of 30 or so locals who organized via group text and greet the protesters with messages including "Hate is toxic" and "Jesus loves me and my boyfriend" painted on pizza boxes.

"It started with my employee, who went out there with a decorated box," says Suzy Kuhr, who has worked at Smart Pizza for more than 20 years and has owned it since 2015. Word spread fast, and a district supervisor "posted a pic of my employee with his box saying 'Fuck these people'" adding the online comment, "One of the things I'm thankful for today was Pizza Box Guy." Gay and straight alike, residents quickly responded and came out in droves to paint their own boxes.

Hamlin has heard this group was also protesting in the nearby upscale wine country town of Sebastopol. But Guerneville, approximately 80 miles (130 km) north of San Francisco, with its pride flags and welcoming spirit, truly drew their ire.

A 19th-century logging town, Guerneville began attracting queer visitors in the 1970s, becoming home to a number of resorts with a strong gay clientele, plus several annual LGBTQ+-themed weekends and a famous bingo game run by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a troupe of drag nuns. A Provincetown or Fire Island Pines of rugged western Sonoma, Guerneville's small downtown would be a fairly obvious choice for organized homophobes.

The protesters were simultaneously very vocal and tight-lipped, Hamlin said, refusing to explain their presence or what organization they represented. These actions are part of a nationwide resurgence of homophobic and transphobic sentiment, with the spread of censorious "don't say gay" legislation, "anti-grooming" rallies at Disneyworld, and the firebombing of a Brooklyn gay bar.

As the protesters were confronted with ever-growing and better-publicized pushback from Guerneville residents, the outsiders seem to have moved on. (Unseasonably cold, drizzly weather the most recent Wednesday may also have been a factor.) If the goal was to shut Smart Pizza down, the protests had the opposite effect.

"If anything, it's brought me more business," Kuhr says. "I had two or three people who came in last week. They'd read about it in the paper, saying they want to support us."

Dax Berg, who owns Sonoma Nesting Company nearby, said he would set up a stereo to blast Johnny Cash's Personal Jesus and other curated songs.

"The realty office and the bank would call me and say, 'Would you put your music on?' That's God's way of smiling at me," Berg says. "When you are bullied, you need to defend yourself in the most effective, judicious manner."

The Pizza Brigade's message has spread throughout the town, with locals asking to borrow pizza boxes so they can join in.

"There was a little old lady, who must have been 85," Berg said. "And she asked, 'Do you have one for me?' She took a 'Love is love'."