Grand Marshals of the 2008 San Diego LGBT Pride Parade are:
- Ruth Henricks - Community Grand Marshal
- Gilbert Baker - Celebrity Grand Marshal
- Peter Tatchell - International Grand Marshal
Ruth Henricks
Community Grand Marshal
San Diego LGBT Pride welcomes Ruth Henricks as this year's parade 
community grand marshal for her longtime volunteerism in the San Diego LGBT community.
As a devoted service provider to the local HIV/AIDS community and owner of The Huddle in Mission Hills, Henricks is the founder of Special Delivery and cofounder and chairman of the Board of Townspeople, which provides affordable and safe housing to people living with AIDS. She is also cofounder and board member of Something Special Food Pantry and active with ACCESS San Diego, an organization that brings clinical trials to San Diego.
"Feeding and helping to create food security for persons living with AIDS and other critical illnesses have been among my life's most rewarding experiences," she says.
Henricks devotes much of her time preparing and delivering fresh, nutritious meals to men, women and children living with the disease. Since founding Special Delivery in 1991, for example, she has rallied more than 150 volunteers to support the effort, which is carried out Monday through Friday on a non-profit basis.
Her care giving and volunteer spirit has garnered widespread recognition over the years, including awards she received from President Clinton, the San Diego Chargers, the San Diego Mayor's Office, Bank of America and the Girl Scouts.
Gilbert Baker
Celebrity Grand Marshal
For those unaware of the origin behind the rainbow cloth that has come
to represent LGBT communities across the globe, one need only look to San Diego Pride's celebrity grand marshal on July 20.
Gilbert Baker, the creator of the Rainbow Flag, arrives to this summer's Pride parade as a longtime gay activist and accomplished vexillographer (flag maker), who in 1978 put forth the colorful symbol that is embraced by millions within our community as a visible call for equal rights.
After being honorably discharged from the U.S. Army in 1972, and while stationed in San Francisco, the young soldier remained in the city just as the gay liberation movement began emerging. Baker taught himself to sew and put his skill to work making banners for gay and anti-war protest marches. His rainbow flags debuted at San Francisco's Gay Freedom Day Parade in June of 1978, with the late gay activist and city politician Harvey Milk ranking among the participants waving the flag triumphantly.
Earlier this year, Baker returned to San Francisco to recreate the banners and flags that he made in the 70s for the feature film, "Milk," starring Sean Penn. And in 2000, he staged his first exhibition of photographs and fine art celebrating the rainbow flag in Rome for World Pride. He would later mount extensive exhibitions in New York and San Francisco in addition to creating a mile-long rainbow flag that was carried by 5,000 people in New York City for the 25th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots.
Yet it was in 2003 when Baker broke his own world record for constructing the largest flag, when he created one that stretched from sea to sea from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean in Key West.
"In my view, the rainbow flag is unfinished, just as the movement it represents," he says. "The flag lives because it represents us all in our diversity and beauty."
Baker's success in unfurling a global symbol for LGBT individuals is striking. Google currently lists more than 2,600,000 references to the Rainbow Flag, plus 241,000 catalogued images. The flag now graces scores of public domains and it has exploded onto the commercial market in endless variations since its birth 30 years ago.
San Diego LGBT Pride extends an honorable welcome to Baker as he rides down our very own "rainbow mile" parade route through the heart of Hillcrest.
Peter Tatchell
International Grand Marshal
A global activist for social justice and LGBT equality, Peter Tatchell 
arrives from London as the keynote speaker for Pride's human rights vigil at 6:30 p.m., July 18, in Balboa Park. He will also serve as international grand marshal for the mile-long Pride parade along University Avenue in Hillcrest, beginning at 11:00 a.m., July 19.
The Australian-born Tatchell is a prominent spokesperson for Britain's Green Party and a parliamentary candidate for Oxford East. His activism dates back to 1967, when at the age of 15, he rallied against Australia's death penalty, launched campaigns supporting Aboriginal rights and publicly opposed Apartheid and the Vietnam war.
After "coming out" and relocating to London in 1971, he became a leader in the Gay Liberation Front, organizing sit-ins at pubs that refused to serve "poofs" while vigorously protesting the medical classification of homosexuality as a disease. He drew particular media attention to the latter when he famously disrupted Professor Hans Eysenck's 1972 lecture advocating electric shock therapy to "cure" homosexuality. A year later, he was arrested in East Berlin by the Stasi for staging the first-ever gay rights protest in a communist country.
Throughout much of the 1970s, Tatchell supported the struggles of people in countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor, while organizing protests against dictatorships that stretched across the globe. Though by the 1980s, his activism focused sharply on homophobia, hypocrisy and the AIDS crisis, making him one of the most formidable advocates of LGBT equal rights in the world.
Tatchell was active with the London Chapter of ACT UP before founding the radical "queer movement" OutRage!, from which he outed 10 Church of England bishops known for supporting anti-gay policies. He has staged citizen's arrests in London and Brussels for visiting Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe on charges of torturing and executing LGBT citizens in his country -- and Mugabe's bodyguards beat him as a result. Last year, he was attacked by neo-Nazis when participating in Moscow Gay Pride marches. And while battling the U.K. government on issues of same-sex marriage and hate crimes, he continually supports other activists in more than 70 countries where LGBT people suffer considerable oppression.
To date, this fearless human rights leader has engaged in 3,000 civil disobedience protests around the world, making him one of the most dynamic international leaders of the past four decades.