Leading a Fight for Rights

To get a snapshot of the gay rights frontier, one need only pick up a turquoise handout from the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

In describing lawsuits dealing with everything from gay marriage to custody battles and harassment of a gay high school student, the sheet summarizes not only Lambda’s caseload but also the issues driving much of the contemporary gay rights movement.

The gay equivalent of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, Lambda is the largest and oldest of the handful of national gay legal groups lobbying for unprecedented change in the way American law and society treat homosexuals.

Its very name and existence illustrate how revolutionary a course that has been.

Founded 23 years ago in New York, the organization was named Lambda partly because the state officials responsible for granting nonprofit status frowned on having gay or lesbian in the title. Instead, Lambda was adopted.

It took a legal fight for the group to gain approval to incorporate. Sodomy laws were still on the books in New York, so an organization advocating gay rights was thought to be advocating the “rights of criminals,” said Jon Davidson, supervising staff attorney in Lambda’s Los Angeles office.

The establishment of Lambda’s western regional office in Los Angeles 5 1/2 years ago marked the beginning of a national expansion that has since produced a third office in Chicago; a fourth will open soon in Atlanta.

There are 12 full-time staff attorneys in offices across the country handling cases that are helping to redefine the role of gay men and lesbians, challenging prohibitions and attitudes that have in some form stood as long as the nation.

Such work is anathema to gay-rights opponents.

“You can say it’s radical, but they’re American values,” Davidson said of his colleagues’ most fundamental pursuits: equality, family rights, access to health care, free speech.

“The ultimate goal in this work has not been to change what [people] believe about homosexuality,” he said. “They can believe whatever they want to.”

Rather, he says, it is to ensure that “the government treats everyone equally regardless of sexual orientation.”

In turning to the courts, gay men and women have followed a long-established pattern.

“This has been the history of the civil rights movement,” Davidson said. “Courts have been an important engine for social change.”

And so they are again.

Virtually every major aspect of gay life--be it holding a job, retaining custody of one’s children, the right to marry or the legality of same-sex sexual relations--is the subject of court cases across the country.

There are wins and losses, but overall there has been more forward momentum than backsliding. Last year, for example, there was the stunning victory from the U.S. Supreme Court, which stuck down a Colorado anti-gay rights initiative in a decision repudiating the notion that antipathy for gays is adequate justification for official discrimination.

It is an opinion that Davidson said may emerge as a turning point in gay rights--and one that Lambda, as co-counsel in the case, played a part in.

Other high-profile cases in which Lambda has been involved include the ongoing lawsuit that may force the legalization of same-sex marriage in Hawaii, recently settled litigation in which a Wisconsin school district agreed to pay nearly $1 million to a young gay man who was brutally harassed by his high school classmates, and the successful effort by Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer to stop the Army from discharging her after she revealed her homosexuality.

One of three attorneys in the recently expanded Los Angeles office, Davidson came to Lambda after seven years on the staff of a similar group, the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California.

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A Yale law school graduate, he started his career in more conventional venues. After being a clerk for a federal judge, he joined a 150-attorney Los Angeles law firm and became a partner, specializing in commercial litigation. His working life was devoted to copyrights, business tort claims, breach of contract and securities.

It was fun, he recalled, “but at the end of the day, it was all about money or ego--or both.”

The deaths of friends from AIDS left him wondering if there shouldn’t be more to his professional existence.

So he exchanged the pressures and perks of corporate life for the challenges and less tangible rewards of advocacy law. There he has remained.

“I want to be able, when I look back at my life, to feel I did something I’m proud of,” he said.

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The Beat

The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund fights court battles for civil rights for gay men and lesbians and people with HIV or AIDS, principally by taking on cases that could set legal precedent or change existing law. Lambda’s Los Angeles phone number is (213) 937-2728.