Paul F. Wotman; Pioneered Gay Rights Lawsuits

Paul Freud Wotman, 49, an attorney who pioneered lawsuits over discrimination against gays. A native of New York state, Wotman went to law school at UC Berkeley after graduating from Columbia University. While at Berkeley, he led the newly founded Gay Law Student Assn. in a suit against Pacific Telephone, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. That suit, the paper said, led to a landmark 1979 ruling protecting openly gay and lesbian workers from job discrimination, on the grounds that sexual orientation was a form of political expression. In 1991, Wotman won what for its time was the largest gay-employment damages award. An Alameda County subsidiary of Shell Oil Co. was ordered to pay $5.3 million in back compensation and damages after it fired an executive for writing a memo on an office computer about a safe-sex party for homosexuals. On Monday in San Francisco of complications from lymphoma.