Steve Stanton, the National Center for Lesbian Right's newest high-profile client, stood uncomfortably in San Francisco's City Hall last Friday. The former city manager of Largo, Florida had arrived in town the night before, after reportedly being dogged by Florida media in the aftermath of being fired from his job just weeks after he announced that he was beginning the process of transitioning to become Susan.
He had held the job for 14 years and made a six-figure salary.
"There are amazing services here. Amazing protections," Stanton, 48, said while visiting City Hall with Cecilia Chung of the Transgender Law Center. Stanton was introduced to Supervisor Bevan Dufty, who pointed out that soon TLC would implement a transgender employment initiative; Dufty helped secure $300,000 in city funding for the program last year.
For Stanton, who is married and has a teenage son, the future is uncertain. Karen Doering, an NCLR attorney in the agency's Florida office, is expected to announce next week whether they will take legal action against the city of Largo, which Doering maintains violated its own internal non-discrimination policy.
"What happened to Steve � violates every premise of decency," said NCLR Executive Director Kate Kendell. "Simply by proclaiming his desire to live authentically and to begin the process of transitioning [he] has now lost his livelihood. It's intolerance in action and it's everything that we fight against."
The case may mark a turning point for NCLR, which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary. Once a project of Equal Rights Advocates, a women's rights litigation and advocacy organization, NCLR grew from the Lesbian Rights Project into one of the nation's leading legal organizations fighting for LGBT rights.
NCLR today has an annual budget of $4.4 million and a staff of 21 spread over three offices: San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and St. Petersburg, Florida. It serves more than 5,000 LGBT families and people annually through its helpline and direct litigation and advocacy. It is governed by a 14-member board of directors; a national board with eight members; and a national advisory council with 13 members, including NCLR co-founder Roberta Achtenberg, lesbian pioneers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Carmen Vasquez, and others. TLC was a project of NCLR before incorporating as a nonprofit in 2002.
Today, NCLR finds itself at the forefront of family law, employment law, and marriage equality as it represents members of the LGBT community on a number of groundbreaking issues.
Celebrating 30 years
NCLR isn't bemoaning turning 30. On May 12 it will celebrate with a huge bash at Fort Mason Center featuring Martina Navratilova.
Navratilova was a pioneer in lesbian rights when she came out in the 1980s, first as a bisexual woman and later as a lesbian. She combated homophobia in the sporting world, which in 2007 remains a serious issue. In 2001 NCLR launched its Sports Project to fight homophobia and discrimination in athletics.
"Martina, at a time when she could have continued to hide or lie, made the decision to be honest about her sexual orientation," Kendell, 46, said in a telephone interview with the Bay Area Reporter . "She did so at a time of significant risk and the risk was realized. She lost endorsements, there was a lot of whispering and joking, and yet time has proven her right. She's definitely come out ... with her integrity and activism intact. We really want to create a world where someone being out is completely unremarkable and Martina is part of that role modeling."
Thirty years of the 'L' word
Thirty years ago, lesbians were just coming out of the early feminist movement's slap in the face with the late Betty Friedan's "Lavender Menace" hazing and were struggling to be recognized in the gay rights movement. Donna Hitchens, a law clerk at ERA at the time and a student at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Law at Boalt Hall, saw a need and an opportunity.
There were very few gay rights organizations at the time and the few that did exist focused on criminal statutes such as sodomy laws, but not on other issues such as family, employment, and housing.
"It was really a time of both the gay movement not dealing with women's issues and the women's movement coming more and more to embrace lesbian issues and to support gay women," said Hitchens, 59. "It seemed like ... for those of us at the time [that] the term 'lesbian' really denoted being both a feminist and a gay person."
Yet, lesbian wasn't the hot word that it is today with the hit Showtime drama The L Word and the New York Times April 1 Sunday Styles section cover story about Dinah Shore weekend.
According to Nancy Davis, now a Superior Court judge and another founder of the Lesbian Rights Project as well as Hitchens's partner, the word "lesbian" was political – very much in people's faces – and there were fears that the project wouldn't continue to receive financial support.
"Raising money for a women's organization is difficult," said Achtenberg, 56, NCLR's first staff attorney and a former San Francisco supervisor. "Raising money for a lesbian organization was even more difficult at the time."
Hitchens agreed with Achtenberg that this was the most difficult challenge that the young NCLR faced, but she was surprised by the amount of organizational and foundation support they did receive. ERA provided office space and staff, while $14,000 in grants supported the staff's salaries during the first years.
Running nearly on empty for many years often kills young organizations, but NCLR's combination of passionate staff and youthful idealism provided the rest of the fuel, even in the face of losing many of its first cases, which Achtenberg admitted was very difficult to endure.
"We were young and we were passionate about what we were doing," said Hitchens. "So, we didn't allow ourselves a lot of extravagance in our lives or in our work."
Hitchens and Achtenberg agreed that the clients they served were the source of their inspiration that kept them going, whether it was providing advice through the helpline, assisting other lawyers with their cases, or directly taking on cases.
"The inspiration for all of this has been the women themselves who are having to endure the taunts or getting fired from their jobs or having their children taken away," said Achtenberg. "Watching their courage in the face of these losses gives you the energy to continue."
Yet homophobia also provided much food for thought. When the B.A.R. asked what surprised her the most Achtenberg said, "The virulence and the shear irrationality of homophobia. You have to be eternally vigilant."
Coming into its own
Devoted to the lesbian-feminist foundation to provide a broad perspective of advocacy and legal support for fundamental rights, Hitchens and Achtenberg focused their initial courtroom battles on lesbian family issues, which at that time saw lesbian mothers having to prove they were fit parents to retain child custody rights.
The first court victory for NCLR was in 1983 when Sharon Johnson, a black lesbian mother, won custody of her son Daimein.
NCLR followed up that success three years later with the groundbreaking second-parent adoption case of Annie Affleck and Rebecca Smith and their daughter Nan. The case set the precedent for second-parent adoptions, which thousands of lesbians, gay men, and non-biological parents in more than 20 states have used to seek parental recognition.
Then in 1988, NCLR addressed the lack of a partner's legal protections when life-threatening situations arise. It took on Karen Thompson's case when the family of her partner, Sharon Kowalski, denied her visitation and guardianship rights. Kowalski was hospitalized and severely disabled following a car accident. After a lengthy court battle, Thompson finally won guardianship of Kowalski in 1991.
In response to Thompson's and Kowalski's situation, NCLR launched a public education campaign to inform LGBT partners about how to protect their relationships through securing their legal rights.
These landmark victories established NCLR as a leading national LGBT legal advocacy and litigation organization. Lawyers from across the nation sought out the agency for legal advice and to assist with cases for their LGBT clients.
The victories and the national recognition signaled that NCLR had grown beyond ERA's project for lesbian rights. In 1989 NCLR left ERA's supportive wing and established itself as a national organization.
"It was a very bold step to take," said Achtenberg. "We didn't know if we could sustain ourselves independently."
The bold new steps not only led to the growing organization's independence but also to new leadership. Hitchens and Achtenberg both left NCLR to pursue other goals. Hitchens is currently a San Francisco Superior Court judge and Achtenberg currently is the chair of the board of trustees of the California State University system. Both continue to be active with NCLR.
When the B.A.R. asked Achtenberg what she learned most from their experience at NCLR she responded, "I learned that fighting for your rights is fun. Being a part of a community of struggle can be empowering and invigorating."
Bold new visions
Building on the strength garnered from the first 13 years of lesbian-feminist leadership and the dawn of a new millennium, NCLR continued to blaze new trails.
Under new leadership it established a youth project, an immigration project, an elder project, and aggressively advocated for transgender representation and tackled homophobia in athletics with its sports program. But transforming family law remained a priority for the organization.
"Thirty years ago when NCLR was founded it was routine for a lesbian or gay parent to lose custody of their children," said Kendell, who became NCLR's third executive director in 1996 and currently earns $139,000 annually. "That is no longer the case. Now it is the exception rather than the rule."
Family law has shifted with reproductive technologies, adoption rights, and enlightened social attitudes about LGBT families. It's no longer a question of whether queer people can raise a family, but whether they want to or not. Many LGBT people are choosing to form families, which means they are starting to navigate the legal system in a different way often raising new questions about parental as well as partner rights.
NCLR continues to be on the cutting edge. Kendell told the B.A.R. that the three cases that stand out as the most significant are: Sharon Smith's wrongful death suit following the vicious dog mauling death of her partner Diane Whipple in their apartment building; four groundbreaking custody cases – three in California and one in Florida; and the California marriage case.
Smith, in what has become known as the "dog mauling case" in San Francisco, received the assistance of NCLR and attorneys from Cardoza Law Offices and Heller Ehrman White and McAuliffe in filing a wrongful death suit against her neighbors Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel. Whipple was mauled to death January 26, 2001 in the hallway of her apartment building by dogs belonging to Noel and Knoller. After two years of court hearings in the civil case (Noel and Knoller served time in state prison after being convicted in the criminal case), Smith and Whipple's mother, Penny Whipple Kelly, settled in December 2002. It was the first time in history that a same-sex partner was able to obtain a civil judgment recognizing a surviving partner as a family member.
NCLR followed that groundbreaking victory with a February 2003 case where it represented Michael Kantaras, a transgender man in Florida, in a custody battle against his ex-wife. Kantaras was legally married to Linda Kantaras, who attempted to declare Michael Kantaras as a "legal stranger" and that he was a woman, therefore denying that their marriage was valid. Florida Circuit Court Judge Gerard O'Brien ruled in favor of Michael Kantaras. O'Brian stated that Kantaras was a legal man and therefore the marriage was valid. The judge also awarded Michael Kantaras custody of his two children that the couple raised together.
NCLR didn't stop there. In a triad of same-sex parenting rulings by the California Supreme Court in August 2005, the justices ruled that both partners in the same-sex couples are legal parents. NCLR won child support in Elisa B. v. Superior Court for Emily B., Elisa's former partner, for the couple's twin daughters, one whom was severely disabled with Down syndrome. The court ruled that both parents are responsible for children born through assisted reproduction, even for same-sex couples. NCLR supported the two other child custody cases through amicus briefs for K.M. v. E.G. and Kristine H. v. Lisa R.
Currently NCLR is working with partner law firms representing 12 clients in the California marriage case, In Re Marriage Cases, to overturn California's current ban on same-sex marriages. The case was brought to California courts after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered city officials to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples during the historic "Winter of Love" in February 2004. In August 2004 the California Supreme Court invalidated the licenses, but didn't rule whether the licenses violated the state constitution. The City Attorney's office filed its brief with the state Supreme Court April 2 [see article, page 1].
Kendell believes that NCLR's success is due to the lesbian-feminist vision the organization was founded on.
"I think it is because we are feminist in our approach and philosophy," said Kendell. "It is the same sensibility that demands that we look at all of our work through a broad lens that looks at not just sexual orientation, but gender identity, race, class, geography, education – you know there may be multiple ways in which someone is being marginalized and denied basic fairness. We feel like we need to have an approach that takes into account the full picture."
The future
Reviewing the past 30 years Hitchens, Achtenberg, and Kendell told the B.A.R. that they are amazed by the progress the LGBT rights movement in general – and NCLR in particular – has made overall.
"Donna and I had a certain vision, so they credit us with being visionaries, well, that's true," said Achtenberg about how NCLR has grown. "But the truth is we never envisioned something this magnificent."
Hitchens added, "I felt then and I feel now that I was given this incredible opportunity and I'm enormously grateful that I was able to found this organization and work with it for as long as I did. It was a great time in my life."
Hitchens, Achtenberg, and Kendell agreed that they hope someday NCLR will no longer be necessary.
"I think that we are all working toward making NCLR obsolete," said Kendell. "That will probably take 30 years to do and the coming decade � is going to be particularly critical, but I think it's the goal of every social justice movement to change the culture enough that you're no longer necessary. The world we want is the world where sexual orientation and gender identity are completely irrelevant in every sphere of public life. The only person who cares whether you're queer is the person you are sleeping with."
Tickets for NCLR's gala are $230 and can be purchased online at http://nclrights.org/30gala/index.php.