Get Used to It: Ep. 83, "Voices of Our Lives: Jon Davidson"

[ __ ] [Applause] [Music] hi welcome to get used to it i'm sheila kuhl your host and today we have one in our occasional series voices of our lives in which we talk to an individual who's been important and uh inspirational in our movement such a man is here with us today john davidson who is senior counsel at the lambda legal defense and education fund western region which is based here in la welcome john happy to be here happy that you're here too you've been on the show a couple of times and we've talked about uh important and substantive issues no doubt uh but today this is really all about you there are a number of folks in our movement that probably never set out to be heroes of the movement if you would have asked them early in their careers what do you want to be when you grow up they may not have said a gay activist or one of the most important attorneys in the gay movement that would be my characterization of you but kind of interested in sort of how you end up in a situation like that let's start early on where were you born and where'd you grow up and what were your folks like and stuff like that i was born in new york city and my father worked as a hospital administrator for the veterans administration and it was kind of like being an army brat every time he got promoted we got transferred somewhere else and we moved around a lot when i was growing up i grew up between new york iowa buffalo new york milwaukee wisconsin here in l.a and in falls ridge virginia outside of washington dc we had a very close family i have one older brother and because we moved around a lot it was really the four of us that formed a very tight unit when i was growing up so did you spend more time in a particular area or really just a few years in california a few years in virginia i went to junior high school and high school here in l.a and so la really kind of feels like home of all the places but i think i kind of had a good sense of what some smaller communities were like and and kind of what the midwest was like what the south was like i think it was a broadening experience though kind of difficult when i was growing up um having to move every couple years and try to readjust to different school systems and to making friends in different places um but um but there were parts of it that were really uh educational for me well you've been one of the people in our in our movement in in crafting legal theory for the movement that has always emphasized our connection to other movements and i know given what i know sort of about your age that you probably would have been in junior high in high school around the student revolution times um did that affect you in terms of how you thought about i guess what other people would call politics but i call sort of substance uh it did yeah i mean there are i i think i was really um kind of in junior high school in high school in this in the early 70s so i missed some of the the most uh revolutionary period of the of the late 60s but still there there was a lot of activity and i kind of got involved as just a participant in rights of farm workers when i was in junior high school and in you know local efforts to to to question our involvement in vietnam my since my father worked for the government it was always an issue for him as to how involved he would be in any political activities but he certainly had a strong political voice at home and and used to play devil's advocate in debates with us but i remember kind of one of my real proudest moments was when he just really couldn't take it anymore and and joined me with my mom um and and to one of the moratoriums up at ucla because he felt so strongly about what was going on in the war so is that what led you i mean it's interesting to me we don't always know why we do stuff especially in junior high but there's this sense i hear young people say well you know that's not fair or that's just not right and not everyone means it about the same thing but what was it that made you early on choose to engage in these kinds of things why the farm workers why against the war you know why not the young republicans um i have to blame it on frank capra [Laughter] no i used to watch a lot of old movies and i think there were certain movies that were about kind of justice to the ordinary person that struck a chord with me um and uh you know that that that and and just you know kind of watching the news it certainly was not just from peers because i i remember when we lived in falls church it was a very conservative republican community where i i have this distinct memory of of the day that martin luther king was assassinated um and there were students in my school who who were clapping when they heard the news and and i was just in shock and it it so um i think it came more from home um and uh i read voraciously in your own family uh ethnic or religious um um was there did that you experience prejudice in in your family we're jewish and um i certainly had some sense of that when we lived in virginia um uh you know i lived in in west l.a when i grew up here and and certainly didn't feel i didn't really feel it at all but back there i was one of two kids who were jewish in my junior high school in virginia um and there certainly was a lot of open prejudice and and uh you know i think growing up with at least that sense of feeling different in many ways made me identify with lots of minority communities in terms of sexuality um often i'm struck by the fact that men in our community say oh i knew i was gay when i was four years old you know we're five years old and women say my god i was married for six years before i knew i was a lesbian um how did this sort of dawning realization about your sexual orientation come to you and what kind of part of your history you know i think it um it came in fits and starts it was not all at once that i figured it out but you know i can identify things when i was very young um you know the the for when people ask you as your little kid what do you want to be when you grow up my favorite answer early on was that i wanted to be in musical theater clearly gay then that's it i fit the stereotype um that's still a love of mine but not as a participant um and i uh you know i think that um i remember uh when i was going to to high school in los angeles one day the there were some speakers who actually came on campus and this was pretty early this was in the 70s came on campus who were talking about gay issues and i i went and i it really kind of uh i was upset about it and i think that was because i was still in some denial about what was going on not not upset that they shouldn't be there but like what were they talking about this seemed odd to me um but i you know it really was not until i was in law school that i really started to come out to people um and it's so funny when you were saying early on about people not really setting out to to end up doing this this kind of work i remember when i came out to my parents them being concerned about well if i let other people know what impact this could have on my career and it's so funny that it's become my career i know my mother once said to me when i was at the women's law center listen honey if it wasn't for prejudice you wouldn't have any work at all i think they really understand after a while right um so what was the response did you um what's in your family i mean it it's always hard for us to come out to the people closest to us but they're usually among the first we do is that the way it was with you um you know i i think um you know ultimately my parents were very very supportive i i think it took them a little while and what made it easier for me was realizing that it had taken me quite a while um and that i had to understand that they had their own process to go through sure um and it's funny i didn't come out to my brother who's three years older than me until much later and i remember when i ultimately took a job doing full-time lesbian gay rights work i was kind of relieved thinking well now i won't need to come out to people anymore because they'll just know and i ended up having a conversation with my brother um when when i was saying something to him uh about um involved with this man that i had met and he looked at me and said what are you saying to me and i said well you know you know i'm gay and he said what and um i was like well i don't see how you could not know there's been like things in newspaper articles i know you've read that referred to me as a gay lawyer and he said well i just thought they meant that you did gay rights work i mean you do women's rights work as well and you're not a woman you can't know a thing until you want to know it i mean there's no question about that well it's bad enough that you were gay but what about a lawyer i mean no seriously what made you i mean that's another career choice that i certainly am familiar with but in your case what made you want to go to law school as opposed to some other uh profession or you know graduate school well when i was in college i i actually thought that i was either going to end up as an english professor or as a psychologist but at the time that i was then in college it seemed that all of the people who i knew who were getting graduate degrees in english were working as taxi cab drivers and bartenders and secretaries and all the therapists seem to have serious psychological problems of their own and you know i wasn't quite sure what what i wanted to do i remember coming home for some holiday and my brother had started law school at ucla and i went with him one day just to see what it was like and i was really excited about it i it you know it seemed to me that law presented power and tools for thinking about things in very clear ways and for being able to change things in society change the way people think about things it was it was a strong force for argument and persuasiveness but you didn't go into doing civil rights work certainly not professionally right away not initially no i uh after i graduated from law school i worked for a federal judge for a year which was a wonderful experience and then i went to work for one of the large law firms in los angeles ireland manila and i did mostly litigation related to the entertainment industry and to the media and it was very interesting work um but i i started also doing some what they call pro bono work and that work i found really turned me on in a way that that the other work really didn't we did one very large case where i was ahead of a team of 20 lawyers who were working to reform the the way in which housing is provided to homeless people in l.a county and got a lot of reforms done on uh inspections of those facilities and and ways of making sure that they were safe and and not filled with rodents and that sort of thing and then i did a case with a lawyer who ended up being very important in my development where we filed the first friend of the court brief with the u.s supreme court dealing with why hiv people who have hiv are disabled under federal law talk more about that who was the person there was a woman who was a lawyer at the aclu of southern california named susan mcgreevey and who i think you know i certainly do i've got my own story about and mentorship susan susan was an incredible is an incredible person she really had the ability to kind of seize me at least i've seen her do it with other people and say you have to do this this is really important nobody else can do this you really have to work on this um and it was this amazing ability to kind of get people to step up to the plate and use their talents to do stuff that was really gonna make a difference so what was the situation as well about hiv and aids that caused you both to believe that this was the way to go well there was there was this case that was on its way up to the supreme court that we noticed at a lower level that dealt with a woman who was fired from a teaching position because she had had a history of having tuberculosis and the question was was she protected under a law that prohibited discrimination by entities that received federal funding was the law at the time prohibited them from discriminating against people with disabilities and the question is well could it could a disease having a disease be a disability and would the fact that it might be contagious in certain ways preclude it being protected um and uh reagan was the president of the time and his administration was taking the position that no infectious diseases couldn't be considered disabilities um and we did this brief to the supreme court because it was becoming this was back in 1985. so it was pretty early in the epidemic that really tried to educate the court about hiv and to to kind of assuage some of their fears and make clear how it was and wasn't transmitted and why there were people who were going to be subjected to irrational discrimination and they should not be excluded from protection under this law and that's ultimately we were able to establish that right um it's been one of the things i think has really helped an incredible number of people living with aids in this country well you know it's interesting when you're talking about mcgreevy because uh when i came back from law school i was working at a firm also in los angeles a downtown firm and mcgreevey was at the aclu and asked me if i would do a pro bono case about a woman who a lesbian who was a taxi cab driver for yellow cab here in los angeles and had been fired and the the evidence sort of showed although not overwhelmingly because it was a little subtle that it was really because of her sexual orientation now of course there's no there was no law against it so we were sort of scrounging around for a theory at the time about it but uh it was susan who was she was teaching at um one of the california state universities here and teaching women and law to undergraduates and said you know i don't have time to teach this class why don't you teach it for a semester i had never even thought about teaching anything about law and of course as you know i ended up teaching there and then i started teaching in you know in law schools and for six years i was a law professor and i think it was partly that that got me interested in doing the law and social policy and probably ended up you know running for the legislature and it's it seems so accidental but i see you do the same thing in terms of mentoring people and you know going and getting them these people are very very important but again we don't really know except in hindsight you know that this is kind of what's happened to us so but you were still at the law firm doing pro bono work but that didn't that that wasn't the be-all and end-all because i know you went did you go right to the aclu yeah i i'm actually became a partner at the firm and after i became a partner i really kind of wondered okay so is this all it's all about you know i'd worked hard to try to achieve that that had been my goal um and and it really made me think you know there has to be more to life than making a lot of money um which i was at the time um now i can only remember that problem distantly um but but there has to be more than that and more than just feeling like you're doing a good job and you know what i was doing was important to the clients i was working for but it really had no lasting social importance and as i had more and more friends who were becoming sick with hiv and uh and who were dying from aids and and as i looked around at what was going on in the gay community and became more aware of the ways in which gay people needed legal protections that weren't really there yet i just felt like i wanted to do something else with my life and that in combination with how it felt to be doing that pro bono work made me start looking around and susan had ended up leaving the aclu so they needed somebody else to come work there and uh and that's where i went and how was that it was it was terrific i mean it was a big life changer it was a big life change um i worked at the aclu for seven years um doing principally lesbian rights and rights of people living with aids but also women's rights and rights of people with other disabilities and um it you know it i felt like an explosion of ideas started coming to me about what needed to be done and and it i feel very privileged to be able to get paid to do this kind of work because i find it so fulfilling and so exciting most of the time i mean i really i like getting up in the morning and and going to work and and there's this wonderful thing about really kind of trying to there's so many problems out there and having the ability to kind of decide this is what i think needs to be worked on now and must have made it easier too for you to sort of live your life as a gay man and just be sort of in in gay society is that the case yes well it was interesting um let's see a couple years after i went to ireland i met someone who i got involved with and was in a long-term relationship with who now standing the fact that i'd come out to a number of people who was a woman and she also was a lawyer and now a law professor named chris littleton she's the head of the women's studies program at ucla and teaches at the law school there and we had a wonderful relationship but it certainly was not an expected one on my part right and it's funny throughout our relationship i really kind of identified as a gay man who had happened to fall in love with a woman um and it's funny because we don't really have no people don't fit so neatly into the categories that we've set up i think in our society um but and and you know it you know i can't be too critical of my brother who was surprised because it was like confusing wait a minute you're gay but what about chris no that's true it is confusing and of course chris herself when she teaches in in women's studies in which he teaches gender and law in the law school talks about this problem of duality i mean you either are uh the sort of the basis of part of the problem in about prejudice about uh sexual orientation is that society says well you know ex could you just be exactly a man or exactly a woman we want that bright line there we want gender distinction and sexual orientation doesn't fit in terms of having that bright line gender distinction not to mention girls who are straight and want to play basketball i mean you know it's very confusing and frankly you didn't help that confusion john but you did i think make the point or help make the point that was so academic for so many people that this duality thing about you either are or you aren't and we're going to define this or that um it's it's much more uh challenging for us than that well it's hard because i do think that it's hard to do work that's about kind of identity politics without having an identity i mean there there is you know a lot of the discrimination has to do with categorizing people and then saying they're different right um and therefore should be treated differently um and and and i also think that that therefore the reaction of people who experience that discrimination and experience the kind of hostility and and subrogation that goes on is to create a culture a gay culture that that i find a lot of strength from and so it was important to me and has been important to me to identify as a gay man whatever that might mean and yet i couldn't deny that that i had these very strong feelings for this woman who is a wonderful woman and who now identifies as a bisexual who's in a committed relationship with another woman um so our lives have taken interesting paths but um i think that uh you know one of the things that's i'm finding very interesting in my work now is is looking at the ways in which sex discrimination applies to the or operates in the discrimination against lots of lesbians and gay men and how we share a lot in common with people who are transgendered because a lot of the discomfort that heterosexuals have is that we don't meet their stereotypes and they can't quite figure out well if you're in a relation if i'm in a relationship with another man who's the man and who's the woman in the relationship because that's a limited way that that they have of conceiving the way relationships work and and there's some challenge to that that they perceive that that two men could be together and be happy or that two women could be together and be happy well and did you experience sort of criticism from our community in your relationship with chris you know i never did i i experienced some puzzlement on the part of some people wait a minute you're the gay rights guy at the aclu um and you know ultimately i think it did get harder as i kind of got more and more into being a gay rights lawyer for chris and me together i mean i think that you know there were issues about kind of me identifying as gay and what that meant for her and how she felt well and also the the you were so thoroughly responsible about heterosexual privilege in terms of saying you know well you guys can be gay and i wherever you go you'll be discriminated against or you'll get a bad table or whatever but we'll walk in we'll be a regular you know couple regular and uh we won't experience it too regular but never too regular but still and chris was as i recall both of you were sort of concerned about that which many of us thought was kind of sweet actually we thought of getting married at one point and then decided that we really didn't want to do that in part because it didn't seem right when when we wouldn't have been able to get married if we had been with a different partner well it was fun having people be really surprised because chris you know if it's like john and chris and you're gay and we get there we're going to meet christopher and it wasn't christopher it was christine watching people's faces that was fun who didn't actually know you know the tree trimming parties or whatever um but you're not you and chris are not together as i heard you say earlier right um it's really after chris and i decided to separate um i met a really wonderful man who uh we just celebrated ten years together um his name's aaron aaronell and he's a doctor that made it easier when i brought him home and my parents you know i said told my parents before no it wasn't a phase [Laughter] i i i that is being being with a woman right you know being gay was not a phase yes i was with a woman but that what didn't make me really gay honestly i'm really gay um but um but that i brought home a nice jewish doctor for them uh was great and he he's been terrific um he now works uh doing research on the neurological problems of people with aids and is the co-investigator for the national national neurological aids bank where they actually look at the brains of people who've died from aids and try to see what sort of changes have occurred as a result of of the disease and you're not at the aclu any longer either no a little over six years ago i went to lambda legal defense and education fund now why would you make that change one of the things that that i didn't like as much about the aclu is i ended up working alone a lot i mean i'd have cooperating attorneys who i'd worked with but i didn't really feel that much of a sense of community it has to do with the way in which the aclu's in each community are kind of separate from one another at lambda i i knew i would feel and i have felt an incredible camaraderie with a wonderful group of lawyers just incredibly talented and dedicated group of people and it also was an opportunity to move beyond just working in southern california but to work on a more national level right now i'm responsible for all of lambda's litigation in 10 states in the west but also work a lot on kind of the national strategy on lots of issues and john i know that you and i both really devoted our lives to the law in one way or another and you certainly far more than i in this in this area but many activists i think are wary of people who just operate within the law though many of us obviously think it's a really important thing to have the law on your side how effective do you think it's been to use this uh sort of the law as one of our tools for equality i think it's been incredibly effective i mean when you know i i also do some teaching in law school and i i like doing that because it's an opportunity to kind of look back and see where we were 20 years ago as compared to where we are now and i see such a different reception of the courts to gay people and our issues and i see incredible progress that we've made and some of it comes from courts decreeing things and i think one can only make limited progress that way because if you move too quickly and the courts get too far ahead of the general public there can be a counter reaction we've seen that happen with some of these statewide initiatives but at the same time courts present a very visible and concrete way to play out in terms of looking at the real life impact of certain inequalities that is important whether you win or lose and that frequently the lawsuits are a way of telling a story that can seize people's imaginations that's happened with respect to for example the boy scout litigation that i've been involved with where we on behalf of of two different cases one in california and one was in new jersey where we sued the boy scouts on behalf of young men who had been involved in the boy scouts and then were kicked out after the boy scouts found out that the men were gay in both those cases we ultimately lost in the courts but those cases were vehicles for incredible change in public opinion i mean when we started those cases the the press reaction and the general public reaction i got was why are you attacking the boy scouts you know why are you going after just find your own thing to do and the reaction now has been why are the boy scouts picking on gay people there's been an ability through having the vehicle of litigation to to kind of bring this to the public's attention in a way that never would otherwise you know it got taken seriously because it went all the way up to the u.s supreme court right but it's really hard on the plaintiffs isn't it you talk about telling a story i mean one of the things that i've found in knowing or being able to know some of the people whose stories are being told and we have the same thing in the legislature when you bring someone as a witness and they say you know my partner was killed and i didn't get any benefits or i mean i'm i'm completely concerned about that after 9 11. it's very hard on the plaintiffs don't you think it's it you know they have to really be willing to expose something about themselves and to be subject to criticism you know it is hard and i one of the things i found particularly difficult is i've had done a lot of work over the last couple years dealing with young gay and lesbian people who either were subjected to harassment or or violent assaults while they were in high school and the schools did not really respond appropriately or who are just trying to find like a a gay straight alliance at their school and this and the schools trying to prevent them from doing that and you know being a plaintiff in this kind of litigation puts an incredible limelight on you and it has all sorts of effects upon people and particularly for young people it's very hard and it requires that when we think about taking on a case we have lots of long discussions with the people who are thinking about being plaintiffs about what this means and i'm not sure it's easy to really get people to understand the changes that this may bring about in their life and particularly for a number of the clients i've had who you know well they got so involved in it they ended up becoming lawyers that's scary yes but you know it must be very difficult because we lose a number of our cases and especially young people or you know young men who've gone all the way to be eagle scouts and they think well this is discrimination can anyone wonder that it's discrimination if i'm good enough one day and then i tell something about myself and i'm not they must expect to win often even if if you tell them look be prepared you know may not this is may not be our time yet it it is hard i mean i think the process since it takes usually several years to get to a result does turn a number of them into you know what i sometimes call accidental activists in the same way that happened to candice gingrich you know some that that they kind of fell into becoming activists because of the attention about about them and that process i does i do think helps people understand a little bit more but it is hard it i think there's i mean i feel it even as the lawyer and and so it's not my story that's being told but when you lose there is this sense of rejection um that i only am able to ultimately deal with by putting it in context and it's a lot easier to put something in context but it's not your life well you see a timeline on other kinds of civil rights and the you know the cases that were brought and lost and the cases that were brought and partially won but never enforced or whatever i think people think well when we won you know the law is going to change uh we got this bill through the law is going to change but it's it's really very difficult you know it is a process and i think that the law interacts with media with politics with with just kind of generally what's going on society as an evolving process where there's lots of kind of back and forth effects among um all of the changes that go on there but um you know i do think you know example is is this case that's been going on in california involving a woman who's whose lover uh was mauled to death um by the that was the dog up in san francisco and um her name is sharon smith and their partner was diane whipple well uh national center for lesbian rights filed a lawsuit suing for wrongful death that that sharon should be entitled to some compensation for losing the financial support and companionship of her partner and there was a whole issue about whether california law allows someone who's not married to their partner to be able to sue well that lawsuit again i think was very significant in us getting ab25 passed the law that that governor davis signed recently that um that specifically is amending that statute to say that domestic partners can sue for wrongful death and again it's kind of my point that that the the courts present a vehicle for spotlighting injustice and sometimes actually the the law sees something coming down the pike i mean it was it's been sort of just the opposite with another aspect of that bill that has to do with adoption right because we have two as you know two different kinds of adoption laws in california and i think it's very similar in other states where there's sort of the step parent adoption you marry the biological parent and then you can be the second parent who adopts without that person giving up their parental right then you have sort of the stranger adoption where all the parents have to give up their parental rights and someone else adopts the child for our community neither one of those worked and california's been allowing us as you know to have a sort of a median category you know where we could be a second parent who adopted we can't get married so but we have committed to this child and to this partner and so several adoptions were granted actually we think somewhere between ten and twenty thousand well adoptions and this is more important to what may be happening next because the an appellate court not the supremes uh indicated that they didn't find anything in the statute that allowed such a result and of course it places in jeopardy uh so many uh of the adoptions maybe right i think it's important that people who have done second parent adoptions not panic at the moment because the decision's not final and there are petitions for a hearing being filed in a petition for review with the california supreme court and we're hoping that this will be fixed because it's a horrifying decision one of the things i find particularly horrifying about it was the lack of apparent concern by the majority of this court of appeal on what they were doing to existing adoptions it's a fundamental principle of adoption law that once an adoption's been entered it's final and that people really can't go in years later and try to question whether that adoption was properly done or not and the court seemed to say oh well you know what this piece of legislation did is say that now domestic partners can do step parent adoptions we're glad that we at least have that i mean that that's going to well i'm not saying it takes place of these other adoptions but it does show some legislative intent it seems right on our part on the governor's part to say you know what i mean we think this is just fine well what's crazy is really all the branches of government before other courts the legislature by evincing intent in passing this bill and the executive branch by the governor having told the department of social services to really go on record as permitting these adoptions to take care of the best interest of the child right right and and generally it is because generally the child is living with their legal parent and the parent's partner already so allowing the adoption to take place creates the legal bond with somebody who with whom there's usually already a psychological and emotional bond makes it possible for that child to be on that person's health insurance for them to continue to raise the child if anything happens to their legal parent makes it possible for them to take the child to the hospital and sign for consents and do all sorts of other things that are necessary when you're doing child raising and i you know it's just very disturbing to me that and i think reflective of the fact that we still don't have equal dignity granted to our relationships um that that makes us vulnerable and makes it so important why we continue to fight for the freedom to marry because i really feel that until we get that there's going to be incredible inequality perpetuated again and again against members of our community well i wish everyone had been at your 10th anniversary party to hear aaron sing to you i mean no one would have doubted that it was lovely so filled with love and sondheim isn't even my favorite composer i mean you know i could see that and it was just it was so sweet but i mean it would be very difficult for people uh who would go out of their way to see us to really see us so that we're not invisible to see our relationships and i have a hunch that that's the other thing about this visibility so many coming out so many people being in long-term relationships raising children together that it's very difficult now for many people in our state at least to say gee i never saw one i never met one i don't know anybody and it's been a great virtue i think of a lot of people coming out your relationship is exemplary of you know of this kind of commitment there's another legal issue though i wanted to talk to you about and that goes to the military which has been one of those issues that's been rattling around for us for a long time and now here we are at war again suddenly everyone was saying well i heard that they lifted the you know the the ban or whatever and now they're not going to be kicking people out uh on the basis of their sexual orientation then i heard no no you have to read the statute very closely it said we're going to keep all the bad apples in except for the gay people they can still be kicked out i mean that's what the air force is doing um that what happened was that the the the secretary of defense issued an order saying that it was up to each of the branches to decide whether they wanted to institute what's called a stop loss order and that means during this period of military engagement we won't prosecute discharges it doesn't mean that you can come out even if they were to to have a stop stop-loss order that applied to gay people um because it just means we won't do it while we need you to fight the war but afterwards we could discharge you and that actually happened during the gulf war um people were allowed came out and we're and then they were discharged um and i know it makes your blood boil but what's what's frightening to me was the air force said oh well we will not prosecute discharges except for gay people those were still going to throw them out um in the navy and the army it appears at the moment they're they're not at least putting this as very high priority but it's really still not safe for people in the military to come out and that you know the military is our largest employer in the united states and it is paid for by our tax dollars and it is continuing to discriminate and i find that so incredibly offensive that you know the government that that particularly these times where many of us are feeling very patriotic that we are still being told we can't be who we are um well but it is a it's a very powerful tool it seems to me for dehumanizing a community and it's not by accident you say to them you may not marry which is um the way we we allow human beings to marry we don't allow you guys to marry we allow human beings to serve in the military although it always seemed to me that taking these young men at the age of 18 19 was a good way of saying we'll take young i'll just use the term cannon fodder and i was in vietnam so i don't know that i'm so sorry that my young men in my community serve but it is a way of dehumanizing us to say look this is an honor we make it an honor in society to serve and you can't have that honor and that's another way that we'll make certain that no one respects you i think one always has to be careful when drawing parallels to to the experience of of of african americans in this country but it is the case that those ways of dehumanizing play themselves out over and over against different minority groups and um you know it was the case that that slaves were not allowed to marry legally um and then you know until um 1967 uh african-americans were not allowed to marry white people uh and it was the same with military service same in military service that they had they either were not allowed to join or were kept separate and so we see those same sort of ways of dehumanizing people playing themselves out again and again but that was the poignancy to me of of the movie glory the long struggle for inclusion in terms of full respect and humanity of being allowed to serve in the military and then of course being put at the head of a uh a a group of soldiers who were just going to be blown away essentially you know in the in in front i i'm not saying you know i'm an anti-militarist myself and i understand that but i guess my view and it is funny if you had told me when i actually made the decision to kind of give up all the money i was making and instead go work on lesbian gay rights full-time that i would spend the principal part of my career working to help uh gay people get into the military the institution of marriage the boy scouts and employment in the lapd you know you name try to name any more conservative institutions than those you know that that's what it was about but but what it really is about is that those institutions were both engaging in the most adamant and express out there discrimination and in many ways we're creating the most harm because those are the institutions that kind of stand for what it means to be an american and we were being systematically excluded from each of them you know you couldn't you couldn't defend your country in war or or in peace time in the police department and you couldn't be in in the country's largest youth group and you couldn't be in the in the main institution that that um you know is it defines family life in america and so you know it has been critical to do each of those things but but for me it's about not whether i would want to do each of those things but do people have choice and are we being excluded unfairly well sure i mean that's when we say i'll fight for equality we're sort of stuck because we are required then to fight for equality as the people who want it kind of define it and not whether we say oh you don't want to be equal to those people you know you might get killed and it is a problem i mean part of the whole issue of the struggle for respect for our families you know is well should we should we seek marriage or should there be some alternatives for people who don't really like that institution um and i've been i've always tried to work for both you know i felt like well there are some things that i think are only going to come from marriage and so it's very important that we have that but there are some people who may not want to get married for one reason or another and that doesn't mean that they should have no rights well and it's also i think too easy for us not to treat the other person fairly if we're not allowed to marry i mean it's sort of a flip side of yes it's not a great privilege to be able to go through divorce but we do say as a state look there's just certain lines of fairness in terms of spousal support in terms of child support in terms of community property or in other states marital property and the equal division of it or the fear and just division of it and we go into a relationship and maybe it doesn't work out and the rich one says bye i have no responsibility to you because good thing the law didn't let us marry and i always thought that was really a terrible thing for us to be able to simply not have that responsibility as well sort of well you know this case that we were talking about before the one the second parent adoption case one of the things that i find shocking is the case involves two lesbians who were really kind of leaders in our community uh sharon silverstein and annette friskoff and sharon and annette met at harvard business school getting their mbas wrote a book together about lesbians in the corporate world kind of they did a second parent adoption together of their first child and they were doing it of their second child when they broke up and then sharon took the position that these adoptions are not permitted under california law i find that just unacceptable i find it unacceptable for people to be members of our community to be out there giving other people advice about what needs to be done in our community to to try to take advantage of things when it suits them and then to take advantage of the homophobia that's still out there in the courts to to to do what what suits them at a particular time but it's not unheard of i was a family law attorney before i was a law professor people do unfair things you know when they break up or even when they get divorced but i i i i would rather that we would have the same responsibilities it's not so much entering into this institution of marriage as though it's such it's the only privilege that we should want but it didn't work so well for them so maybe we shouldn't want it i think we should want the protections that the state provides just as we would provide certain protections or benefits that come along with uh with marriage economically even while you're married right um and it is interesting that we're sort of eking them out one at a time the question about domestic partners for instance i was thinking the other day well we allow seniors to register as domestic partners there are certain requirements in terms of what you share but it seems to me that friends over the age of 65 may want to register companions you know non-sexual companions to register as domestic partners to gain this kind of uh i i can help you in terms of your health i can be there as your conservator if you lose it you know whatever that it would be a useful model for older people who have never had a way to commit legally to each other just as friends and you know sort of taking care of each other in their golden years you know i don't see how the government or society loses it all by us having ways of recognizing and even honoring commitment of one person to another person and i do believe that there should be multiple ways that that can be done um you know it used to be that there were some people who men and women who got married to one another in order to be not because they had a romantic relationship but because it suited them economically or provided that sort of someone to take care of them and that was what their relationship was about and we didn't go question them about that you know and so why shouldn't that be equally available in some way to a same-sex couple that decide to do that or two friends of the same sex well you know we've actually in our community it seems to me have we've led the way sometimes without even meaning to about these concepts of fairness or of common sense commitment to each other because we've had to build our relationships virtually out of no legal protection at all when you don't have the rules applying to you you have to make things up as you go along and sometimes that leads to some great creativity and and new new ways uh and and i think it's important that those be respected at the same time as we're seeking full equality under the law so what do you see for our community kind of next in the legal arena and then i want to kind of take a broader look maybe at that well i mean i i think we're seeing advances on a number of fronts the rights of young people the rights of the elderly we're increasingly seeing you know as our our activists get older um you know there's a there's a focus on some of these issues about what does help it happen to seniors when they need assisted living facilities or nursing homes and and what are those policies i think that there's going to continue to be a tremendous look at at relationships and a fight for marriage uh continued exploration of things like civil unions or reciprocal beneficiary relationships or domestic partnerships um and uh you know i i think that there's a lot of work to be done kind of again in exploring what happens as we raise families those are all very very important issues we still have a lot of work to do in fighting employment and housing discrimination we still only have 11 states in the country that actually have laws prohibiting employment discrimination and you know there's still a lot of work to do but but we've made tremendous advances if you look back just 10 years you look back 20 years it is a very different legal landscape than it used to be how do you think we've done as a community just in sort of winning the the culture war as it were in in this country anyway you know i i i do feel we're winning there too i mean i um it's hard having having you know lost the knight initiative um the proposition in california that uh said that we were not going to allow marriages and same-sex marriages that might be permitted in other states to be recognized here it lost that by 61 percent um to feel like oh we're there but um but i think that just shows how much more we have to do i think the fact that we've broken through in the media both in news coverage and in tv and movies and the music industry gives me a lot of hope because you know frankly when i was growing up there were there were like no gay people on the scene that i could really have much of a clue about what it meant to be gay and i think one of the wonderful things about working with some of the young people that i've worked with it's like it is amazing this kind of lack of conflict internal conflict in some of these 14 15 16 year olds who are lesbian gay and proud of it and not going to take anything from anybody else and and that gives me incredible hope so john as you think of this first half of your life which is really sort of what it is hopefully you know knock wood please are you are you happy you made these choices i'm very happy um i i feel very lucky to be able to get up in the morning and do work that i care passionately about and i i really have been amazed at the my colleagues the the people that i work with both at lambda and other organizations um the level of selflessness the level of dedication to this work um there's some incredibly wonderful people and and i just you know i i really do feel like it is incredibly fulfilling to be able to spend your life doing stuff that you really care about and it's interesting people say to me well sheila are you having fun up there in sacramento and i you know me i it's hard for me to lie but i don't want to go into big long explanations but i i like to say to them it's you know mostly it's not fun like fun fun might be going to a movie or going to the beach or you know playing with kids but there's a great joy to me which is different right no it's not it's not a game it's not it's not that it's um and and there are days when um when it's very difficult there are days when you just can't believe that the opposing counsel did something in this case or that that a court reacted in a certain way to to a presentation that you made but but there is a sense and fulfillment is the best way that i can give a sense of of knowing that you're doing what you should be doing and that it's you sort of using you up i mean i don't mean totally burn out i and that's different but i have all of these things that i can do and i uh we've had this conversation and i think i certainly feel like my job requires me to use all of those parts of myself that i've developed and i know at least i think you feel pretty much the same well one of the great things about doing this kind of work as opposed to when i was in private law firm is my my days are filled with so many different kinds of work i mean i'm not just a litigator i'm writing up ads and um doing things with the media and giving other lawyers advice and giving people and community-based organizations advice and giving legislators and their aides advice and kind of have feel like i have my fingers and lots of different things but at the same time feel like it's great to where where the client in all these cases in everything i do is my community that feels great well our hour is up i can't believe it goes by so fast for me so thank you john davidson thank you very much for uh being with us um those of you who are thinking gee i don't know maybe i might like a career doing something to uh as my colleagues say kick the can down the the street a little bit on the rights of our community and i would say that if you get such a job get used to it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you