INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEWS
John Flanagan
An Interview with
LORRI JEAN
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Greg Hernandez (greginhollywood)
LGBT Rights Advocate
Lorri L. Jean (LAW ’82) is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center. She was the lead plaintiff in Gay Rights Coalition of Georgetown University Law Center v. Georgetown University, a landmark federal lawsuit that compelled the University to give the gay rights group equitable access to benefits as a student group because of the sexual orientation protections of the D.C. Human Rights Act. She now serves as CEO of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, the world’s largest LGBT organization with more than 300 full time employees serving over a quarter million people each year, a position she has held since 1993 with a short break while serving as executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force from 2001 to 2003. Before 1993, Ms. Jean spent ten years as an attorney for FEMA, where she was the highest-ranking openly gay or lesbian person in the federal government until her retirement from government office. John Flanagan had the chance to chat with Ms. Jean about her life, the landmark discrimination lawsuit, and her work as an activist for LGBT rights.
What did you know about Georgetown’s position on LGBT rights before you arrived? We see a lot of stories about gay, lesbian, or transgender students at relatively conservative universities who are agitating for acceptance and then they fall under criticism for not recognizing the character of their university before they arrive. How would you respond to that criticism? One of the things that was very interesting that came up in the litigation, actually, was that the catalog that I got from Georgetown when I was considering going to law school did not even mention that it was a Catholic institution. I don’t even know if I realized if it was a Catholic institution. I’m not Catholic, it wasn’t in the law school catalog that I got, and this was actually introduced in evidence in the very first trial at the D.C. Superior Court level. And certainly there was nothing about LGBT anything in these catalogs. More to the point, when we were organizing the LGBT student group, it never occurred to us that this would be an issue because I, for example, was involved in the Women’s Rights Collective, which was an approved student group at the Law Center that was regularly involved in prochoice activities and that was never an issue. So it never occurred to us that because the Catholic Church, a separate entity from Georgetown University, had an issue with homosexuality that that might determine whether a student group that was fighting for equal civil rights would be a problem.
Do you think it would matter if it were explicitly stated at the outset? Well, you know, the Georgetown case is a lot more complicated because Georgetown received huge amounts of government funding, including from the District of Columbia, which required compliance with D.C. law.
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At the time, the District of Columbia had one of the strongest human rights ordinances in the country which included sexual orientation. What we said at the time was, “Look, Georgetown can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to use religion and now say it for the first time, when you didn’t say it to the women, when you didn’t say it to any of the other groups that might have been doing things that were not consistent with Catholic Church doctrine, if you’re going to let that govern, then you can’t have it both ways, you can’t also then get all this government funding. I guess I feel like if they advertised that this was an organization that did not in any way support LGBT rights and did not welcome LGBT students, then, I don’t know, maybe it would be different. But I sort of feel that the nature of progressive change is that people within institutions are the most effective change agents. So maybe somebody reads that and they go there, but what happens to the student who didn’t read it or what happens to people who didn’t realize it applied to them and suddenly then it does? Does that mean they never get to advocate for what’s right? By that theory, black students would have never been able to advocate civil rights on their campuses because they should have known what the environment was when they went there. Women couldn’t have advocated. That’s the antithesis of academic freedom if you ask me.
You asked for University recognition and support for your group. Were you expecting the University to endorse the organization or simply to allow it access to certain benefits? There was no endorsement that was given by the University to any student group, and so we thought we’d just get the approval through the normal process. In fact, we went through the entire law school
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process and got all the approvals from the student bar association, the faculty senate. It never was an issue. Our group was completely approved, and then it went to [University President Fr. Timothy Healy] for what everyone presumed was just going to be rubber stamp approval. When we started this group, we never thought there was going to be an issue with it. We never for one moment anticipated a controversy and then suddenly after we’d gone through all the approvals – we were just following all the bureaucratic red tape – Fr. Healy vetoed it and it shocked everybody. During the actual trial, and at various levels of this litigation, we always made it clear that we didn’t expect University endorsement because they didn’t ever give it to anyone else. What we did expect was equal treatment among all the student organizations, which included the ability to use rooms for meetings, there was a small stipend that was given to recognized student groups, they provided office spaces for student groups – you know, those sorts of things. Once Healy vetoed it, though, we were shocked into this adversarial posture.
How would you describe your legal strategy? What made you think that you had a viable case when Fr. Healy denied you? Because the human rights ordinance in D.C. was so strong and because of all the funding that Georgetown had gotten from the D.C. government. We felt that, “Hey, you have to comply with D.C. law and D.C. law says that you can’t discriminate against us.” Frankly, when we first decided to get a lawyer, we thought naively that the University would change its course rather than go through litigation. They would realize, “Hey look, these students aren’t going to take this lying down and the law is clear.” So we thought it’d never actually go forward.
May 2012
We thought that the mere threat of a lawsuit would be enough. We underestimated the homophobia of members of Georgetown’s staff and board and the internalized homophobia of Fr. Healy. He was a closeted gay man and well known to be. I always felt like that fact led him to pursue this with far more vehemence than he likely would have otherwise.
I’ve never heard that about Fr. Healy before? Where had you heard that?
We knew people who had been in relationships with him. He was pretty well known in some quiet circles of gay men.
Did you know that when you went to go seek his approval?
I did not know at the time that it had to go to Fr. Healy to get approval. We went through all the steps at the Law Center and that’s all that we thought had to happen. Then suddenly it was vetoed from on high. As you know, the law school’s all the way across town, so I don’t even know if we realized it had to go to Fr. Healy for approval. Clint Hockenberry, who was my co-plaintiff, and I and an undergrad we recruited to join us went into this because the undergraduate organization was trying to get organized at the same time. Clint might have known Fr. Healy was gay, but I didn’t until after all of this happened. Then afterwards everyone was talking about how hypocritical it was that this gay man was doing this.
Did you experience any pushback from administrators or students while you were litigating? Did you ever feel intimidated?
What is the issue that most divides the LGBT community? You know, things have really been changing rapidly. Twelve years ago I would have said marriage because there were huge swathes of the population in our community that felt that we should be pushing for that, they weren’t sure that they even wanted it. But I don’t think that’s the case anymore. One of the things that divides our community today is how much support, if any, we should be giving to politicians who continue to say we should be treated as less than. There are people, like me, who draw a fine line and say, “I may have to vote for people who don’t support full equality, but I won’t give them a dime.” There are others who will say that this is just one issue, so they’ll support those people. For example, some of the Log Cabin Republicans will support candidates who are clearly anti-gay. They might argue that Obama is anti-gay. Certainly he does not support our full and complete equality, so that’s why I didn’t give him a dime. But it’s not part of his platform that we are sinful and evil and to be denied equal rights, whereas there are some Republicans and Democrats who believe that. I guess that’s one issue, but I’m sort of feeling like our community on the key civil rights issues is fairly together these days. You know, there used to be a big debate about transgender rights, and HRC [Human Rights Campaign] really bore a lot of the brunt of that, but they’ve come along now too.
What would you say are the essential media,
rhetorical, and strategic tools of an LGBT Completely! There came a point, and by this point – I rights activist? For media, I would say social media has becan’t remember if this was my third year or whether it was it was my second year because come a huge tool in our arsenal because we can it’s been so long now and this went on for nine reach so many people so quickly. I think the reaction to the passage of years – that the administration tried to blame a significant tuition increase on us and to suggest Proposition 8 in California was a perfect example. that tuition had gone up because of the cost of The community got incredibly angry all over and when I organized the very first march and the litigation. And then when they did that, of course demonstration in front of the Mormon temple there were a bunch of students who said, “Oh, here in Los Angeles and word spread about come on, that’s complete malarkey!” But there what was happening via the Internet, and there were some students who then began to confront were demonstrations in front of temples across some of us in the halls and say, “Hey guys, look the country and the world. That’s an example of what you’re causing! I can’t afford this!” So, there things that could never have happened before. And I also think of China because we have was that. And then Fr. Healy himself pressed us. I saw a China partnership. The LGBT movement in China is just getting started. him at the law school and went They’re in their first decade, and as up to him and tried to engage they were getting started they had MORE ONLINE him about how important it was decades of strategies and tactics and Read the full interview at to stop fighting this, to settle it, progress to view on the Internet, COUNTERPOINTMAGAZINE.ORG. to let us be. Then he poked me even though they couldn’t see it in in the chest and told me that he would blackball me and that I would never their country. They could see what was happening around the world and it has impacted them. So I’d practice law in that town if I didn’t give up. So, of course I felt completely intimidated, say that’s the most important media tool. From a rhetorical perspective, I think that our but again I was so young and naïve that I didn’t stop to think whether he could make good on greatest strength is coming out and talking to colleagues, families, and neighbors about who we his threat.
counterpointmagazine.ORG
Counterpoint
are and our lives. Now the vast majority of people in the country all have someone in their lives who they know who is LGBT. That was never the case before. When I was growing up, you would ask people and nobody would say they knew anybody who was LGBT. Now virtually everybody will say that they know someone. Being able say, “We’re your friends, we’re your family, we’re your neighbors,” I mean, that’s incredibly powerful. Strategically, I think that the way the fight for the freedom to marry has proceded has been fascinating to watch. It’s been very strategic because we haven’t just gone at it in one way. We’ve fought it in the legislature. We’ve fought it in the courts. When the first plaintiffs wanted to start pushing the marriage case in Hawaii, everybody was against them doing it. As a result, that moved forward domestic partnership rights. So, every step of the way, even though there have been some big internal disputes about it, we’ve tried to cover the waterfront. If we couldn’t get “the whole enchilada,” we’ve just pushed for what we could get, never losing sight of the ultimate goal, which is full and complete equality under the law.
The Human Rights Campaign, which you mentioned a while ago on the transgender issue, has come under criticism for being overly centrist and enabling the Democratic Party and the president in their lackluster support for LGBT issues, particularly marriage. How do you balance the need for radical change with working within the present legal and political infrastructure? What is the role of civil disobedience and protest in the LGBT movement? I think that all successful social change movements have people who are working on the inside and people who are rattling chains from the outside. That is, civil disobedience at the far left of the continuum to quiet insiders at the right end of the continuum. In fact, I feel that one of the weaknesses of our movement today is that we have lost that “in your face,” radical contingent. It simply does not exist in a significant degree anymore. Where we did have such a contingent in a very significant way was in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic when ACT UP was formed and Queer Nation was formed and organizations like that who, literally, demonstrated, did die-ins, who used all kinds of civilly disobedient tactics to bring attention to the issues and to bring about systemic change. One of the things that happens when you have that strong radical component to your movement is that it makes the people in the middle seem so much more reasonable. Our movement continuum now is much more out of balance. What people were asking for twenty years ago which was, in some respects, much more in the middle of the continuum, begins to look like a far left demand because there is no far left anymore. CP
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