Oral History Program Kate Kendell Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon & Lorrie Rands 17 December 2019 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Kate Kendell Interviewed by Sarah Langsdon & Lorrie Rands 17 December 2019 Copyright © 2022 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Beyond Suffrage Project was initiated to examine the impact women have had on northern Utah. Weber State University explored and documented women past and present who have influenced the history of the community, the development of education, and are bringing the area forward for the next generation. The project looked at how the 19th Amendment gave women a voice and representation, and was the catalyst for the way women became involved in the progress of the local area. The project examines the 50 years (1870-1920) before the amendment, the decades to follow and how women are making history today. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Kendell, Kate, an oral history by Sarah Langsdon & Lorrie Rands, 17 December 2019, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Kate Kendell 17 December 2019 1 Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Kate Kendell, conducted on December 17, 2019, in the Stewart Library, at Weber State University, by Sarah Langsdon and Lorrie Rands. In this interview, Kate discusses her life, her memories, and the impact of the 19th Amendment. SL: Alright, so it is December 17, 2019. I am Sarah Langsdon and I am here interviewing Kate Kendell as part of the Women 2020 Project. Kate, thank you for coming first of all. KK: Oh, it’s my pleasure. SL: So we’re going to start at the beginning, so tell us where and when you were born? KK: I was born in Portland, Oregon on April 15, 1960. SL: Okay, so tell us about your parents. Who were they, what did they do? KK: My parents were then Afton Dean and Leonard Dean. Leonard Dean was my biological father, but when I was two and a half, almost three, and my sister was about a year, he died of colon cancer. So my mom, within pretty short order, maybe not the best decision, married my step-father Max Kendell and she became Afton Kendell. That’s the only father I’ve ever known. He is the father who raised both me and my sister Sharon. We moved from Oregon to Utah when I was about four-years-old. SL: Okay, so what was it like growing up in Utah during that time? 2 KK: I actually loved growing up in Utah. We lived in Ogden the entirety of my youth, and well into my adulthood actually. We lived in North Ogden, right across the street from the cemetery which creeped a lot of people out when I would tell them that, but I loved it because it was this open playground. We would go right across the street, that’s where I learned to ride a bike. The school was right up the street. We could walk to school, then I could walk to junior high. It just felt like there was a lot of freedom. It was at the time where kids, especially in the summer, leave at nine o’clock in the morning and your mom would say, “Be home for dinner,” and you would just traverse the entire neighborhood. There was maybe a two by two by two mile limit, but I went everywhere and loved it and was very much a tomboy and got to really be a tomboy with that kind of freedom. SL: So when you were a young girl, who were some of the women you looked up to and why? KK: I looked up to my mom and always did my entire life until her death because she just exuded love and optimism and positivity. I never ever felt unloved by her. From my earliest memory, I felt like I was special even in her eyes. I didn’t really have a sense of other people to look up to until I was probably more a young girl and then it was really teachers, it was some of my church leaders. I grew up Mormon, I’m fond of saying, “Good girl gone bad.” But I loved and admired women who led and who had opinions and who engaged in conversation. I was always attracted to and engaged with older women. My mom had a lot of older women friends and I remember I would just hang out with them, listening to their conversation and being a part of it, even 3 when I was six or seven. I always found myself wanting to be in those circles, where women were talking. Then I would hang out with my boy friends who were my age who would do rough and tumble stuff. As I think about the seeds of understanding my sexual orientation, it began with being very intellectually drawn to women and their conversations. SL: Interesting. So where did you go to high school then? KK: I went to high school at Weber High. We moved from North Ogden when I was about eight to a part of a subdivision in Pleasant View called Majestic Heights, which is right up the hill above Weber High School. I loved that Alma Mater. SL: Your mom and step-father, were they very encouraging for you to pursue an education? KK: Well, my mom was very, very loving. My father was more the disciplinarian and hardcore and a little bit of a rageaholic. I loved my father, the only father I’ve ever known was Max and he definitely provided well for our family. But he had his own challenges, I think, as being the youngest of eight kids with not a lot of love in his childhood, so he didn’t know how to really nurture or love. He loved by buying things and by supporting the family and bringing home a paycheck. He also was not at all intellectual, I don’t ever remember seeing him reading a newspaper, let alone a book. I don’t remember deeply political or intellectual conversations. I went to school because everybody went to school, I don’t really remember my parents pushing me for academic excellence, except that they gave three dollars for an ‘A,’ two dollars for a ‘B,’ and you even got a dollar for a ‘C’ in my 4 household, which as a parent, I would never reward a ‘C’ grade. Education was not prioritized in my household at all as a young child. SL: Did your mom ever work or was she more of a homemaker? KK: My mom was a homemaker up until we were in high school, then she went to work outside the home. I love the fact that she was there every morning and made breakfast for us when we got up and was there when we got home, I feel like that is a real treat for a young kid. Young kids do fine without that, my kids are grown and they did not have stay-at-home parents and they turned out just fine, but I appreciated that my mom was able to do that and my dad could provide for the family. I also love that when we got to a certain age my mom could pursue something other than being a homemaker and have her own career pursuits. SL: So what did she end up going into? KK: Well, she was a secretary for a while, then she worked in a dentist office, and then she was an office manager. It was mostly administrative assistant and office manager work. My mother had the kind of personality that just lit up the room everywhere she walked in, so people just wanted her to be the front of the house wherever that was, whether it was at the dentist office or whether it was an office environment, because she just drew people in. SL: Okay, so you graduate from high school, where do you go to college? KK: I graduated from high school not sure that I was going to go to college, because I didn’t know how I was going to go to college. I told my dad I wanted to go to 5 college and he said, “Well, hope you know I’m not paying for it.” I thought, “Oh, okay, well that’s a little bit of a wrinkle.” I missed the first semester, what would have been my freshman year in college, and I remember vividly getting a call from the then debate coach at Weber State, then college. I’d been a debater in high school and had done well and loved it and he called me and was recruiting me to come be on the debate team at Weber State and they would give me a scholarship. I remember thinking, “Yes, I definitely want to say yes to this.” I started the next semester and ended up on a debate scholarship through my time at Weber State College. SL: What did you pursue as your academic path? KK: When I got to college, and looking back and having a son who is just about to graduate from college and a daughter who is just about to enter college, I had zero idea what I was doing when I registered for college. I had no academic counseling at all. I don’t think anybody in my high school thought I was going to go to college. I was not a particularly outstanding student, I was a good debater, but I wasn’t a great student. I didn’t have high grades, so no one even pulled me in to say, “Hey, have you thought about college and where would you like to go? This is what you do, this is how you register for classes.” I went through the catalog for the first, literally, two years and would just sign up for every class that looked interesting to me. I ended up at the end of my sophomore year, woefully short on the credits that I needed to actually graduate but I ended up graduating with a double major in English and Political Science because those were all the courses that I loved 6 and took. But it was completely by accident, and it took me an extra year to graduate because I had not fulfilled my requirements. But you know what? I wouldn’t change a thing. Looking back makes me realize how little my parents knew about what it meant to have a kid go to college, I was the first to go to college in my family, and how little I knew about how to navigate that. It didn’t even occur to me to ask questions about how to do it. SL: So after you graduated from Weber, you went on and got a J.D., is that correct? KK: I did. After I graduated from Weber, I did go directly to the University of Utah Law School and got my J.D. there. SL: What were some of the challenges, if any, did you face while getting that degree? KK: I loved law school so much. I know there are lots of students and I have friends of mine in my class who hated law school. Frankly, I couldn’t believe I was there. I felt incredibly lucky to be in law school. I wanted to be a lawyer since I was a teenager when I had this very, very amazing current events teacher in eighth grade, but I never thought I was going to be able to do it. In fact, I remember when I told my dad that I was going to go to law school his response was, “Oh, so you’re going to be a professional student.” So there really was zero support for pursuing education and certainly not higher education. I just felt like I had to pinch myself every day, I loved it. It was challenging academically because I’d never been a very rigorous student, but I did certainly fine and well enough and I loved the subject matter, I loved the Socratic method of the questions, I made great friends there. The biggest challenge for me was that I was not out as a 7 lesbian in law school, even though I was in a relationship that lasted eleven years. My oldest daughter was a year old when I met her mom. So I essentially had a family and was not out in law school because this was in the mid-1980s. I was no profile in courage, but I also didn’t feel like I wasn’t going to be able to get a job if people knew that I was a lesbian. I had a few close friends who knew, there were a couple of lesbians in my class and to this day I’m still great friends with them, but I kept it a secret from everyone else and that was the biggest challenge. SL: Since you brought it up, when did you come out and what was that experience like? KK: I came out to myself—It’s interesting, I came out first as a feminist and I remember a discussion I had with a history professor at Weber State, Gene Sessions, who I loved and he was a big progressive Mormon. I remember going and talking to him and saying, “Look, I just can’t do it,” ‘cause we’d have discussions sort of back and forth and he said, “The Church needs you. The Church needs women like you.” I finally just said, and I didn’t tell him about the lesbian part, but I said, “Gene, I just can’t do it, somebody else is going to have to do it. First of all, I don’t believe. I don’t have a testimony. I don’t believe the Gospel, and I just think that this is really bad for women, generally, and I can’t be a part of it,” so that’s when I left the Church. I think that had to be a precursor to me really coming out to myself as a lesbian because the Church then, and now to some degree, was very condemnatory of anything other than heterosexual identity. I did that around eighteen, nineteen, pretty much came out to myself 8 about the same time, a few friends knew, certainly the woman, my first lover-partner, she knew. But I really thought that we were the only lesbians in Utah for a long time until I started to get more of a community. Finally, my real coming out was when I came out to my mom when I was about twenty-two, when I was involved with my oldest daughter Emily’s mom. You just can’t be in the closet with close family members when you have a kid. It just wasn’t possible. Coming out to my mom was one of the most affirming experiences of my life, I didn’t know what it was going to be like but she was amazing. From that point on, even though I wasn’t out in law school, I was actually very comfortable in my own skin as a lesbian, even though I knew I had to navigate a bigger world. I didn’t feel shame, I didn’t feel like there was anything wrong with me. SL: Do you think your mom had a harder time with you leaving the Church than she did with you coming out? KK: That is a great question. Did she have a harder time with me leaving the Church than coming out? I think she did. I think she would’ve preferred that I stay in the Church and even be a lesbian, she’d probably been fine with that. Up until my mom’s death, she still was a devout Mormon, had a very deep belief in the Gospel, and I think it broke her heart a bit when I left the Church. I think you’re right, as I think about it, that probably continued to nag her because she really believed the Gospel, so if she really believes the Gospel, she believes I’m not going to be with her after I die. I think she came to terms with that because I remember asking her, “How do you reconcile your love for your testimony and your love for me?” She said, “God gave me you and He gave me my testimony 9 and I know I’m supposed to love you both.” I think she figured God’s got it figured out here and the doctrine of Mormonism is probably wrong about who’s in and who’s out of being able to be in the afterlife. SL: Interesting. So after you graduated with your law degree, what was your first job? KK: My first job, and this is where I feel like I’ve been hit with the lucky stick many, many times, was at what was then the largest firm in the state of Utah. It was called VanCott Bagley. They had a big office in Salt Lake and then they had a satellite office in Ogden. They hired me knowing I lived in Ogden and I worked mostly out of the Ogden office. It was a fantastic experience, made me a much better lawyer than I think anything else I would’ve done, and really positioned me for my next career moves. After about three years there, and again I wasn’t out, I knew I had to leave. Of a hundred lawyers, and maybe once you add support staff in, two hundred staff total, there was not one openly gay person and I thought, “I can’t do this.” Plus, I found myself being bored with the work, it didn’t speak to me. I didn’t care whether Corporation B or Corporation A won a lawsuit. When I started having those feelings, that’s when I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to go,” but I very much appreciate the learnings there and the partners who mentored me. I wouldn’t change that either. SL: Did you find it difficult being a lawyer and the hours and everything that goes into that and being a mom and a wife? KK: I’ve been so fortunate that the women I’ve been involved with when we had kids, and this would be my relationship with Lori and her daughter, our daughter Emily. 10 She just knew this is what it took, and even Emily, I think, at a young age, understood there was something else going on. I loved the first year of my law school class because torts is one of the classes that you take within your first year of law school. A tort is where something bad has happened to someone and someone has to be held responsible for it, so figuring out who’s held responsible for this bad thing and how do you hold them responsible. The cases can be grizzly but often really interesting. So every day after dinner, as I would spend four hours studying, I would spend the first hour telling Emily the stories in the tort case book. There was a case where some guy had gotten hit in the face with a meat hook when he was inspecting a meat plant and so there were some really funny and kind of involved stories and she loved it. I remember when the class ended and then it was the next semester, I had no classes that were nearly that interesting, we’d finish dinner and she’d be like, “Tell me a story from your law book,” and I’d be like, “Oh Honey, I don’t have any, I’ve got nothing interesting that I’m learning right now.” But I didn’t mind, and obviously, that was law school but that was no different than working in a law firm. It’s ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hour days and I’d been doing that already with law school and so it was an easy transition to the firm. I was just blessed with tremendous support from my family. SL: How old was Emily at that time? KK: When I was in law school, she would’ve been probably four or five. I graduated from law school in 1988, she was born in 1981. Then the firm, she would’ve been 11 eight to ten years old and by that point kids have kind of their own life too. So she was starting to get to a phase where she would be with her friends and stuff and who cares whether I’m around? SL: Yeah, ain’t that the truth. So what was your next position, was that when you joined the ACLU? KK: Yes. I mentioned about feeling bored at the firm and feeling like this wasn’t what really fed me, and I remember sitting in my office in Ogden just up the street here and reading through the Utah Bar Journal, which was the lawyer magazine. At the back of the magazine they always had job announcements, positions that were open, and I remember flipping to the back of the magazine and reading a job announcement for the first ever staff attorney at the ACLU of Utah. I remember closing the magazine and leaning back in my chair and thinking, “Oh my God, I want that job.” I applied and got the job, and I think part of the reason was that I had been at this large law firm. That is the beginning of a breathtaking career, there’s just no doubt about it. I thought then it was the job of a lifetime and now it turns out, I’ve had more than one job of a lifetime so I have a lot of gratitude for that. SL: What was it like being the first staff attorney? KK: Being the first staff attorney at the ACLU of Utah, which it’s worth noting, is routinely voted the most hated organization in the state, was like drinking out of a firehose every day. It was exhilarating, it was exciting, it was unpredictable, and it was overwhelming. It was crazy but I loved it. Every day I would like, I would 12 almost skip to work although I was driving. Every day. In my head I was skipping to work because I couldn’t believe, “Oh my God, I get to do this most important work.” We did church day stuff, we did reproductive rights stuff, we did LGBT stuff. I was out from day one because my boss at the time, Michelle Parish, she was the director of the ACLU of Utah at the time. Wait a minute, let me go back. I started at the ACLU of Utah the same day Carol Gnade started as development director at the ACLU of Utah. So the executive director at the time was Michelle Parish, Carol and I start on the very same day. I remember I’m sitting at a desk and she’s sitting across from me, and out of the blue she says to me, “So, Kate, are you a lesbian?” I froze with fear, that’s how I felt on the inside. I tried to keep my cool, but I thought, “Wow. Okay, well look, if you can’t be an open lesbian at the ACLU of Utah then something’s really wrong with the world.” So I just said, “Actually, I am,” and wow, it was just amazing. Within a couple of years, Carol became the executive director of the ACLU, was my boss and is a very close friend of mine to this day. She ended her relationship with her male partner at the time, she’s now lesbian identified. I mean, it was an amazing time there. I feel like the reason I was able to do my job as fully as I was is because I could bring my full self to the job and I knew the difference. SL: Totally. Were there some cases while you were at the ACLU that still stick out in your mind? KK: I’ll just mention two. One was suing to stop prayer at the beginning of Salt Lake City Council meetings. That was one of the very first cases I was involved in and 13 I remember people just thought that we were the Devil. But it wasn’t just a generic prayer or it wasn’t a prayer that rotated among different faiths or beliefs, it was a Mormon prayer that began with “Heavenly Father” and ended with, “in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ,” and so it was very monolithic in presentation. What they ended up doing, as a result of the suit they would open up the meeting to any presentation of faith other than mainstream faith tradition. So there were Native ceremonies that would open, there was a Jewish prayer that would open and that solved enough of our issue, to recognize that you don’t give priority to one religious tradition in a government setting. That was one case that I really loved being a part of, and it was like right from the get go I was thrown into the deep end on that. Then there’s a case that I still remember, and I just thought about this case maybe a couple of months ago. We represented an individual who was incarcerated at the Utah State Prison, Stephen Currier. I forget what he had been incarcerated for, but there was a law in the books at the time that required, if you wanted to appeal your conviction, you had to do so within thirty days. Now imagine someone who’s been arrested, gone through trial, convicted of a crime that puts them in prison. They’re now in prison and totally disoriented, terrorized, Steve had not previously been in prison, trying to get their bearings about how to navigate and survive. Within thirty days you’re supposed to file your writ for an appeal? So we challenged that and I remember just like it was yesterday, these moments get burned into your brain, arguing that case before the Court of Appeal and I think it was three judges and the state Department of Corrections 14 was the defendant, someone from AG’s office argued the case. I remember a couple of comments from the judges on that panel made it clear that they thought this was truly unrealistic and barbaric and that there just was no good reason why the time had to be thirty days rather than six months, something normal where somebody could get their bearings a little bit and then make an appeal. Because if someone was wrongfully convicted, you want them to be able to have a path for appealing that. We don’t want people who have a basis for an appeal to not be able to have that grievance heard by a court. So we ended up winning that case and I still remember when we won, going to the prison and talking to him and just seeing the relief that he now had a chance to make his case. While it was great to win for him, it was also something that would endure for anyone else who was convicted so they would have a much longer runway to appeal their conviction. We want to deal with the structural barriers to justice, in addition to helping individual plaintiffs. SL: Interesting. So how long were you at the ACLU? KK: I was at the ACLU for three years. I was in a new relationship and my partner was on the Board of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. I had never heard of such an organization and didn’t even know such an organization existed. She faxed me, ‘cause keep in mind this is before email, this is before these [cellphones] existed right? She faxed me the job description for a legal director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights based in San Francisco and I thought, “Wow, I want that job.” so I applied and started as Legal Director at NCLR in the fall of 1994. 15 SL: Okay. So she was your motivation to take that job. KK: We had decided, as that point in time, our marriage has now ended, but at that point in time, we had made a commitment that we wanted to be together and I didn’t want to test the relationship by requiring her to move to Utah. I never thought I’d leave Utah, but with this opportunity, Emily was now a teenager, Lori and I were no longer together and it just felt like, “Yeah, this is the right move.” SL: So what types of things did you do at the Center? KK: NCLR is a national LGBTQ legal organization, and it’s a little bit similar to the ACLU although it’s more focused on LGBTQ issues. Most of what we did early on was impact litigation. So a case would be decided at a lower court level, we would then hear from the lawyers or the plaintiffs involved in the case saying, “This was a huge miscarriage of justice,” this woman lost custody of her kid for example, which were very common cases then, and NCLR would take the cases on appeal. We did that kind of work on a whole range of family issues, we then broadened into youth issues, and then immigration issues. I will say, in the first year of my work as legal director, I was shocked at how rampant homophobia was in the legal system in this country. I thought I’d seen the worst of it being in Utah. No, not by a longshot. We got calls every single day in the mid-1990s from men and women who had lost custody of their kids or visitation with their kids based solely on their sexual orientation. I think about that now, sitting here in 2019, having won marriage in 2015 and that’s only twenty years. That’s the lifetime of a college sophomore and 16 look how much things have changed. It was commonplace, in many, many states, for sexual orientation alone to deprive you of a relationship with your children; even if you had been the primary caretaker, even if the kids were fully bonded with you, even if there was not one iota of evidence that you were in any way unfit, and coming to terms with that just blew my mind. That was the work that we were doing early on and now we’ve seen huge, enormous, amazing changes. SL: So how active was the Center in the whole Prop 8 in California? KK: NCLR was right in the middle of the Prop 8 fight because NCLR had been lead counsel winning marriage in California. In November of 2003, Gavin Newsom had been elected mayor of San Francisco and 2003 was also the year that Lawrence versus Texas was decided, striking down Bowers versus Hardwick, ending sodomy laws, laws that criminalize same-sex sexual intimacy in the remaining eight states in which it was a crime, and the Goodrich decision, affirming marriage in Massachusetts, had been decided. So 2003 was like a banner year for LGBTQ legal rights, and it felt like, “Wow, we’re really turning a corner.” George W. Bush is elected in his first term as President of the United States and in his January 2004 State of the Union, he declares support for a constitutional amendment to ban recognition of marriage between same-sex couples. Mayor Newsom is in the audience and he comes back to San Francisco, talks to his staff and says, “I want to do something about this. I want to take a stand.” Some of them say, “Don’t do it. You’re brand new, you just barely took 17 office. Don’t take this risk, it’s not worth it,” others of his staff say, “No, this is exactly what you should do.” He decides he wants to do something and his Chief of Staff, Steve Kawa, calls me and tells me that the Mayor is planning to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples beginning on Valentine’s Day February 2004. I would like to say, in revisionist’s history, that I was totally supportive of it, I thought it was a great idea, I thought he was bold and courageous. That is not what happened. I tried to talk him out of it. I told his Chief of Staff, “Steve, I think this is not a good idea. We just barely won in Massachusetts, things are white hot right now, there’s a huge blow back. The President has declared support for a constitutional amendment, we really need to be more moderate right now and less provocative.” Steve heard me say all this, he has this very thick Boston accent which I can’t do justice to. After I finished my pushback, he says, “I hear ya Kate, I hear you. But let me just say, next week the mayor is going to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples,” and so I thought, “Oookay, well, here we go.” So I talked to our colleagues at Gay and Lesbian Advocate and Defenders in Boston that won the marriage case there, I talked to my legal director, who’s still the legal director at NCLR, Shannon Minter, and other colleagues, this was on a Friday. By the time it was Sunday, we had decided, “Game on. Let’s do it, let’s do it.” So we met with the mayor and his staff, we worked through the week to get him up to speed. I suggested that Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon be the first couple to get married because they’d done fifty-years of work on behalf of LGBT rights, specifically, lesbian and women’s rights. They founded the first lesbian social organization, 18 the Daughters of the Bilitis, and it would be their fiftieth anniversary of coming together as a couple on Valentine’s Day of that year. So sure enough on Valentine’s Day 2004, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were the first couple married by the city and county of San Francisco and that just opened the floodgates. That moment, looking back on it, changed everything. I was wrong to doubt, I was wrong to think the mayor shouldn’t have done it. But Barney Frank took him to task, said he shouldn’t have done it, Diane Feinstein took him to task and said he shouldn’t have done it. Many people thought that this was a grave mistake and way too bold and provocative. Well, it turns out, with the benefit of history, it was exactly the right thing to do and it electrified the country. After Del and Phyllis got married, another eight thousand couples got married over the course of the next five weeks and the city and county of San Francisco continued to issue marriage licenses. The city was pulsating with excitement and joy, I mean, you could not go anywhere, you couldn’t get in a cab, you couldn’t go to a restaurant, you couldn’t sit at a bus stop, you couldn’t go to a workplace without everybody talking, “Holy Heck! What!? This is amazing!” Couples lined City Hall day after day after day in inclement weather. People from all over the country sent flowers, food, dry socks, for when people stood in the rain. It gives me chills to just relive it a little bit because it was so incredible. We were in court right away because anti-gay forces tried to get an injunction multiple times to stop the city and county of San Francisco from issuing marriage licenses, they lost again and again and again. Finally, about five weeks into it, the State Supreme Court, with Arnold 19 Schwarzenegger as the governor at the time, who ridiculously claims that it’s bedlam in San Francisco, lawlessness in San Francisco, and that the court needs to step in and stop licenses from being issued. There was no bedlam, there was no lawlessness, there was just couples standing in line for hours on end to be able to have an opportunity to marry the person they love and get this marriage license. But the State Supreme Court stepped in, stopped the marriage licenses from being issued, but then they said, in their opinion, “If someone wishes to challenge the exclusion of same-sex couples from the right to marry, there is a way to do that,” so the next day we filed our lawsuit challenging the exclusion of same-sex couples from the right to marry. Four years later in 2008 we won, which was again electric and amazing and one of the best days of my career. Six months later, Prop 8 passes. So it feels like we’re back to square one but that’s the rollercoaster of civil rights work. LR: Will you explain what Prop 8 was? KK: Prop 8 was a measure to strip same-sex couples of the freedom to marry that we had won at the California Supreme Court in 2008. It stated that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. Its passage would mark the first time that a state took away the right to marry from same-sex couples. There have been states that have passed measures to prospectively deny recognition of marriage between same-sex couples, but this is the first time that that right, having been won, would be denied. This fact made it particularly hard to take because on one level it felt like, “Wow, they really hate us. They really hate us.” Having distance from it, winning marriage was the greatest 20 moment in my career. Having Prop 8 passed was the worst moment of my career. But in hindsight, it galvanized a whole new generation who thought we were done and that we didn’t have to fight anymore. And I think Mayor Newsom issuing marriage licenses, winning marriage, Prop 8 passing, all accelerated winning marriage nation-wide. I think we might still be fighting to win marriage nation-wide had it not been for those events. SL: Interesting. KK: Thank you for asking that. SL: Yes. So why did you decide to step down and step away from the Center? KK: I decided to step down from my position as executive director at NCLR because people should not hang around forever, people should move on, and I never thought I would be in the role that long. I was legal director at NCLR for two years and then became executive director in 1996, the same week my son Julian was born. I figured I’d stay for two or three years, which was pretty much the average trajectory and timeline of an executive director of a non-profit, but I loved it. We were growing, and we were making a difference. Every year there were new challenges and there was a new way to make an impact. I had an amazing staff, I had a fabulous board, I loved my donors. It really suited me and it gave me an opportunity to learn stuff I didn’t know, to stretch my abilities, to be outside my comfort-zone.When I finally made the decision to leave, it was because I really felt like I’d done everything I could do and the organization deserved a new leader. I feel like the organization deserved a younger leader, someone who had 21 a different vision, someone who brought a different life experience, and we’re never going to have that if I don’t vacate the office so that somebody can take that position. I left the end of 2018 and I have no regrets. I don’t think I overstayed my welcome and I don’t think I stayed past my passion for what I did, but I think I left at the right time. It’s interesting, as we record this today, my successor is being announced as the new executive director of NCLR. So that’s being announced today, December 17th 2019, her name is Imani Rupert, she is someone I’ve known for years. Her sister, Maya, is currently the campaign manager for Julian Castro’s presidential campaign. Imani comes from Chicago but has lived in the Bay Area, she’s run an LGBT organization in Chicago, been involved deeply in the African- American and the lesbian community there, and she is going to be spectacular. I feel now totally vindicated, because if I hadn’t left we wouldn’t have Imani as the new leader and she’s going to be fantastic. SL: Bring a whole different experience to it. KK: Exactly, and that’s what the LGBTQ movement needs right now, in a moment where our community is literally everywhere. We’re in every demographic, we’re represented in every religious faith, we're represented in every geography. We have to have leadership that comes from a breath of experience that can speak to different identities. One of the critiques of the movement that I think is well-founded is that the leadership of the movement has been too monolithic, it’s been too white, and that does a disservice to the communities that we serve. You can have spectacular white leaders but by not having a good representation of 22 leaders of color, leaders who have experienced systemic racism and been subjected to white supremacy, you’re just not going to be able to tackle the issues that impact the most vulnerable queer people in this country. So I’m super excited for NCLR and for the movement more largely. SL: Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what she does. What does the term ‘women’s work’ mean to you? KK: Oh, that’s interesting. I think what ‘women’s work’ means to me is it’s work that’s done from a particular perspective that is more humble, and more inclusive, and more willing to take risks than work that is done by a traditionally privileged populations, white men. I do feel like work done by women, in my experience, and of course, there are exceptions to this, is done particularly well. I think women who understand purpose do approach our work as women and women’s work with a perspective that is more inclusive of different voices and less focused on us being the center of attention. SL: Very well said. What about the word ‘discrimination?’ KK: You know it’s still a term I use because I do feel like there is a tremendous amount of discrimination in this country. It’s a term that I think, has lost some of its more powerful meanings because there are lots of ways that people can use structural discrimination to not take personal responsibility for their own failure to act or their own actions. People see discrimination as something done to someone not something they’re a part of supporting. If I were to ever talk about a community subject to ‘discrimination,’ I would never use that word alone because 23 I think it is both under-inclusive and over-inclusive. We have discrimination in this country because it’s on purpose, it’s structural and it’s intentional. If we don’t understand that, we can’t ever truly combat the root causes of why someone either experiences discrimination or someone acts in a discriminatory fashion; you’re playing your part in a script that’s already been written. I want to back up to the headwaters of how we ended up in a place where we’re swimming in a lake that is infested and infected with white supremacy, racial hierarchy, and racism that is deeply, deeply structural. Individual fish in the lake may be subject to discrimination or may be discriminatory actors and we might be able to do something about them and that’s fine, I mean, lawyers do that. We take individual cases on behalf of individual people to right a wrong and to protect or redress discrimination. But if we don’t understand the lake and address issues of how the lake got created, we’re only taking half measures. SL: So I asked you before, as a young girl, who you looked up to, so now looking back over your life to date, who were some women who have influenced you? KK: Well, my mom would still be top of the list just because of her embrace of me when I came out to her. Her unstinting support of me made my whole life possible, and she did it with a biography that people would not assume that’s where she would end up. Not very well-educated, devout Mormon, you would finish that sentence with not supportive of her lesbian daughter, that’s just not true. Totally unconditional love is what she exuded. My eighth grade current events teacher, Lynn Miller. She is the one who lit that spark in me and made me understand that you can have a life beyond what your vision is. She introduced 24 me to Chief Joseph, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Cesar Chavez, and those stories and those biographies made me realize, “Whoa, wait.” It made me have a much broader understanding of race and racism. My father was a pretty much avowed racist and so I had no real context for understanding how the system works. The odiousness of racism, Mrs. Miller exposed me to that and made me realize also that you could do something about it, and obviously a lot of what we talked about were the courts and structural reforms ‘cause that’s when the courts really worked, not always, but sometimes. She made a huge impact on me. I look up to people who I have the honor of meeting and knowing like Kamala Harris, and Nancy Pelosi. I’ve met Michelle Obama. To be able to see women operate on such a brightly-lit stage with such scrutiny and yet they do it with such grace. I do think there is a way in which what women navigate the world differs. You see it on social media, you see it in how Hillary was treated and you’re seeing it how the women candidates running for the democratic nomination are treated. The idea that we think we are post-feminist or post-racial or that we’ve overcome misogyny and sexism is ludicrous. I mean, put out a comment on Twitter that white men disagree with and you will be called the C-word, you will have your looks attacked, you will be vilified, not engaged with on the substance of the argument but vilified for how you appear as a woman and with epithets thrown at you. So women who have achieved a particular level of accomplishment, in the face of all of that takes an enormous amount of courage every single day and I try to emulate just a little, tiny piece of that because it is a 25 daily challenge to get up and face that. I’ve been lucky enough to not face much of that, but when I see it happen I recognize that I can’t sit back and rest. SL: So speaking along those lines, what contributions do you feel you’ve made to the LGBTQ communities? KK: I think the highest purpose of really any white person, generally, but certainly a white leader in a civil rights movement is to move your organization, move your colleagues, move yourself, and move the conversation along at a point where people recognize how, how intersectional and interrelated our issues are. I do feel one of the contributions I’m most proud of is elevating the conversation about the importance of the LGBTQ movement being an anti-racist movement and understanding that we’re not doing our best job on behalf of LGBTQ people if we don’t understand how homophobia, racism, white supremacy, misogyny, sexism, transphobia, all suppress the ability of even the most privileged, white, LGBTQ folks to truly be free. These conversations are not unique to me, I had colleagues who taught me and who also elevated those conversations, but I do feel like that is something that NCLR was seen as being an active participant in moving. Engaging across identities and being at the forefront of leading and showing how to lead on intersectional framing. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of. SL: So looking back, like your mom or even your grandmother, how do you think the roles of mothers have changed? And even looking forward to now you being a grandmother. 26 KK: I was thinking about how grateful I am that I was born when I was because my grandmother, who I was very close to, was a very loving and amazing woman. But she had a pretty dissatisfying life. She and my grandfather had a fine marriage but I don’t know how truly fulfilled she was. I think she had hopes and dreams that she didn’t get to have fulfilled. I think my mom probably shouldn’t have stayed married to my dad, Max, but didn’t feel like she had very many options. It was 1963 and she’s widowed with two little girls and he was willing to marry her and raise the girls. If she’d had a greater range of choices she may have chosen differently. One thing that I think white men particularly, of any generation, but definitely generations of my father’s and my grandfather’s, always knew was that there were people betting on them to succeed. Women didn’t grow up to feel like anyone was betting on you to succeed, if someone bet on you to succeed that was an anomaly. You weren’t expected to succeed, you were expected to marry a man who would succeed and that’s how you would be successful in your life. Standing on your own two feet, and having choices about how you wanted to live your life, and what jobs you were going to take, and what education you were going to pursue, and whether you were going to be a parent or not, those options were not available. I feel very lucky that I was born when I was, where I could be open as a lesbian, at a certain age anyway, where I could choose to have children, I could be in relationships of deep mutual respect. I do feel that I have a tremendous amount of race, economic, class privilege, and education privilege because of this, and I don’t feel threatened based on my sexual orientation. That 27 is obviously much different than many people in the rest of the country. Especially trans folks who feel that threat, a vicious threat, every single day. I’m well aware of the fact that I have been able to live a fulfilled life, and I do feel tremendously blessed, it’s kind of an accident of birth and the timing of when I was born and able to live. I want to pay that forward. I want my grandson to be the kind of man my son is, gentle and warm and a feminist. My son Julian lives right at the intersection of race and identity as a black man. And he is also able to support women and to see women. There is no question in his mind that women are his equal. I also feel like his generation are so over the issue of sexual-orientation and trans issues, but we’re in a fraught moment in this country right now where his generation, the twenty-somethings, they’re being highly contested. They could get pulled to fear, “Build a wall,” “They’re coming for your jobs,” “They’re coming for your guns,” framing that is perpetuated by state news media with Fox News, or they could get pulled to, “What kind of world do you want to live in?” We want to live in a world where we don’t feel fearful, where we’re all in this together, and we understand that our fate is shared. But even given this very frightening moment, it’s so much better. It’s so much better for me, it’s so much better for my daughter Emily who’s thirty-seven, it’s so much better for my son Julian who’s twenty-three, it’s so much better for my daughter Ariana who’s eighteen, than it was even for me and certainly for my mom or my grandmother. I’m aware of that arc of the moral universe and you want it to bend towards justice, it feels like it’s getting pulled in the opposite 28 direction, but we have to believe that we can still bend it, and I feel like I need to do that and that is my daily task to do that for my kids and my grandkids. LR: So being a part of the NCLR during the national fight for marriage equality, what was the Center’s role in that and what was your part? KK: Once NCLR won marriage in California, and then we had the fight over Prop 8, and then we lost Prop 8, and then that was litigated, now the national fight was on. There were many organizations that wanted to be a part of that fight, there were private firms that wanted to be involved in that fight. There were cases that were taken to the U.S. Supreme Court and then not accepted. Remember before we won in 2015, 2013 is what set the stage. 2013 is when the Court took two cases, they took the challenge to Prop 8 and they didn’t rule that it was unconstitutional, they ruled on a procedural issue. They ruled that because the proponents of Prop 8 did not have standing to represent the state in the challenge to Prop 8, that Prop 8 was invalidated. But the point is it was all the same, Prop 8 went away. So now Prop 8 went away and our ruling, winning marriage in California, was now back to being the law of the state. The other case was the DOMA case, the Edie Windsor case. Edie Windsor was a widow in New York whose partner, Thea Spyer, died and because her relationship with Thea over three decades wasn’t recognized she was taxed on the estate that she inherited from Thea, and she wouldn’t have been taxed at all if their marriage had been recognized. It was like a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar hit. Edie was represented by private counsel and the ACLU, and that case went up to the Supreme Court. That Court invalidated the 29 key provision of DOMA. So now the deck’s clear. Prop 8 is gone, California, the largest state in the country with the highest population of same-sex couples now can get married, and now DOMA is struck down. That happens in 2013. 2015 is when we, NCLR, the ACLU, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and Lambda Legal, consolidate four marriage cases. All four legal groups that represent LGBTQ issues consolidate all four cases, they’re called the Obergefell cases. Jim Obergefell is the named plaintiff, that’s the ACLU case, but every one of us had plaintiffs involved in that case. This is the case that got decided at the Supreme Court in favor of the freedom of same-sex couples to marry in 2015. So we got to be there, we got to be at the court. I was there in the Court for the argument, as I was for the Edie Windsor DOMA challenge and the Prop 8 challenge. Those are two amazing experiences of my life. It was tremendously gratifying to see us go from bringing the challenge in California in the wake of Newsom issuing marriage licenses, winning marriage, having Prop 8 take it away, then Prop 8 being invalidated, then finally being a part of the constellation of organizations winning marriage nationwide. SL: Okay, so last question. This is one we’ve asked everyone. How do you think women receiving the right to vote shaped or influenced history, your community, and you personally? KK: I want to start with answering the question about how winning the right to vote shaped history, and women’s rights, and me personally. Because I do think winning it begs the question about why did we even have to fight for it? It’s important to understand we had to fight for it because we were then, and are still 30 to some degree now, considered second-class, considered less than equal, considered subpar, considered suboptimal, considered not the exact ideal of what a citizen is. I feel like that’s how we should understand race, that’s how we should understand colonization. There’s all sorts of ways in which looking at the denial is a way to make sense of why the win and why the victory is so important, but the victory is just the beginning of continuing the struggle. I feel like winning the right to vote for women is what made it possible for women to do slightly better in every successive generation. This is why I’m grateful to be born when I was, I feel like if we hadn’t won the right to vote when we did, let’s say the right to vote had been denied for another generation or two? I’d be living the life of my mother or my grandmother. I’m very aware of the shoulders I stand on and I think that’s really important to understand, that you’re not just the product of your own efforts but there’s an army of many women behind you that made it possible for you to live the life that you live. I think that’s what it’s done for the country. I mean, it’s certainly changed the trajectory of the country. Different decisions have been made because women have been able to vote. For me personally, as with much of our conversation today, it creates a debt that I’ll never be able to fully repay but I want to be able, at the end of my life, when my granddaughter who’s now ten months old, let’s say she’s a twenty-something or hopefully thirty-something young woman and she says, “You know, Mama Kate, what did you do? How do you think you made a difference?” She’s writing a paper for college or something and I want to be able to have a pretty 31 long list of things to tell her because I’m here because other women made a real long list. SL: Well, thank you Kate. KK: My pleasure.