WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN, PROFESSOR
OF LAW: I'm Bill Rubenstein, class of 1986, best class
in law school history, Paul Butler will tell you, and I
am the master of this ceremony. This is a session on LGBT
issues in Harvard Law School. If you're in the wrong place,
this would be the right time to extricate yourself. I hope that's not true. It's wonderful to
see a full room. We have an amazing panel. Everyone on this
panel has two things in common with one another. First, they're all graduates
of the Harvard Law School. Second, they all did something
important in helping LGBT issues come along and progress. And it's just an incredible
experience for me to have the opportunity
to host this panel. I want to begin by saying
two things about those two characteristics. First, these, of
course, are not everyone who graduated from the Harvard
Law School who helped work on LGBT issues over the years. There are many,
many other people who have been involved
in this, many of whom are in the room today, and
you'll hear more about and more from as we keep going. So I just want to
make sure everyone acknowledges this is a subset-- a great subset, but just
a subset of everyone who's contributed to these
issues from the law school. It's also true, second, that
the Harvard Law School is not the only law school in
history to contribute to this set of issues, so the
panel is partial in that way as well. Although as we take this
moment of our bicentennial to celebrate Harvard
Law School, I'd like to claim, perhaps without
an enormous amount of research, that we've had an inordinate
impact on these issues and the people in
front of the room have really been among
the great leaders in this movement over the years. It's just really kind of
been a special connection between Harvard Law
School and LGBT issues. It's quite amazing to think that
this is the 200th anniversary. If we had gone back to the
150th anniversary 50 years ago, the idea of this panel would
have been completely laughable. There would never have
been a suggestion that you have a panel like this. And yet, at the same time,
50 years later, you almost have the sense that
we've won and that thing has progressed so far, that
it's an amazing trajectory. So I would kind of
want to hear about all that, both endpoints
and everything that's happened in between. My main role is going to
be to get out of the way and let everyone else talk. You don't have written
biographies of everybody in the panel and I'm not going
to read their full biographies. I'm going to instead
introduce people and make a few comments
personally about them and then let them [LAUGHTER]. Yeah, be careful. And then let them talk about
their own work a little bit. What I'd like to do
is, I've asked everyone on the panel to start by
addressing this question. What was it like when you
were at Harvard Law School? In particular, what was it
like around LGBT issues when you were at Harvard Law School? I started at Harvard
Law School in 1983 and I had a first year
section of 150 people. There were two of us
who were openly gay. There was very little in the
way of role models or experience or anything to look up to
but among in that desert, one thing that stuck
out was Professor Tribe. During my law school
years, Professor Tribe, quite amazingly, looking back
on it with Kathleen Sullivan, a lawyer who was working
with him at the time, took on two of the largest
lesbian and gay rights cases in the country and argued them
in the United States Supreme Court. As a young law student, it
kind of meant everything to me. So Larry, I want
to start with you and ask you actually to go
back to your time in law school and tell us if these issues
were ever even in the air and what it was like to be
at the law school in the 60s. LAURENCE H. TRIBE, PROFESSOR
OF LAW: Well thanks, Bill. If I try to think
back when I was here, '63 to '66, one thing
that does stick out is that Archibald Cox
came into class one day and he had a copy of Griswold
v. Connecticut, which had just been handed down,
and I was fascinated by it. And I raised the question
whether it might not be an implication of
Griswold that sexuality would be protected and that
people couldn't be prosecuted for whom they love. And everybody looked at
me as if I was crazy. I mean, I didn't, I have
to say, know anybody that was out at that time. Being a straight man, I didn't
know much about gay issues. But it seemed to me
that it was obvious if there is a sphere of
privacy tinged with equality, really the most important
and obvious place where it would flourish
would be in connection with sexuality,
sexual orientation. But there was nothing going
on with the law school then that would have
reinforced that impulse, and I kind of suppressed
it for a while. When I ended up writing my prius
on constitutional law in 1978, I had a section on sexual
orientation as protected. Sexual minorities,
gays, lesbians, I don't know if I talked
about bi issues or trends, and the word queer hadn't
entered the vocabulary yet in that form, but I had a
whole section on why that was a suspect classification. And again, a lot of
people told me, don't include that in your book. Nobody will take it
seriously, and it was a while before anybody did. Then flash forward, the
first gay rights case I did in the Supreme
Court was actually before the infamous
Bowers v. Hardwick case. It was a case involving
teachers, gay teachers and sympathetic
straight teachers, in the Oklahoma schools who
were fired, either for being gay or for talking about sexuality
in a way that legitimated same-sex interactions. And the case had come out
in favor of the teachers under the First Amendment
in the Tenth Circuit. When the Supreme Court
heard it and I agreed to argue for the
teachers, Justice Powell recused himself and it
ended up being 4 to 4. We sort of won, but
the oral argument is one I'll never forget in
which Warren Burger and Byron White looked at me as
though I were from Mars. At one point, I swear that
the Chief Justice actually said, how can you protect the
right of people to stand there and say, go have sodomy? And I said, well, that
wasn't exactly it, but people are
protected for saying go overthrow the government,
so why not go have sodomy? Of course at that time, sodomy
was a crime, oral and anal sex in every state. I think every state. He said, but this is much
worse than overthrowing the government. So flash forward, I sort
of knew that the court was not sympathetic
to these issues when I argued on behalf of-- WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: Let me interject before you-- No. We're going to get through
everything, believe me, but you've got us up
to the early 1980s and before you get to
Harvard, let me just pull in some others. I'm going chronologically here. And our next
chronological person, our next chronological
person skips the 1970s. I want to acknowledge, before we
get to Evan, that in the 1970s was the first time
the Harvard Law School has a formation of a
lesbian and gay student group. So there was the
beginning of activism here and the formation of a group. And when I started
law school, one of the first things
I did in 1983 was go looking for
materials on lesbians and gay men in the library. First day of law school they
teach you how to do research. The second day, I
went in and said, OK, where's the gay stuff? And the third day, I
was done reading it all. Didn't know what the next three
years were going to bring. One of the people in the 1970s
who graduated, Arthur Leonard, is sitting over here. One of the things I found
in the library in 1983 was a publication Arthur was
writing called Lesbian and Gay Law Notes. When did you start doing? ARTHUR LEONARD: 1980. WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: 1980. And this is all
before the internet, so Lesbian and Gay Law
Notes in those days had the feel of
being mimeographed. It kind of was, yes? ARTHUR LEONARD: It was
actually photocopied. WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: Photocopied. Even better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there it was, in
the law school library. Evan started law school in 1980. Because you graduated in 1983. I've known Evan or have known
of Evan since I was born. He and I grew up in
the same neighborhood. We went to the
same grade school. The same middle school. The same high school. The same college and
the same law school. Evan was kind of a
revered figure ahead of me at each of those steps by a
few years and hence someone I looked up to. Famously, when I came out to
my parents in 1980 something, '82, '82, this wasn't the
happiest moment of their lives but one of the first
things they said is, well, the Wolfsons have
one of those gay kids, too. This was along
the lines of we're not the only people to
raise a sick person. EVAN WOLFSON: So, first of
all, I really want to say, and you can tell
from Bill's remarks that we all had dinner
together last night. And I think one of the
strengths of our movement is that there has been
this happy band of warriors who have laughed together,
fought together, or fought against each other together,
struggled, gone through so much, but had
trust and affection and known each other for so
many years working together, that it has been at the center
of a movement's success. Of course, it's always
been important to bring in new people, bring in new
energy, bring in new talent, bring in new ideas. That has also been part
of our movement's success, but the fact that there is
this bond of relationships and connections amongst people
who have trusted each other and come to be family with
all the button pushing that sometimes comes
with family has really been very, very meaningful. Just to echo Bill,
with regard to you, Larry, when I was
at law school, I experienced it as pretty
closeted, pretty closed. I didn't at first know
any other gay people. I started coming
out at law school. I didn't find it hostile. People were friendly, people
were acknowledging, supportive. It didn't make a difference. It was easier and easier
to keep coming out to more and more people and so on. But really the only
mention of gay stuff that I remember, at least in
the first couple of years, was when I was in your class
as your con law student. And I remember the
days you taught that section of the treatise. And how much I felt honored
and a little bit grown up when just a couple of years
later as a young attorney, back in my hair days, I got to
work with you and with Kathleen Sullivan on the NGTF case,
the teacher's case, and then the Hardwick case. And how meaningful that was and
how meaningful your standing up for us then was and ever since. I feel like really very
much the same with everybody on this panel. We've been in each other's lives
and in each other's business and in each other's
arguments for decades. And it has been
really wonderful. So back to law school. Law school was pretty closeted
but, as I said, not hostile. I started coming out at the
time the little group that Bill mentioned, I discovered
there was this little group, it was called COGLII, Committee
on Gay and Lesbian Legal Issues. The yearbook photo of
the group that year, that I first started
going, featured a bunch of people who literally,
at least as is my memory, had bags over their heads. Only one person was
willing to have his face in the yearbook at that time. And he was not gay. He worked with you in
May, Bryan Cacucha. Not a gay man, but
a total supporter. But what was interesting
was, I think I must've been, that's my memory
but as you can see where I'm positioned
on this panel, memory is not all it used to be. But what I would
say is that maybe I was just there at this
very transitional moment, because by the end of
my law school time, it had shifted dramatically. Each year I found was different
because different people would come in, as I was
saying earlier. And in my third
year of law school, we had a cohort of 1L's who
were much more out and much more militant and much more engaged
and much more annoying. We've all again become
very close friends, but we fought very
bitterly and very intensely in this little group about what
the activism should look like and what the styles
of activism should be. We launched a project to
have to write to law firms across the country explaining
to them Harvard's policy of nondiscrimination and
pushing for them to have to comply with this policy. That was a big step of
activism that people felt in some cases quite
risky because they were really putting themselves on the line
both with regard to the school but also with regard
to future employers. It was also the time
when HIV/AIDS erupted in public consciousness. And we began reading
Newsweek and so on about this terrible
thing that was happening. And it still felt mostly out
there, but it was happening, and it was coming. And of course it
was also the dawn of the Reagan administration. Then one of the most hostile
administrations we had. It was a very threatening
and challenging, but also increasingly almost
day by day, political time at which the silence
and the closetedness that I experienced,
with Larry being one of the few exceptions,
at the beginning in '80, '81. By '83, you could
already feel people being much more engaged, much
more willing to take things on and much more call to action,
both with regard to gay rights and with regard to HIV. WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: Thank you. In '80, you go right up to
my first day of law school and seven days in 1983. Shortly thereafter in my
civil procedure class, I figured out the guy
sitting next to me, a fellow named Dan
Gordon, was also gay. Perhaps the best thing
about this experience was that Dan knew this 2L. We didn't know any
2L's, but Dan knew this 2L named Chai Feldblum. He said, wait till you meet her. She's a dynamo. I met Chai my first year
of law school through Dan and have been close
friends with her. Worked with her many
years at the ACLU togethe. And Chai was a dynamo
and was just, is, is, is. Evan said there was a new
energy coming at the end of his time in law school. I think Chai exemplifies
that for everybody. CHAI FELDBLUM: Well, thank you. And I'm also just thrilled to be
here sort of seeing all of you. All the ones who are
going to be taking this on to the next level. So, I love you already. OK. When I came to
Harvard in 1982, I had been out as a lesbian for
three years at that point. I came self-identified
as a lesbian. Do you really think it
should be such a big deal? Very excited to go to my
first meeting of the COGLII, the gay student group. I walk in. There were like 15 guys
there and one woman. I go straight to the woman. Turns out she's a 3L
who will be graduating at the end of the year. I'm like, damn, not really
good for my social life. But, the other thing is, I
was very much of a feminist. So in terms of my
time at Harvard I was very involved with
the Women's Law Association. I was involved in public
interest fellowships. I was lucky enough
to be a research assistant for Professor Tribe. So while I kept going to
the meetings here and there, I wasn't actually involved
that much in that group. The second thing that happened
that affected my LGBT life also concerns Dan Gordon. Because I had begun to
think, well, you know, and I think maybe I'm a bisexual
as opposed to a lesbian. Part of that was, well, you
know what, I think I like guys. My father would be really
happier if I were with a guy, so why don't I just. There's this guy, Dan Gordon. He had told me, this is great. Well by February,
he told me because I was like, what's going on
and he's like, I'm gay, and I'm like, oh, good, me too. But I still was in this I
could be a bisexual mode person and so I dated a guy I met
last year of law school. I have to say I am much
happier being with women. I'm all about the
B part of LGBT, but I feel literally one of
the greatest gifts of my life is that I've been able to
live, honestly, happily with integrity as a lesbian. So I get involved
in LGBT work really because of the AIDS epidemic. My first job after
my two clerkships was with the ACLU
Aids Project, which was started by a, shall I say,
phenomenal woman, Nan Hunter, who started both that project
and the Lesbian Gay Rights Project at the
ACLU at that time. My work primarily focused on
legislative efforts dealing with people with AIDS and HIV. But, because of that, got
integrated with some LGB, there was no T yet, work. So one example, one of
the first amendments that I fought against was
what we call the No Promo Homo Amendment. In a bill that finally
provided money for HIV testing, the Senate added
a provision that said that none of
the money could be used to promote, directly
or indirectly, homosexuality. Directly or indirectly, none
of this money for AIDS funding. So we wrote a counteramendment
because we couldn't get it out 30 years ago, that said, none
of the money can be used, can be designed to promote,
directly or indirectly, none of the money can be
used to promote directly, homosexuality, heterosexuality,
or bisexuality. Because we figured
government didn't really have to be in the business
of promoting any sexuality. We could do that
fine for ourselves WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: Great. Thank you. So Chai and I were working
at the ACLU in the late '90s and starting to burn
out shortly thereafter. As I was doing this
long or longer, all of a sudden in the
early 1990s this new person burst onto the scene. I remember the first time
I met Suzanne Goldberg. We were at a lesbian and
gay litigators roundtable and she was an incredible
breath of fresh air. Brilliant, full of energy. Like me and Chai and so many
other people in this room, another disciple of Martha
Minow's, our former dean, ready to come and join us. So Suzanne, you're
next chronologically. SUZANNE GOLDBERG: So I also
am just thrilled to be here. If you had asked me in my
first year of law school if I would ever be
sitting on a panel talking about LGBT rights, I would have
said you were out of your mind. And, in fact, everybody
on this panel, I think, had much more come
into law school having sorted out their
identity as lesbian or gay or sort of bisexual
and lesbian than I had. There was no way. I didn't even know about COGLII
but when I heard about COGLII, the acronym is C-
O- G- L- I- I-, I think, and it
sounded a little bit like an amoeba or something. And there was just
no way I was going to participate in any kind of
lesbian and gay organization or LGBT organization. I did date a woman my first
semester of law school but it was not a
political identity. For me I was not coming
out in that sort of a way. At the same time, I was
involved politically and in all sorts of
public interest law, in an assortment of
civil rights issues and I thought,
actually I don't think I've ever told this story in
public but I'm going to now. So in my third year
of law school-- it's not that that exciting. Just so, I didn't [INAUDIBLE]. In my third year of
law school, there was a visiting professor
named Regina Austin who was fantastic. She had been a
professor of mine. And the law school, I think, or
as far as we knew as students, was declining to invite her
to join the faculty here. so many groups concerned with
an array of civil rights issues got together and were
protesting and one of the forms of protest
involved getting together. I don't fully remember
what it was called but it was kind of our rainbow
coalition of diverse groups out in front of the [INAUDIBLE]
standing up and saying what we thought about
the need for diversity at the law school. At one point,
somebody from COGLII got up in front of the group
of students who were watching and maybe some
faculty and said, I'm going to come up here
as a representative of the gay organization
and I invite others from the organization
or others to join me. I wasn't part of
the organization but I did stand there and think
I need to be there, right? I can't not go. And so in this kind of
out-of-body experience, I walked up there
and stood with him and I'm sure there
were other people there but I have absolutely no
recollection of who any of them were, and stood there
in front of everybody while he talked and
said whatever he said. Afterwards, I got on my bike
and I rode back to my apartment and it was like this sort of
physically and emotionally and intellectually
transformative moment where I realized that
all of my efforts to retain this information for
myself that I was a lesbian or to a close circle of
friends who I could trust, I had just let it go. And I hadn't done that with
really any calculation. I hadn't done it with
a lot of forethought. It just was compelling
to me in that moment. It was, in so many ways, this
transformative experience that didn't have to do
with classes here at all, but it helped enable me to go
down the path that I went down. The one other thing just from
law school I want to mention is that, I was editor-in-chief
of the Women's Law Journal. We published, I think one
of the very first articles on lesbian-baiting in
the military, which was, again, one of these
newly energized won out by one of these newly
energized 1Ls, Michelle Beneky and another person
and Michelle went on to begin the Service
Members Legal Defense Network that I'm sure we'll
hear more about from others. And I'll save my
tribute to Larry Tribe till my next comments. WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: Terrific. So Keith Boykin's
my favorite person on this panel for
one simple reason, although I love
them all equally. In 1989, students
at the law school started agitating
that the school should have a course on
sexual orientation in the law. There never been a
court like this before. Some of my former professors
thought I was the right person to teach it. It was a great opportunity. In 1990, I think, I started
teaching sexual orientation law courses. Actually the time, there
was no case book or anything and I put together materials
to teach the course and my students helped me turn
the materials into a case book. One of whom, Jennifer
Gordon, is sitting right here was part of the
architect of the case book. In the second year
I was teaching, there was a guy who sat
in the back of the class and was obviously struggling to
come out, named Keith Boykin. He was kind of a quiet but star
student who I took note of. This was in 1991,
I think, and Keith was struggling to come out. Within a year, President
Clinton was elected and Keith was working
in the White House as the liaison in LGBT issues. So a meteoric rise of
a Harvard Law School graduate from the back of a
class on sexual orientation law to the White House. I can't tell you how spectacular
that was in that time, at that moment. I mean, if you think about
everything people have been saying, to go from what Larry
described as his law school years to having Keith
in the White House, it's quite amazing. Welcome. KEITH BOYKIN: Thank you. Well, my story picks up
where Suzanne's story ends. In that, the
organization COGLII had changed to COGVLI, by adding a
V, in my second year I think. But I was an activist
on campus and the group that Suzanne referred
to was called the Coalition for Civil Rights. And it was seven
different affinity groups, including the Black Law Students
Association, the Women's Law Association, and
COGLII, and others. We agitated by holding protests. We went to the dean's
office and had held sit-ins, went to the president's office. And one day I remember I was
standing outside of the faculty meeting in Pound Hall when
all of the faculty members strolled out after the meeting. The dean of the law
school walked by, Robert Clark, who I just
saw a few moments ago for the first time in
years, and he walked by and I asked him, I
said, hey, Dean Clark, why don't you come
and talk to us? And he continued
walking, ignored us. So I called him again, I said,
hey, come back and talk to us. Again he turned around,
didn't know who I was and kept walking
toward the door. So that point, I
grabbed my backpack and slung it over my
shoulder and took my sign I'd been carrying and
put it under my arm and started racing to the
door to catch up to him. The Dean of the
Harvard Law School, it's a true story,
Robert C. Clark, saw me and literally began
sprinting across the campus to get away from me. It was a shocking thing to me. I ran track in college too. I went sprinting
right after him. It was just an
amazing experience that here it was I was chasing
the dean of the Harvard Law School across the campus. We invited members of
the press to our events and there was a photographer
from the Boston Globe who took a picture of me. That photo appeared
on the front page of the Metro section of the
Boston Globe the next day. So I sort of became
infamous on campus as being this agitator
for these issues. We took this case
all the way up to-- We actually filed a
lawsuit against the law school for discrimination in
the selection of the faculty. We argued the case
ourselves as students. We took the case all the way
up to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. We lost on the issue of
standing because they said we were, I think,
incidental beneficiaries. I didn't realize
until last night-- I was having dinner with
Jansen and he told me this case actually created
some sort of precedent, which I didn't realize that, but that
was an interesting development for me. But it was also the
time when I came out. I came out in law school,
as Bill mentioned. I took two courses-- Race, Racism, in Law
and Sexual Orientation in Law at the same time,
one by Randall Kennedy and one by Bill Rubenstein. I kept seeing that
the arguments that were being used in
one context were the same in the other context. I struggled with how come
it was acceptable to use these same
unjustifiable arguments in the sexual
orientation context that had already been
disbanded or discredited in the racial context. So that's what led
me to sort of pursue this whole sort of
avenue that I've been on for the rest of my life. But just one quick story about
my coming out experience. I was in law school. I went to a bookstore
at Harvard Square. I found a book or two that
seemed to interest me. There was no LGBTQ
section at that time, just the gay section. I took the book home. Read that book, that entire
book, that night and I came out to myself that day. The next day, I came out to
my mom in Killeen, Texas. I called her up on the
phone and came out to her. It was a very
difficult conversation. The following day,
I went to campus and started coming
out to other people. And that was really,
really difficult because I didn't know
how people would react to me coming out because I'd
been with these activists on campus. And I'd been involved
in [INAUDIBLE].. But it was a very
positive experience, except that it was
a little traumatic. I didn't want to actually
come out, I wanted to be out. So that's when I
discovered what I have now called The First Rule
of Coming Out, which I learned here at the law school. And the rule is this-- if you tell the right
people, you don't have to tell everyone else. I'll just quickly
tell you how it worked with one quick example. I didn't realize how
many people found out I was gay until one day I
was sitting in a meeting with, I guess I can
mention his name, with my friend and
professor Chris Edley, who I'd known from previous
work in the Dukakis campaign so he was more than
just a professor. He was a friend of mine. After the meeting,
he closed the door and sat on the edge of the
desk and he says to me, so I hear that you're gay now. Is that true? I said, yes, but
how did you know? And he told me that one
of the other professors had told him about it. And so I was shocked,
because for a long time I'd actually labored
under the delusion that the faculty at
Harvard Law School had more important things
to do with their time. I guess I was wrong. WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN, PROFESSOR
OF LAW: Just a delusion. I first met Brad Sears when
he was a college student and he applied for a job as
a summer intern at the ACLU and I interviewed him
and did not hire him. There's an activist playwright
in New York, Larry Kramer, who people have probably heard of. The next day, Larry cornered
me at a gay function and started screaming at
me at the top of his lungs, why didn't you hire Brad? I never made that mistake
again the rest of my life. Brad was a law
student at Harvard. He worked with the ACLU
with me for a summer and I realized immediately,
he was brilliant. Fast-forward a half
a decade or so. I was teaching at
UCLA and trying to get out of doing LGBT work. I got a phone call from a guy
named Chuck Williams who said, I'm thinking of giving a lot
of money to a law school. I said you should
start a think tank. And he said, what's
a think tank? The next thing you
know we got together, and Chuck and I spent a
lot of time figuring out how to start a think tank. We started something
at UCLA Law School called The Williams
Institute, which is now called The Williams Institute. Which, I basically
did two, three things. I convinced helped convince
Chuck to do this, got the law school to set it up, and then
I convinced the law school to hire Brad and
got out of the way. Brad built The
Williams Institute into what I actually
think is probably the most significant
academic institution connected to these issues
anywhere in the world. Actually one, of
the most significant academic institutions
connected to any issue. It's really quite an
amazing thing what Brad did. So I'm very proud to
say, I got out of the way and let him do it. Brad. BRAD SEARS: Thank you, Bill. I'm really honored to be here
and on this panel as well. I guess I have to say the
same summer that I applied to work with Bill for the
summer and he didn't hire me, Evan did. I ended up having the
great pleasure of working with Bill after my 1L year. So my experience here, I
would say, I was a wreck, the gays were bad, and
the straights were better, and the institution was amazing. If you want to know
about how I was a wreck, there's an essay online
called "Queer L" that will tell you about every angsty
thought I had in my 1L year. In 1994, when I wrote
that for a class here and the law professor turned
it into an online journal, we didn't realize that
anything that went online would never go away. So feel free to read
more about that. And it names names online. But I was very out. I arrived here queer. I didn't come out to my
parents until Thanksgiving break my first year. I didn't come out to
them when I arrived back in Missouri
on the first day or on Thanksgiving or on Friday,
the day after or Saturday. I waited till we got to Kansas
City International Airport and that security line
was right in front of me. I turned around
and said, I'm gay. By the time I got
back to Harvard, they had called my
roommates and told them. Unfortunately they
were both gay. And they had had a
minister reach out to me and unfortunately he turned
out to be gay as well. So that was thwarted,
but it was rough. I think it was rough
for me personally dealing with the kind of
family part of coming out. Then two years later,
I spent a year here with the lymph nodes
in the back of my neck kind of growing
larger and larger and realizing I had the
symptoms of early HIV infection. But knowing that if
I took that test, I probably wouldn't
finish law school. And that was in 1995, so
I'm happy to be here today for a lot of reasons. I got here and I was queer. So I was queer-identified
when I got here. I'd been involved with Act Up,
which Bill and others really helped defend,
with Queer Nation. And I got here and there was
no one out in my first year and that was kind of shocking. The gays were kind of bad. Unfortunately, I missed
Keith and that class and what I ended up with
was kind of the good gays and I was the bad gay. And the good gays
at that time really felt everyone should quiet down. They would say COGLII and
kind of make fun of the name. One thing I will
take credit for, is I got rid of the
COGLII, [INAUDIBLE],, and actually changed
the name to something that was harder to make fun of. But they really
kind of looked down. There was a bunch of people,
not everyone, that looked down at activists at that
time, which just sent me in the other direction. So I started wearing
skirts to class. I did at that time illegal
needle exchange downtown on the weekends. One time to crim law I brought
this huge plastic container of dirty syringes
and sat on my desk. For some reason, Richard
Parker let me, let me do that. So I kind of went in
the other direction. And while there wasn't a lot of
support in the LGBT community, I have to say the
allies, and I think you were speaking to this,
in kind of the coalition groups was amazing. So by my second semester,
the incredible, Van Jones who was at Yale had brought
a protest to Harvard. It was a hunger strike
against Guantanamo, at that time which wasn't about
torturing people but holding Haitians there who
are HIV-positive. So suddenly I was working
with a lot of straight allies on this issue. We did a hunger
strike here for a week in support of then President
Clinton releasing them. A campaign promise
he made that he did not keep for quite a while. By the time graduation time
rolled around my first year, the "don't ask, don't
tell" policy was in play, had not been passed
yet by the Congress, but Colin Powell showed up
here to speak at commencement. Again, mainly working
with straight allies, we staged a protest
at commencement. We decided to have one pink
balloon for every person that had been kicked
out of the military while Colin Powell
was in his position and that resulted in 7,000
pink balloons facing him when he gave the commencement. Which, was a big nice
visual, flashy picture all over the papers after it
happened and brought a lot of attention to the issue. So the gays were a little hard. The straights were good. I have to say the institution
was amazing, both in terms of the fantastic alumni. We had a kind of 25th
anniversary of Stonewall and Chai came and spoke to
that and some other folks. That was incredible. Bill was teaching his class. I didn't take it. There was Zita Lazarini who was
here teaching HIV and the Law, and she's still really
active on these issues. Mary Bekker came and combined
what you were talking about and taught a really great
seminar on race and sexuality, and then published my personal
autobiography online, which was there for years to come. So I look back. I don't think I
appreciated it at that time but I was really allowed
to learn about and explore these issues by the institution. And I think in a way that was
like really ahead of its time. WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN, PROFESSOR
OF LAW: Thank you, Brad. Janson, you're last, youngest. Bringing us into
a new millennium. We now also will hear
your story and then turn and talk about some of
the substantive issues as well. So take it away. JANSON WU: Thank you, Bill. And thank you for
having me on this panel. Like Brad, I was super out by
the time I got to law school. But, unlike Brad,
I actually wasn't involved in any LGBTQ
activism before law school. It wasn't till, I think,
my third year of law school that I had my first
LGBT activism moment, which I'll talk about in a second. But just to give a little
background, just to give you a little context, in college,
that was when Ellen came out, that was when Matthew
Shepard was murdered, and so LGBT issues were
very much on the forefront. There was an active
group at college. For me, I was an activist
in college as well too but, like Chai, my
activism really kind of was born out of feminism. I was a women's studies
major in college. And so I was really
focused on kind of domestic sexual
violence issues and women's rights issues. I did that because I really
wanted to focus on an area where I had privilege. Not an area where I
would directly benefit but rather a place where
I could use my privilege to make social change. And so I was very much focused
on feminism in college. Got to law school and
continued that focus. It wasn't until I think it was
my second year of law school that the university
reversed its policy and allowed military
recruiters on campus. This was in response to the
threat from the administration to implement the
Solomon amendment and withhold federal funding
to any universities that forbid military recruiters on campus. Just to give you a little
context there as well, too, 9/11 happened my
second year in law school. And so we're in
this era where there was a lot of warmongering, and
a lot of patriotism in the air and a lot of pressure
to go along with that. For me and for my friends, it
felt like such a huge insult that our university would
so easily allow recruiters onto the campus. And not just do
that, but reverse the position knowing that that
position was right before. And so what we did
is we went ahead and we signed up for all
the interview spots with JAG on campus recruiting. That was my first
act of activism, was to make sure that
they heard from us in a respectful
conversation discussion, but that also that we made
it more difficult for them to recruit folks on campus. What was interesting following
that, though, is our-- by then the name,
thankfully, was Lambda, and there was dissension within
Lambda as to whether or not they would support our action. Again, I think post 9/11
there was so much pressure to support the troops and
be patriotic and support the military. And there was a group
of LGBT law students who thought what we were
doing was unpatriotic. There was actually a
vote of Lambda as to whether or not they would
denounce us in our actions in the school newspaper. Thankfully, that vote failed. But that gives you a little
bit of a sense of divisions in activism amongst
the LGBT community. Anyway, suffice it
to say I've been super gay activist since then. My very last year
of law school, I had the honor of driving
down with my friends to the Supreme Court to
watch the Lawrence v. Texas arguments. We camped out outside
all night and were the very first ones in line. That was really the
beginning of my career. WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: Wow. Thank you. So we are halfway
through our 90 minutes. I want to try to do two things
in the time we have remaining. One is to have the
panelists discuss some of the substantive issues
that have pervaded our times. The second is to leave
open some time for people to ask questions and
participate from the audience. It's interesting,
actually, Larry, you talked about the
teacher's case and Chai, you also talked about
the no promo homo. When I was in law school,
really the only gay rights cases that had ever been done were
more or less free speech cases. Where everything kind
of began in some ways because the right to
speak and organize is the underlying effort
to get everything going. As it did, I think, the sodomy
cases and Bowers v. Hardwick. It's really the place to
start for so many years or for almost two decades. It was the organizing
principle of these issues. So Larry, I'm going
to ask you to start. Talk a little about
your experience arguing Bowers v. Hardwick. But I'm going to, rather
than try to manage this, I'm going to say, why
don't we all just try to jump in and talk to each
other about various issues and try to kind of move along
and bring a discussion up. LAURENCE TRIBE: Sure. First of all, I
guess, I didn't begin when I talked the last time by
thanking you for inviting me and thanking all of
you for being here. It's a great honor. It's not something that would
have happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It's terrific. As to Bowers-- WILLIAM B. RUBENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: We always would have
invited you, Larry. We would have invited
you 10 years ago we would have invited you 20. LAURENCE H. TRIBE,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: And I hope 10 years from now. Evan got me involved,
I think together with Kathleen Sullivan, in both
NGTF v. The Oklahoma School Board and Bowers. In Bowers, I met Michael Bowers. He was a really sweet guy,
unfortunately died of AIDS not all that many years
after the case. I kind of knew it was not
a cause that whose time had really come yet. I especially knew
after arguing NGTF that we were going to face
a hostile Supreme Court. I strongly urged
that we not take the case to the Supreme Court. I hadn't gotten involved
at the lower level, but we really didn't
have any choice because good old Bowers,
who was the attorney general of Florida, sought
cert from a lower court decision that had handled
the issue rather narrowly and said only that there
should be heightened scrutiny and didn't really
resolve the issue. So at that time, when there
was lots of panic about AIDS and confusion about how
HIV was transmitted, there is the notion
that that might be a powerful justification
for restrictions on anal and oral sex. But I knew that the
Supreme Court didn't want to talk about those things. They were embarrassed even
confronting their existence, even though many of
them undoubtedly were involved at least in oral sex. So, I didn't think it was
great to be arguing the case. But on the other hand,
we had no choice. And I was very honored
to be asked to argue it. And when I did, I really
got into the subject and thought a lot. Here, there were
a lot of divisions within the LGBT community. Divisions over whether it
should be presented as a privacy case or an equality case. It turns out, in my view,
that the two are inseparable. I think of the double
helix in which they surround an axis of dignity. But in any case, we didn't
really have a choice. That is, no equal protection
issue had been preserved in the case, Michael
had not publicly identified that he was gay. The record contained no
evidence of who he was with when he was having oral sex. And so I thought that the
only way we could argue it was to basically make
the argument that this is an aspect of personal liberty. The law in Georgia had
not distinguished straight from gay, so-called sodomy. They had treated
them identically, although on the ground
and in practice, they were obviously
treated differently in terms of selective
arrests, selective harassment, selective prosecution. The court that I
was talking about did how the sanctity of the
home and personal liberty, all this stuff that seems
standard now, and Lewis Powell leans forward from
the bench and says, Professor Tribe, you're
arguing the case just the way I would if I were you. And I thought, uh oh. It turns out later on, a memo
came out from his chambers where the attempt
to invoke the home and notions of personal liberty
that applied to everybody, really turned him off. He told his law clerk,
he said, Professor Tribe, with his usual
hyperbole and rhetoric, makes light of the
center of American life. The home is sacred. He sullies it by addressing
it in the context of gay sex. He said, I don't think
I've ever met a gay person, so I don't even know
what he's talking about. In any event, we lost
the case, 5 to 4. I was hoping to get some
powerful dissents, which we did. One of the things I didn't know
was that we had already in fact gotten Powell's vote at first. He gave a talk after leaving
the court to a bunch of students at NYU and he said,
I think I only made one mistake when
I was at the court, and that was my vote
in Bowers v. Hardwick. And I wrote him a letter
saying, better late than never. Turns out, however, he
still didn't get it. Because in his view,
the reason he said, I don't think the case mattered
because people really aren't prosecuted for this offense. Michael Hardwick was
not thrown into jail. He actually brought a
civil rights claim himself. What he didn't realize
was, of course, some people are prosecuted. But the main thing-- and it really emerged
finally, finally in Justice Kennedy's
opinion in Lawrence-- was that this was an excuse
for discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. In every other context-- housing, immigration, adoption. It really didn't matter
if people went to jail. Or it mattered,
but if they didn't go to jail for having
oral or anal sex, they were nonetheless branded
with a scarlet C for criminal. And it was possible to argue
that because what they were regularly doing
was a crime, they weren't entitled to any
recognition as people with equal rights. So when I lost that case,
I've ever since been teaching con law, I told my students,
I'm sure that not only you, but I will be alive when
Bowers is overruled. Of course, 17 years
later, it was. I wrote the ACLU's
main brief in Lawrence. It was an extraordinary moment. I was in a courtroom filled
with crying people when Kennedy announced the decision. I had testified for Kennedy
after testifying against Bork. Partly, because in his
earlier jurisprudence, I saw the promise
that he would rule what I thought was the right
way in cases like that. So when he did I felt really an
enormous kind of vindication/ also sadness for all the people
who had come before and anxiety about what was
going to come next. I thought it would
be same-sex marriage. It turned out to be. And Obergafel as well as Windsor
were extraordinary decisions. But now it's hard not
to be a little sad. I mean, here we are celebrating
the triumphs with Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas and
a bunch of justices, who if Donald Trump
is re-elected-- and he may be, not only
may he last out his term, may be reelected-- we're going to face for the
rest of your professional lives an even harder struggle than
many of us went through. Because there will be pushback. If Kennedy votes what I
think is the right way in the Masterpiece
wedding cake case, maybe that pushback will
be held off for a while. But I know where Gorsuch and
unfortunately the Chief Justice and Clarence Thomas and
Alito and the person who replaces either Ruth
Ginsburg or Anthony Kennedy are going to vote
on these cases. So all of our progress
has to be focused in the foreseeable future on
legislatures and on organizing and on working
from the ground up. Not looking for the highest
court in the land for rescue. So that was a little more to
say about the Bowers experience. I probably flashed
forward too much, but I can't help
thinking about that because that's what
it's really about. KEITH BOYKIN: Can I just respond
to the whole Neil Gorsuch thing? It's a slightly tangential,
but I think relevant, point to move forward
in the conversation in that one of my classmates-- I'll mention his
name, Phil Berg-- was also a classmate
of Neil Gorsuch. They were both a year
ahead of me in law school. Phil was a gay man
and he was out. He was in the press, in the New
York Times and other places, advocating on behalf of-- and
Phil is a friend of mine-- on behalf of Neil
Gorsuch's confirmation because he knew him
and that Neil Gorsuch came to his wedding. I think that's appalling. And I don't mean to call him out
when he doesn't have a chance to defend himself. But I just think it's appalling. This is the same mistake we
made with Clarence Thomas. When there are African Americans
who say, well, he's black, he's a good guy, I
know him, or whatever. We have to get smarter. We can't just because
we like someone support them regardless
of our personal history. We have to think about who
they are and what they will do. I think it's time for us to
start thinking strategically when we make those
statements and not just thinking about what's
in our personal interest. CHAI FELDBLUM: So
I mean, I think Larry's absolutely
right to say there's going to be work to be done. Absolutely. I will say, listening
to this, I was one of the people
in that courtroom when Lawrence came down that
did cry, didn't expect to. And 17 years earlier,
I had come to the court to clerk for Justice
Blackmun literally right after Bowers came down. I would be calling-- at that
point again, no, no internet, so I was calling that
Supreme Court line every day to see
if it had come down and to see how
Blackmun had voted. Because I was already
going to be his clerk. So to me-- LAURENCE TRIBE: And
you may not know, he wrote a wonderful dissent. CHAI FELDBLUM: He wrote a
wonderful dissent but here-- which was supposed to be
the majority but again, just think about-- so I want to say this
in terms of thinking about both to your question
of what substantive issues but going forward. His dissent, Blackmun's
dissent, said, yes, there's a right of privacy. OK. There were two aspects
of that, right? One is the family, the
sanctity of the home, you know. One could say, OK,
and that's where the right to be able to have
sex with the person you love comes from. But that's not how the
dissent was written. Because the other
part of privacy is to do in the privacy
of your home something like read pornography
or whatever. But you have the
right to do that. That's how that
dissent was written. Very important in terms of
a result, if we had one, but it was where
the justice was. When I met him,
that's what he was. So two things, we
had to have moved the moral conversation forward. Michael Sandel, whom I
went to hear this morning, was a huge person in my thinking
because his piece on abortion and homosexuality said
so long as you're just going to be that that's
something you should tolerate, it will not get the
full protection. It has to be something
that people think is actually morally neutral. I mean, does it have
to be morally good? I always used to say, gay is
good, not because being gay is any more better morally
than being straight, but love is good. That's the good and being gay
takes nothing away from that. Therefore, gay love is good. It has taken so long
for this country to even come to that
place of love is good, and when you're gay, that
doesn't take anything away from it. I believe regardless of who's
going to get on the Supreme Court and everyone here
has to fight to the utmost, regardless that, we
are not going back on that normative
belief in this country. BRAD SEARS: I just
want to jump in right off of that and
just something I've been thinking a lot about. What is my job in the movement? What are we doing? I think, when I was law
school and for so long, it was about using the law
to gain rights and resources. Now when I think about it-- and it goes right into
what you were saying, what everyone has said so far-- it's about healing. And I think for community,
it's really about healing and it's about connection. It's about connection in terms
of personal relationships, in terms of family,
in terms of society, Those aren't byproducts of
the work that we've done. They really are
the central focus. And I think Evan
discovered this in his work on marriage when
the message needed to be about shared values in
terms of love and commitment, as opposed to the economic
benefits of marriage. I just think it's an issue
of the right message. It really was the issue
of the right motivation. So those opinions
by Kennedy are so healing because they deal
with dignity, that they recognize our families. That's really, I think, if
we approach our work in terms of the healing that needs
to be done for the trauma that most LGBT people still
experience when they're young and the connections
that need to be made, that our argument
should be shaped by that and what we focus on needs
to be shaped by that. LAURENCE TRIBE: Can I
just say one more thing about the healing? Kennedy went out of
his way in Lawrence to do something the court
has actually never done before or since in its history. That is, he said,
it's important for us to say that Bowers was wrong
the day it was decided. Because of the insult
delivered to a whole community. It was not just raw. I mean, you know when
the court looks back at things like
Plessy v. Ferguson, it says, you know,
things have changed, education is different, our
consciousness is growing, and there is that element
in some of Kennedy's talk. But he really said
it was a moral wrong when it was decided. On the other hand, in
his marriage opinion, he says something
that I sort of regret. He says, one of the main reasons
that same-sex marriage is protected is that
marriage is the only way you can avoid loneliness. You reach across
the bed at night and if you're not
married, you have no one. Well, I can testify that
that isn't true, number one. And number two, it is too bad
that he sort of privileged that state as marriage. I've spent many years married,
I can't say it's good. But it's not the
summum bonum and people who are couples or not
couples and who choose not to marry have rights as well. Hopefully, someday as
the culture evolves and as it embraces
love, we will get there. EVAN WOLFSON:
Well, we could have a whole discussion about
marriage and how that fits. One of the reasons I
wrote my paper here at law school on why we should
fight for the freedom to marry was that I believed,
and I had become to believe in law school, that
the legal part of our work is in some ways the
least important part. That what you need to do is
to get the decision-makers, whoever that
decision-maker may be-- judges, justices,
legislators, the public-- to see who you are
and to see the values and to want to do
the right thing. Then our job is to give
them the legal roadmap. The legal roadmap, to me-- this is probably why I
got a B on the paper-- was the least interesting part. The reason I think
that's important is because that is exactly
how we then proceeded to win. In the Hardwick case. The operative sentence in
the majority anti-gay opinion was Justice White saying
that any idea that there's any connection between
this court's precedents on marriage, procreation,
child-raising, on the one hand and homosexuality on the
other, is at best facetious. When I got that
opinion, I can still vividly remember this moment. It was the one moment in
my time where I actually questioned, should
I even be a lawyer, do I even believe in the
system, for a day or two. But I remember saying,
the reason this happened is because we have to show
the country and the court that, in fact, there's every
connection between procreation, between family, and
marriage, and gay people. The first 17 years of our
modern movement struggle from 1969 to 1986,
were the leave us alone, don't attack
us, don't harass us, don't persecute us years. The next 17 years, little
civil rights karma, from Bowers from
Hardwick to Lawrence, when we succeeded
in overturning it, were the years in
which we actually fought not to be let
alone but to be let in. We claimed that
vocabulary of marriage, as I had argued we
should in the paper. And while some may go
too far in their rhetoric and some have a more
conservative way of talking about it, others
have a more liberationist way of talking about it. To me, it was about claiming
that central language of connection that would help
people understand who we are. Help them see who we are. In Blackmun's dissent, he wrote
about the willful blindness of the majority
who refuse to see how these values of love
and connection to family apply to these people. Gay people. And we had to cure
that willful blindness. And I'll just end by saying
to the other part of what you teed up here,
Larry, is, this is the work we have at hand now. As lawyers, yes we litigate,
yes we write legal roadmaps, yes we do legislative
lawyering, yes we use our legal skills
and legal language and the legal roadmap and the
doctrines and all these things that I got a B on. But actually our power and
the real work of change comes from, as lawyers, and as
citizens, and as organizers, and as friends, and people
who can speak and engage, is in engaging people
and opening their hearts and minds and eyes to the
vision of the right society that we want and doing
the work of creating the climate in which
decision-makers, political or judicial,
get us where we need to be in terms of the law. And that is the way we're
going to get our country back on track now. It's not about just
legal argument. It's not about a narrow idea
of what our legal tools are. It is about our
ability to get people to see and to create the legal
and political mechanisms, including litigation,
that get our country where it needs to be. JANSON WU: So if
I could just say add one other thing to Evan. I just want to integrate
the importance of what Evan said about changing
hearts and minds with the law and litigation,
because I actually think that the law has so
powerful tool in two ways in changing hearts and minds. The first is that it's
a powerful framework for storytelling. You have the plaintiffs
who've been harmed, and you have a story
that you can tell people that they can connect with. And that's exactly what we
did here in Massachusetts in the Goodrich litigation,
which was one of GLAAD's cases where I work, is to tell the
stories through litigation. And then the second thing
where law can help prompt that conversation is by actually
forcing the conversation, right? So once GLAAD won the first
case in the country allowing same-sex couples to marry, that
wasn't the end of the story. It is only beginning
or maybe the midpoint. And Massachusetts, for
those who weren't here, went through just
a transformation in the course of
three to four years because we had to
protect that victory from being voted in the ballot. And so folks had to
talk to the legislators, had to talk to the neighbors. I was actually just
talking to a legislator the other day at the statehouse
who was there during the fight. And he still says
that that vote he made to preserve
marrying in Massachusetts was the most important
vote of his career still. WILLIAM B. ROSENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: Suzanne, can you talk and then
take some questions? OK. SUZANNE GOLDBERG:
So I went from being afraid of being a
member of COGLII to my first job after
clerking, and then for 10 years at Lambda Legal. So not quite to the
White House, but to becoming a professional
gay, as some people say. I remember-- and
working with Evan while there-- and
I remember standing at the elevator at Lambda. And I was pretty new
as the Skadden fellow, and their first to
an LGBT organization, and talking to a colleague,
Mike Isbell, who also went here, I think, and asking
him for some advice. And he said, just don't
judge your value as a lawyer by your win-loss record, because
you're going to lose a lot. And just to pick
up, I want to go back to what Evan was
saying, it was a moment where we had greater capacity
to pull in allies across a range of groups. To try to meet our
decision-makers and focus on the courts
here where they were, right? And I strongly believe
that that whether we're in a legislative context or
litigation or the public forum, people don't come over because
you want them to come over. They come over because you
meet them where they are. And so in litigation--
and I'll talk a moment about
Roemer and a moment about Lawrence, because I was
involved with the litigation of both of those. When we were at
the Supreme Court, it was very important to
me to get as broad a range of amicus briefs as we could. We worked intensely with all
of the civil rights groups, the Legal Defense
Fund, and others who filed incredible
briefs, which were to me important for two reasons. One, to get their legal
analysis and their positions before the court, and two,
relating to the public domain to have those
conversations, right, so that organizations report
on their work and they say, hey you know, we're standing
up for gay rights here, which wasn't a thing that
seemed so obvious at the time that organizations or law firms
or many entities would do. Also very important to me
was to try to get state bar associations to join the brief. And it turns out, as I
discovered at the time-- maybe you all know--
there are actually rules about which state bar. Some state bar associations
can't exactly sign on, some can. My interest at that
time was, I mean, sure I wanted the bar
associations on the briefs, but more I wanted to get that
question into their forms so that they would have to
debate it and start having the conversation,
because the only way to get the
conversation to move is to start having it and having
it in many, many places. And I think each of
us in various ways has done that in
our work and that is to me sort of
strategic advocacy wherever you take it, ask
the m have the conversation, I'll just say one quick
thing about Lawrence, which is I remember I was working
after Roemer was decided, sort of had a gap
in my docket, so all of these anti-gay initiatives
at that moment had gone away. And Evan had moved on
really fully to marriage. He had been working
a lot at Lambda on sodomy law litigation, and
I wound up taking that up. And I was sitting in my
office, and I got a call from a guy I knew because
we had done some work on HIV together for
Mitchell Cateen, who, said I was talking
to these guys who were arrested for violating the
Texas homosexual conduct law. And I said, really? Because maybe many
of you in the room know that there had been many
efforts to challenge that law. And some of them had done
kind of well, but repeatedly the civil litigation,
the civil suits to challenge the
constitutionality of the homosexual
conduct law in Texas were ultimately
rejected by courts on jurisdictional grounds or
lack of standing basically. And so he and I
talked, and I heard about John Lawrence
and Tyrone Garner and then I remember walking
down the hall to my colleague Ruth Harlow and
saying, I think we just got the case that is
going to enable us to get at Bowers versus Hardwick. And I have to say just
personally, when I went down to meet them in Houston and
work with the lawyers there, it was a little bit
terrifying, because I had never done a criminal case. I had never wanted to
do a criminal case. I liked the class
ish in law school. But it was just not my thing. And so I worked a
lot to try to make sure we preserved the issue
so that we didn't screw it up when they pled no
contest and that we could preserve it going forward. Can I just-- there's
just-- no, I probably don't have time
to say one story. No. I'll stop I'll try
to weave it in. WILLIAM B. ROSENSTEIN,
PROFESSOR OF LAW: Good. Let's do that. I know there are a lot
of people in the room and I know people probably
want to talk or ask questions. I see a hand going up already. Wow.
