When Lambda Legal applied for nonprofit status, New York’s court rejected the application, stating that advocating for gay rights was “neither benevolent nor charitable.” Lambda Legal appealed—becoming its own first client—and won. The victory affirmed that advocacy for LGBTQ+ people is a legitimate public good and cleared the way for decades of impact litigation.

Decorated Vietnam veteran Leonard Matlovich and Navy Ensign Vernon (“Copy”) Berg were discharged from military service after being identified as gay. Lambda Legal challenged these discriminatory policies in early federal court cases that exposed the injustice of discharging lesbians, gay men, and bisexual servicemembers. These cases laid essential groundwork for successful later challenges to the exclusion of LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV from military service and other types of government employment.

Pioneering AIDS researcher and physician Dr. Joseph Sonnabend opened a clinic to treat people living with HIV, only to face eviction efforts fueled by neighbors’ fear and stigma. Lambda Legal helped stop the eviction in the nation’s first HIV-discrimination lawsuit, protecting both the clinic and the right of people living with HIV to access care without discrimination.

Michael Hardwick was arrested in his Atlanta home for engaging in private, consensual sexual activity that was illegal under the state’s sodomy law. He took his fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Georgia’s law. In response, Lambda Legal helped develop a successful strategy to dismantle sodomy laws in state courts across the country.

After speaking out against Russia’s persecution of LGBTQ+ people, Alla Pitcherskaia was arrested, beaten, and subjected to electroshock treatments intended to change her lesbian sexual orientation. Lambda Legal secured a breakthrough federal appeals court ruling that such conversion efforts, whatever the enforcers’ intentions, constitute torture and must be recognized as persecution. The case established a critical precedent for LGBTQ+ people seeking asylum in the United States.

Same-sex couples in Hawaii were denied marriage licenses solely because of each person’s sex. Lambda Legal helped win a landmark state high court ruling that the marriage exclusion appeared to be unconstitutional sex discrimination, and then proved at trial that the state had no valid reasons for the exclusion. Although later negated by a state constitutional amendment, the decision proved that marriage equality could be won in the courts and opened the door for successful advocacy nationwide.

In the years before broad domestic partnerships, civil unions, and marriage equality, same-sex couples usually could not establish legal ties between both parents and their children. Lambda Legal took up the challenge in New York, representing Gail Messina and Patty Irwin, who wanted to secure Gail’s legal relationship to Dana, the daughter to whom Patty had given birth. We persuaded the state’s highest court to approve second-parent adoptions, which allow unmarried same-sex couples to both be legal parents. The decision offered protection to thousands of children with same-sex parents in the state and strengthened the movement to protect LGBTQ+ families nationwide.

Colorado voters approved a constitutional amendment banning local nondiscrimination protections for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Lambda Legal helped take the case successfully through Colorado’s courts and then in the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck the amendment down as unconstitutional. The ruling marked the first time the Court recognized that laws targeting people for unequal treatment based on sexual orientation violate the U.S. Constitution.

Jamie Nabozny endured years of brutal anti-gay bullying at school while administrators refused to intervene. Lambda Legal took his case to federal court, securing an appeals ruling that schools can be held accountable under the Constitution for failing to protect students from abuse based on sexual orientation or gender. That decision and the trial that followed resulted in a nearly $1 million settlement for Jamie, which reshaped how schools nationwide respond to bullying.

When Anthony Colín and other students in Orange County, California sought to form a Gay-Straight Alliance and were blocked by their public school district, Lambda Legal and our partners went to court to defend their rights. A federal judge ruled based on the Equal Access Act (a federal law) that schools receiving federal funds must allow GSAs to meet on equal terms with other student groups, affirming LGBTQ+ students’ right to organize, be visible, and support each other.

Following the murder of Brandon Teena, a transgender man whose life and death exposed deep failures of rural Nebraska law enforcement, Lambda Legal pursued accountability in court for Brandon’s mother. Our success highlighted the devastating consequences of official indifference to anti-trans violence and became part of a broader national reckoning over systemic anti-trans bias and hate crimes, which included the documentary and then award-winning feature film, “Boys Don’t Cry.”

John Lawrence and Tyron Garner were arrested for consensual intimacy under Texas’s sodomy law. Lambda Legal took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned Bowers v. Hardwick and invalidated sodomy laws nationwide, affirming the constitutional right to liberty, privacy, and dignity for LGBTQ+ people.

People living with HIV were categorically barred from serving as Foreign Service officers. Lambda Legal challenged the policy on behalf of Lorenzo Taylor and won, ending the federal government’s blanket ban and affirming that HIV-positive status alone cannot justify exclusion from public service. The case marked an important step in recognition that employment discrimination based on HIV violates federal law.

Doctors refused infertility treatment to Guadalupe Benitez because she is a lesbian, citing their religious objections. Lambda Legal took on the case and secured a unanimous ruling from California’s highest court that the state’s civil rights laws apply equally to medical providers and that the protections for religious freedom do not justify discrimnation against patients.

Following five years of in-state public engagement, same-sex couples in Iowa challenged their state’s marriage ban, represented by Lambda Legal. In a unanimous decision, the Iowa Supreme Court struck the ban down, making Iowa the first state in the Midwest to achieve marriage equality. The victory dispelled assumptions that we could only win on the coasts, and boosted the national momentum toward full equality.

When Janice Langbehn was denied access to her critically ill partner Lisa Pond in a Florida hospital, Lambda Legal took action. The case sparked national outrage and inspired President Obama to implement sweeping reforms of visitation policies in federally funded hospitals, ensuring that LGBTQ+ families can be treated with dignity in moments of medical crisis.

After informing her supervisor of her gender transition, Vandy Beth Glenn was fired from her state government job. Lambda Legal secured a breakthrough federal appeals court ruling that discrimination against transgender employees is unlawful discrimination based on sex and violates the U.S. Constitution. The decision became a critical building block in the legal recognition that workplace discrimination against LGBTQ+ people is unlawful.

Alec Esquivel, a transgender man employed by the Oregon state court system, was denied coverage for medically necessary gender-affirming care. In an early litigation success against such exclusions, Lambda Legal’s challenge caused the state health plan to agree to cover all necessary gender-transition care, affirming that transgender people must not be denied this essential medical treatment.

Early in the AIDS epidemic, many states enacted criminal laws that impose harsher penalties based solely on HIV status. Eradicating these discriminatory laws has been a Lambda Legal priority. In Iowa, Nick Rhoades was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a one-time sexual encounter in which he used a condom and did not transmit HIV. Lambda Legal challenged Iowa’s use of its outdated HIV-specific law and persuaded the Iowa Supreme Court to overturn Nick’s sentence. The victory has helped to dismantle these laws rooted in fear rather than science and to advance fair treatment for people living with HIV.

Jim Obergefell and John Arthur flew to Maryland to marry legally as John was dying from ALS. They then sued to be recognized as married in Ohio, their home state, so Jim could be recognized as John’s surviving spouse on John’s death certificate. Their case was joined with marriage cases from Kentucky, Michigan, and Tennessee to be decided together by the U.S. Supreme Court. Lambda Legal was co-counsel in the legal team that secured a landmark U.S. Supreme Court victory in all of the cases, which made marriage equality the law of the land.

Chelsea and Jessamy Torres are a married same-sex couple living in Wisconsin. After Chelsea gave birth to their son, the state refused to list both mothers on their child’s birth certificate as it would have done automatically if they had been a different-sex married couple. Lambda Legal went to court and won a ruling that requires the state to treat same-sex spouses the same as different-sex spouses, reinforcing that marriage equality includes equal recognition of parenthood.

Community College professor Kim Hively was fired when her employer learned she is a lesbian. When her case initially was dismissed, Lambda Legal took on her appeal and persuaded a federal appeals court that workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation is a form of illegal sex discrimination. This breakthrough victory built on our 2011 Glenn v. Brumby win and provided the other essential piece of groundwork for the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 affirmation of nationwide protections for LGBTQ+ workers in Bostock v. Clayton County.

After North Carolina enacted a law targeting transgender people’s access to public restrooms, Lambda Legal and the ACLU challenged the measure in federal court. The case exposed the harms of such discrimination, debunked the lies used to justify the discrimination, and helped secure protections for transgender people after the law’s repeal. Unfortunately, North Carolina was soon joined by dozens of other states that made attacks on LGBTQ+ people, especially on transgender youth, a primary focus of state politics. In the following years, Lambda Legal was kept busy challenging state laws that passed.

Marsha Wetzel, a lesbian senior, faced antigay harassment and violence from other residents at her assisted living facility in Illinois. Lambda Legal brought suit, and the federal appeals court ruled in a national first that landlords can be held liable under the federal Fair Housing Act for failing to stop known, discriminatory tenant-on-tenant harassment—strengthening protections for LGBTQ+ elders.

Jessica Hicklin, a transgender woman incarcerated in Missouri since she was a teenager, was denied medically necessary gender-affirming care under a state “freeze-frame” policy. Such policies limit care to treatments a person was receiving when they entered prison. Jessica did not come to understand her gender dysphoria and need for treatment until years later. Lambda Legal challenged the policy and won an important ruling requiring prison officials to provide constitutionally adequate medical care, including gender-affirming care, for transgender people in custody.

In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court held that federal employment law protects LGBTQ+ people nationwide. The ruling built on decades of Lambda Legal’s work—including Glenn v. Brumby and Hively v. Ivy Tech—establishing that discrimination in employment based on gender identity or sexual orientation is unlawful. Lambda Legal filed amicus briefs in Bostock, explaining the legal doctrine and reinforcing the foundation for nationwide workplace equality for LGBTQ+ people.

Many same-sex couples denied marriage for decades then found themselves excluded from Social Security survivor benefits when one member of the couple died before they could marry or be married long enough for the survivor to qualify. Lambda Legal’s litigation successfully challenged longstanding marriage discrimination being used to justify still more discrimination, addressing lasting harms caused by marriage bans by ensuring that these survivors could receive proper benefits.

Dana Zzyym, an intersex and nonbinary U.S. citizen, was denied a passport because they could not accurately mark “male” or “female” on their application. Lambda Legal challenged the policy, and after years of litigation, Dana became the first person to receive a U.S. passport with an “X” gender marker—marking a major step forward in the recognition of nonbinary and intersex people under federal law.

Lambda Legal has successfully challenged multiple policies restricting or barring military service by people living with HIV. In our cases on behalf of Army National Guard Sgt. Nick Harrison and two Air Force service members, the court blocked enforcement of the bar on officer’s commissions and the “Deploy or Get Out” policy, affirming that HIV status alone does not justify discrimination in service to the country.

The second Trump administration immediately launched a renewed wave of policies targeting transgender people, people living with HIV, immigrants, reproductive health care, and racial justice initiatives, as well as medical and scientific research, education programs, and social services critical for the wellbeing of LGBTQ+ people. As before, Lambda Legal moved swiftly to court, challenging these actions in multiple federal cases across the country to block efforts to erase protections in health care and social services, military service, identity documents, family life, free speech, and nondiscrimination law. We have secured protective injunctions in many of our cases and are preparing additional cases.