Lesbian Visibility Week is a time to remember, amplify, and celebrate the lesbian community. Their stories, struggles, and triumphs are foundational to LGBTQ+ history past, present, and future.
In fact, many of Lambda Legal’s own milestone cases in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality were possible thanks to the courage and resolve of our lesbian plaintiffs. From challenging discrimination based on “religious freedom rights,” to expanding domestic partners’ rights, to winning the freedom to marry — they blazed trails by living their truth unapologetically, and their fortitude continues to guide us forward today.
To honor this week, we are highlighting a few of those inspiring plaintiffs and their cases.
These cases are featured in “Making the Case for Equality: 50 Years of Legal Milestones in LGBTQ History”, the coffee table book authored by Lambda Legal’s chief legal officer, Jennifer C. Pizer, and political scientist Ellen Ann Andersen. Purchase it today.
Lupita Benitez
Filed in 2001, Benitez v. North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group challenged doctors’ attempts to use religious freedom rights to discriminate against a lesbian patient, Lupita Benitez.
Our client Lupita suffered from a common medical condition that made it more difficult for her to achieve pregnancy. There was one infertility clinic in her health plan, and the doctors there were happy to perform tests and prescribe fertility medications for her.
However, they refused the simple insemination procedure that was the medically proper next step – a procedure they did all the time for other patients who were not lesbians.
Because religious refusals to treat LGBTQ+ patients like other patients were (and remain) a widespread problem, Lambda Legal took up Lupita’s case. And after many years of legal wrangling, we won a unanimous victory in the California Supreme Court—a national first. Now, Lupita and her spouse Joanne Clark are raising three lively, happy children.
Lydia M. Ramos
Lydia M. Ramos and Linda Rodriguez were a Latina lesbian couple who had had a church wedding but no legal recognition of their 14-year relationship, nor any legal tie (such as a second-parent adoption) between their 12-year-old daughter Lita and Lydia, her non-biological mother. So when Linda was killed in a highway crash, Lita’s blood relatives—her uncle and aunt—took Lita and refused to return her to Lydia, her surviving mother.
So Lambda Legal went to court. And although it took two months, which was an eternity for Lydia and Lita, we got a guardianship order requiring Lita’s return. And the following year, Lydia’s testimony about the family’s ordeal helped drive passage in the California legislature of AB 205, the “Registered Domestic Partner Rights and Responsibilities Act of 2003,” which expanded domestic partners’ rights and responsibilities to nearly all those of married spouses under California law. It was a huge advance, and it set the stage for our marriage victory in the California Supreme Court five years later!
Couples Nelda Majors and Karen Bailey; Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin
Through their own cases and advocacy work, these two couples helped secure marriage equality in two states on the long journey to our Supreme Court landmark win in 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges.
Nelda Majors and Karen Bailey were the lead couple in our Arizona case, Majors v. Jeanes. The two met in Texas in the 1950s and were together for decades before they finally announced their relationship to their friends and family. The couple wanted to be legally married to ensure their relationship would be respected and recognized like other married couples’ relationships — especially in medical emergencies or regarding guardianship of Sharla and Marissa, Karen’s great grand-nieces whom they raised as their own children. Perhaps most of all, the couple wanted to marry each other to celebrate their love and the life they had built together over many decades. Our win in Majors v. Jeanes made it possible for Nelda and Karen to finally wed in 2014, when they were well into their seventies.
Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were 79 and 83 years old, respectively, when they joined Lambda Legal’s litigation in 2004 to win marriage for same-sex couples in California. They became the first same-sex couple to legally marry in the state.
The two founded the first lesbian rights group in the United States–the Daughters of Bilitis–and often are considered the mothers of our lesbian feminist movement. They also published a book entitled, “Lesbian Woman” in 1972, which was a first of its kind, with stories of their experiences and those of women they knew, including problems women faced at a time of universal prejudice and zero legal rights. Phyllis and Del also were behind publication of “The Ladder”, the first lesbian rights periodical in the U.S.
