“These were pretty fraught times,” Allen said. To convey his solidarity, Allen often wore a yellow button saying: “How Dare You Presume I’m Straight.” In February of 1984, Avidon and Allen saw a notice in the Virginia Law Weekly announcing the first meeting of the Gay and Lesbian Law Students Association, which would serve as “a support and rights advocacy group.” To this day, they don’t know who placed the notice, but they showed up at the meeting and became the informal heads of GALLSA.
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Among the millions of lives AIDS would claim, the disease would kill Clarence Cain and John Curtin, plus two of Schwartz’s Law School classmates, his business partner and “well over a hundred” members of his Hotlanta Softball League. Moreover, the HIV/AIDS crisis was just beginning to unfold. These things add up over time.”Ĭlarence Cain ’77, pictured in Corks and Curls yearbook as an undergraduate at UVA “I was part of the Class of 1980, but the Class of 1982 got to know me as an out gay man on the softball field, and the Class of 1984 got to know them. “I was 28 years old - I felt like I had lost a decade of my life - and I wanted to pave the way for the next generation of gay kids so they wouldn’t lose so many years of their lives,” Schwartz said. Schwartz has no regrets about choosing visibility over his career. Within a few years, he moved to Atlanta to be with Robinson, join a gay softball league and launch his own small law firm with a gay colleague. For better or worse, the firm did not extend Schwartz a permanent job offer at the end of the summer - an experience that was all too common for gay and lesbian law students who peeked out of the closet in those days - and Schwartz instead went to work as a staff attorney at the Tidewater Legal Aid Society after graduation. Richard also accompanied Robinson to summer associate events at his Big Law firm in Los Angeles. Schwartz wore drag to one Law School class dinner and brought Robinson, who dressed as an Arabian princess. “Fraternities were out there within 30 minutes, painting over everything we had done,” Schwartz said.Īlthough his grades got him onto Law Review, Schwartz dropped off to focus on courting a young man named Richard Robinson. To that end, Schwartz, Curtin and GSU members took a bucket of bright orange paint out to the Beta Bridge and furtively painted their favorite part of the Good Ol’ Song lyrics: “We come from old Virginia, where all is bright and GAY!” Like Kameny, Schwartz believed visibility was the “key to everything,” from securing basic civil rights to eventual marriage equality. Kameny had lost his job and his national security clearance in 1957 for being gay, and he spent the rest of his life denouncing the evils of the closet.
Under Schwartz and Curtin, the group also extended a speaking invitation to a personal hero, gay rights activist Frank Kameny, who just a few years earlier had convinced the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder. “If you ask me a direct question, you’re going to get a straight answer.” “I didn’t walk around wearing a gay T-shirt or anything, but my rule of thumb was ‘tell no lies,’” he said.
In those early fall days on the softball diamond and at “Café du Nord,” as they called the North Grounds eatery, Schwartz made a decision that was simple, elegant and impactful: He would just be himself. They never met, but both of their lives would go on to affect the experiences of thousands of LGBTQ law students and lawyers, with ripples arguably touching millions of Americans. So Schwartz decided to become a lawyer, and entered the University of Virginia School of Law a few months after a Newport News native named Clarence Cain graduated.
His life was a good one, he said, but “I was tired of feeling like all I had to contribute to gay rights was five bucks for the American Civil Liberties Union and an occasionally well-worded letter to the editor,” Schwartz recalled. The year was 1976, and he was working as a medical records transcriber at the University of Virginia Hospital, playing softball every chance he got and living in a commune south of Batesville. It all started because Bob Schwartz was done with the status quo.