A Search for ‘Meaningful Work’ Fires Up a Civil-Rights Advocate

I grew up in central New Jersey, the great-grandson and grandson of immigrants who came from Ireland and Poland. My father worked rotating shifts on the assembly line for a pharmaceutical manufacturer. It was very much a world where he did not have much control over his job, and I knew that meaningful work was something I wanted for myself.

KEVIN M. CATHCART Age: 52 First professional job: Staff lawyer, North Shore Children’s Law Project, Lynn, Mass. Current job: Executive director, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, New York

Of course, my sister and my cousins and I were the first generation to have the opportunity to go to college, and as a result, being able to seek meaningful work was much more of an option than it was for my parents and grandparents.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family, and the church certainly has shaped my sense of justice. It gave me a very strong sense of right and wrong. I learned how people should be treated, and even though I doubt the church would approve of what I do today, that is where my values come from.

I graduated from college in 1976, and got a master’s in education. I finished law school at Northeastern University in 1982. My first job after I passed the bar exam was as a staff attorney for the North Shore Children’s Law Project. Many of the children we represented were wards of the state, some were in foster care, and all had very chaotic lives.

I loved the work I did there, but after nine months, the position of executive director of Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders came open. It’s the largest legal organization for gay men and women in New England. I was on the board of directors, and so I applied for the job and was hired.

As executive director, I had a very nice title, but the reality was that I was the receptionist, the person who picked up the office supplies, the one who handled all of the money, who kept the mailing list up-to-date — I had to do everything. However, being a one-person operation gave me an insight into exactly how all positions are critical to having a well-functioning organization. Most importantly, I knew that this was a job in which I could truly make a difference.

Over the course of several years, we grew. When I left after eight years, there were eight people on staff. We managed our growth entirely with private money — mostly individuals and some foundation money. One thing that I learned was that there are enormous unmet needs and that a small organization couldn’t begin to meet them all. Growth can be a big challenge, and I’ve seen organizations falter as much when they grow as when they shrink. But I’m very proud that the organizations I’ve led have steadily grown and become stronger since I came on board.

When I was at GLAD there were two events that I especially remember. In the mid 1980s, the Massachusetts Department of Social Services had placed several young children in foster care with gay foster parents.

When The Boston Globe ran a story about this, there was a huge uproar — and uproar is a very polite way of describing what happened. The children were taken away from these two wonderful men to find themselves bounced through the foster-care system. This was all about homophobia, nothing else.

We sued the state to change the regulations that prohibited gay people from being foster parents and ultimately won. This really mobilized people in the gay community, as well as those in the child-advocacy community. One thing I learned from that case is how critical it is to have an organization in place. You have to have a sound infrastructure, because you can’t do civil-rights legislation on an ad hoc basis.

The other theme at the time was the AIDS epidemic, which really hit Boston hard by about 1984. There was a lot more ignorance then: Dentists wouldn’t provide care to people who were HIV positive, employers were firing people when they learned they had HIV. None of us knew where this was all going, and we were concerned that we would lose a lot of the ground we had gained. While we did some public-policy work, mainly we sued the hospitals and dentists who would not provide care, the health-insurance companies that would deny coverage for AIDS treatment, and the employers who were firing HIV-positive employees.

In 1992 I moved to New York to be the executive director of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the country’s oldest and largest lesbian and gay legal organization. We do impact litigation, which means we handle civil-rights matters that will have an impact on a much larger group of people than just the plaintiffs we represent.

We’ve represented people who were married in Canada but when they returned to the United States their marriage was not recognized. We’ve worked with school administrators who have told students that they cannot organize a Gay-Straight Alliance. We’ve been able to make enormous changes. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2003 in favor of John Lawrence, who was challenging the Texas sodomy laws, that resulted in these laws being struck off the books there and in 12 other states. It ruled out one of the legal underpinnings for anti-gay discrimination and was an amazing victory for everyone.

When I was hired, there were 21 people on staff. In addition to our headquarters, we had a regional office in Los Angeles. Since then we’ve grown to 97 staffers, and we have opened regional offices in Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas. I really wanted to push these regional offices. There are people in this country who believe that if an organization is based in New York or on one of the coasts, it is not there for those in the Midwest or the South or elsewhere. However, every time we open a regional office, our help line is flooded with phone calls.

Those of us at Lambda are privileged to work with wonderful people who are willing to put themselves and their values on the line. They lose their privacy, put their families in very public — and often uncomfortable — positions, and risk a lot.

But they do this so that many other people may benefit. I’m always inspired by their sense of justice, regardless of how they arrived at that. I think that harkens back to my Catholic upbringing: The church always emphasized standing up for what was right.

I’ve been very lucky to find meaningful work, and the changes for gay people in our society over the past 20 years are almost immeasurable. But one of the things I do miss as an executive director is the direct contact that I had with our clients — those people I just mentioned. I knew that I had to give that up if Lambda was going to be able to grow to meet the needs of our clients. It is sort of like being a salesperson in a shoe store, which is a job I had in high school. I’ve moved up to being the store manager, but I still miss my customers.