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A Brief History of the Austin Bar's LGBT Law Section/Austin LGBT Bar Association
Sponsored by the Austin Bar’s History and Traditions Committee.
On a balmy June night in San Antonio, three attorneys—Gary Schumann, Fred Sultan, and Jim Shead—attended a presentation by the State Bar of Texas's LGBT Law Section at the 2011 State Bar conference. Knowing firsthand the many legal hurdles facing LGBT Texans, the three attorneys wondered why there was no local chapter in Austin.
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After the conference, Schumann contacted DeLaine Ward, executive director of the Austin Bar Association, to ask about establishing a local LGBT chapter. To his surprise, she responded that she had been waiting for someone to call and ask! With the support of the Austin Bar, the trio of attorneys and others organized the inaugural Austin LGBT Bar Association champagne social in 2013. Hosted at the historic Cambridge Tower rooftop, the night was a great success and attended by dozens of members of the Austin legal community. As the bubbles flowed and glasses clinked, the Austin LGBT Bar Association was born.
The organization was originally founded as a standalone group, apart from the Austin Bar. This was a strategic move to lobby the Texas Legislature. Ironically, many early members were also legislative staffers who reserved the Civil Rights Conference Room outside of the Texas Senate chamber. Schumann recalls the early membership had both straight attorneys and LGBT attorneys.
Presenting the 2016 LGBT Law Student Scholarship: (L-R) Claire Bow, scholarship recipient Anya Morgan, Gary Schumann, Christine Andresen, Elliot Beck, Fred Sultan, Daniel Collins, scholarship recipient Luis Medina, and then-State Bar of Texas board chair David Chamberlain.
This dynamic membership’s motivation to form a local LGBT Bar was not solely to organize local attorneys or fight for civil rights, but also to better educate local family law attorneys on how to deal with the multitude of conflicting laws impacting LGBT families in Texas.
Prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, Texas law did not recognize same-sex marriage, divorce, or recognize two same-sex parents of a child as legal guardians. These laws created a myriad of problems and legal limbo for same-sex couples who married and had children outside of Texas. To help serve the Austin LGBT community, the organization held CLEs and seminars on how to navigate this complex legal arena, becoming the lodestar for local LGBT legal education.
LGBT Bar Association board meeting at the Capitol Civil Rights Conference Room near the Senate chambers.
After Obergefell, the LGBT Bar assessed the legal climate and merged into the Austin Bar in 2019. Now known as the LGBT Law Section of the Austin Bar, the group has 68 members and continues to host CLEs on LGBT issues and raise money for mentoring programs and scholarships for LGBT Texas law students.
As the organization looks to the future, the commitment to serve all the members of the LGBT community remains steadfast. As Schumann sees it, “transgender rights remain very much a work in progress” and, as a result of the organization’s educational outreach, Travis County judges are now some of the most educated judges on transgender rights in the state. AL
