BRAD
SEARS
INTO THE
FUTURE
BOLDLY CHALLENGING
INJUSTICE FOR LIGHT YEARS
TO COME.
Written by Alan Uphold
Photographs by Paul Robinson
Critically acclaimed Los Angeles photographer, Paul Robinson, has created a 12-part series of photos and articles featuring twelve LGBTQ individuals who have used their notoriety, their celebrity, or their downright chutzpah to affect change in the LGBTQ+ community.
The series, named “Twelve Soldiers,” will feature Paul’s photographs and a profile of a different social justice warrior each month.
In addition to Paul’s incredible photos of the twelve featured soldiers, his company, NEFT Vodka will donate $1,000 to the charity of choice for each of the featured soldiers.
Believe it or not, there once was a time in America when judges, politicians, and even the media would regularly spout off information about the LGBTQ community with absolutely no basis in fact.
They would put forth information like…
—LGBTQ people only live in big cities like New York and San Francisco.
—LGBTQ people don’t stay in long-term committed relationships.
—LGBTQ people don’t have kids, or even if they do, they are not healthy, well-adjusted kids.
All of these ridiculous notions were incorrect, of course, but very little hard data existed to refute these claims.
Brad Sears helped change all of that.
Growing up in Grain Valley, Missouri (population 90), Sears could never have imagined that his life path would lead him to become a well-renowned and highly regarded civil rights legal expert.
After all, his humble beginnings started with his family living on a rural ten-acre property about 20 miles from Kansas City. His family’s land included a two-acre garden and was surrounded by large farms.
When Brad was a child, the Southern Baptist Church figured prominently in his life. His family went to church at least three times a week most weeks. His father was a deacon in the church, his mother ran the church pre-school, and both of his parents became missionaries. It was in this environment that Brad heard early and frequently that being attracted to someone of the same sex was absolutely forbidden according to scripture.
Also, because it was the 1970s, very few people were openly gay in television or the media, so Brad had no concept of what a gay person actually was let alone that they even existed beyond Grain Valley.
Then something changed one day. A magazine for a clothing store featuring all male models—many of whom were in suggestive positions—arrived in the mail.
“It took a few years for me to accept myself because I was raised to believe it
was a sin. But I came out on campus and eventually came out to my parents.”
“Somehow, suddenly one day we got the International Male catalogue delivered to our house. To this day, I have no idea how or why we received it,” Sears laughs. “But I held on to those catalogues for a long time, let me tell you.”
“At around that same time, I also remember receiving a letter in the mail from Surgeon General C. Evert Coop warning people about the dangers of contracting HIV/AIDS. The letter warned that men who had sex with men were at higher risk of contracting the virus."
“And the reason I remember both of those things so much is that it was the first time I had any indication that there might be other people out there who were interested in people of the same sex.”
When it came time for college, Sears left conservative, small-town Missouri and headed to much more liberal Connecticut.
“Going away to college at Yale was a culture shock for me for a number of reasons. It really made an impact on me seeing other students who were openly gay, and even one of my professors was out. These were people whom I liked, and I respected. It made me realize that maybe this was okay and that I could be open.”
But it was hard for Brad to shake those many sermons he had heard during his formative years telling him that being gay was not okay.
“It took a few years for me to accept myself because I was raised to believe it was a sin. But I came out on campus and eventually came out to my parents.”
It was a difficult time for his family.
“They struggled, and their process took a number of years—just like my process did. But I was fortunate in that growing up, my parents were pretty liberal on other issues like women’s rights and reproductive rights. So eventually, they just left the Southern Baptist Church. It became too much for them to continue to hear the pastor saying negative things about people like me—their son."
By his junior year, Brad was working with the campus LGBTQ group and did a summer internship at Lambda Legal, the
largest LGBTQ legal organization in the country.
Sears continued his legal education at Harvard where he earned his Juris Doctor degree. While in Boston, he worked in the needle exchange program as part of the ACLU’s LGBTQ civil rights project, and that’s when his real interest in the community emerged.
“When I entered college, I thought I would focus mostly on civil rights issues related to race,” Sears says, “but after coming out and working at the ACLU LGBTQ project, I ended up focusing mostly on LGBTQ issues.”
During his last semester of law school, Brad’s life took a dramatic turn—a turn that would influence the direction his life would take.
Brad learned that he was HIV positive.
“My HIV progressed rapidly to full blown AIDS, and that was a really rough time for me,” he confesses.
Brad happened to be clerking for a federal district court judge at the time. Despite the fact that the judge was an older white man with right leaning rulings from the bench and decidedly conservative views, he was sympathetic to Sears and treated his diagnosis with compassion and respect.
“It was something that made quite an impression on me. He showed me the importance of treating the people that work with you and for you with compassion. Because of him, I have always tried to go above and beyond to make sure that people can prioritize their personal and health needs while continuing to work. If he hadn’t done that for me, my life would have turned out very differently.”
Thanks to support from the judge and from friends and family, Sears survived those difficult years.
“Fortunately, protease inhibitors came out in 1996, and that helped a lot. I was able to recover and refocus on my life and my career.”
As a result of his personal experiences, Brad took up the task of helping other people with HIV/AIDS, especially underserved communities affected by the pandemic. He pulled together
“I talked to more than 800 people over that period all of
whom needed some form of HIV legal support.”
funding from the Echoing Green Foundation and others and began his work in earnest.
“For a couple of years, I ended up going to clinics all over LACounty and talking to people about their experiences. The goal was to help people get the legal resources they needed, or in some cases, I would even work with them myself. I talked to more than 800 people over that period—all of whom needed some form of HIV legal support.”
As he sat down and personally talked to hundreds of people around Los Angeles County, Sears found that many of them were dealing with some form of discrimination. In some cases, people had been denied housing or employment because of their HIV status. In other cases, people with HIV/AIDS were dealing with egregious violations of their privacy or were outright being denied basic healthcare.
In one particularly cruel twist of irony, Los Angeles County was refusing to hire HIV+ people to conduct HIV testing of other people.
“Here were these well-intentioned HIV+ people who wanted to help other people and to prevent the spread of the disease, and they were being denied the opportunity to work for LA County. We successfully sued the county to reverse this discriminatory policy.”
As he traveled LA County carrying a very heavy case load, Brad found that he needed help to assist so many HIV+ people who were in desperate need of legal assistance.
“Eventually, I started working with students from UCLA who volunteered to help with the legal work. At one point, I had 30 people working with me, so instead of me meeting individually with all of these people, I had a whole team helping me.”
It was around this time that an opportunity presented itself that Brad simply couldn’t let pass by.
“I really enjoyed working with the students, and it was at that point that a position became open at UCLA in the public interest law program. I saw it as a chance to continue and even expand on the important work that we were doing, while still being able to work with up-and-coming law students who were interested in civil rights law.”
In 2001, shortly after Sears had formally accepted the position with UCLA, Chuck Williams and his partner Stu Walter approached UCLA with a bold proposition. Williams, a successful businessman and philanthropist in the LGBTQ community, approached UCLA about wanting to do something to address discrimination against LGBTQ people. Those initial conversations between Chuck, Stu, Brad, and others resulted in creating a think tank to do independent, reputable, and fact-based research of the LGBTQ community.
Up until this point, many of the supposed “facts” that were being quoted in the media, in courtrooms and in legislatures across the country had no basis in reality.
“Judges, legislators and the media would throw out these specious statistics that we knew had no basis in the truth about our community. They would say things like, ‘Well, there aren’t that many same-sex couples in America.’ Or ‘Gay relationships don’t really last that long anyway.’ Or ‘These people don’t really have kids.’”
“Even though we knew that those statements weren’t true, we didn’t really have any research or data to counter what these mostly older, white, straight judges were saying in court. So those statements were just being accepted as kind of common knowledge. Our mission was to change all of that by providing fact-based research about our community.”
Thus, the Williams Institute was created with Brad Sears appointed as the first executive director. The goal was to replace pervasive bias about LGBTQ people in the areas of law, policy, and culture.
The first order of business for Williams Institute was to establish some basic demographic information about the LGBTQ community. Keep in mind that up to this point, there was no reliable, scientific data to track information about the LGBTQ community in America.
There were so many fundamental unknown questions.
How many LGBTQ people are there living in America? What are the demographics of the community in terms of age, gender, race, religion, and income? Where do they live? How many of them are in committed relationships? How many of them are raising children?
“No one is arguing any more about how many LGBTQ
people there are or how many same sex couples there are.”
No one knew the definitive answers to these principal questions.
Sears says, “Research on the baseline demographics of the LGBTQ population was one of our initial priorities. There just wasn’t a lot of information about the size and the characteristics of our community. So that really became a central anchor for our work and helped inform the other areas that we worked in.”
One of the first things Brad did was contact the handful of people who were already doing what little research was already out there.
“We immediately reached out to form partnerships with the dozen or so people who were respected for the research they were doing in this area, including Lee Badgett and Gary Gates. This was important to us, not only to avoid duplicating their existing work, but also to make sure we were working with the best people already in the field.”
As part of their research, the Williams Institute made it very clear from the beginning that the purpose of their research was to educate and advocate for the community. This research would be directly tied to specific laws and policy decisions that. were under consideration.
Williams Institute really changed common knowledge about LGBTQ people. Because of Williams Institute research, we know that there are more than 14 million LGBTQ people in the United States, including 1.6 million transgender people. Williams Institute research has shown that LGBTQ people live in every county in the United States, not just big cities; are racially and economically diverse; and are raising hundreds of thousands of children. It has also shown that LGBTQ people continue to face high rates of discrimination, harassment, and violence.
Williams Institute research has not just been used to support equal rights such as marriage equality, discrimination protections, and ending the military’s ban on LGBTQ people, but also to show that LGBTQ people are impacted by broader issues.
“Our research has shown that when there are policy debates about issues like Medicaid, food stamps, or student loans, LGBTQ people are disproportionately impacted by those
debates,” says Sears. “In fact, there are some issues like housing instability among young people, youth suicide, or the overincarceration of women that you can’t understand or create effective policy solutions to address without taking sexual orientation or gender identity into account. Our research has made policymakers see that LGBTQ people have to be considered and involved in addressing some of our nation’s most pressing problems.”
“Now, our research has been accepted by lawyers on both sides of the argument. They used to say things like, ‘There are no transgender people in the U.S.’ Now it’s a pretty much agreed upon fact that there are 1.6 million transgender people living in the United States.”
He continues, “Our research and statistics have sort of become an accepted floor that both sides start from, as opposed to throwing around facts and figures that everyone obviously knows are simply not true.”
“No one is arguing any more about how many LGBTQ people there are or how many same sex couples there are. Our research has been able to maintain a certain level of credibility such that people don’t even try to argue those things in court anymore.”
With time, the hard work of Williams Institute began to be cited in court cases around the country.
Indeed, very few research centers have had their work quoted by United States Supreme Court justices in not just one, not two, but four different pivotal cases brought before them.
One of the most consequential cases in which Williams Institute was referenced was in Obergefell v. Hodges in which the Supreme Court ruled that the fundamental right to marry was guaranteed by two separate clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.
As Sears explains, “You saw the significance of our work in the Obergefell case, when one of the Supreme Court Justices pointedly asked the lawyer for the government, ‘Well what are these things that you are so worried about that would happen if we granted marriage equality?’”
“In the past, the lawyers would have said things like, ‘LGBTQ
“It’s not like they turn 18 and someone gives them a condo
in West Hollywood and a couple of puppies."
people don’t have kids…or the kids don’t come out right…or opposite sex couples are going to marry less frequently…or they are going to divorce more.’”
“But in this case, the lawyer for the government didn’t have an answer for that question. To a significant degree, because of our two decades of research, those arguments have been proven to be completely false. As such, any such response from the government would have been deemed totally implausible—if not laughable.”
In addition to Windsor and Obergefell (the Supreme Court’s two marriage equality cases) Williams Institute research has been cited more recently by the Supreme Court in Bostock, which extended federal civil rights protections to LGBTQ people, and by Justice Sotomayor in her dissent in 303 Creative, to support assertion that LGBT people face widespread discrimination when accessing services from businesses—including services that same-sex couples use to plan their weddings.
More recently, the Williams Institute has been focusing on poverty and the over-criminalization of the LGBTQ community.
“When we first started talking to people about researching poverty in the community, we got a surprising amount of push back.”
Many of the agencies that support people who lack basic resources didn’t understand the need to focus on members of the LGBTQ community as a subset of the wider lower-income community at large.
“We talked to foundations and charities who provide services for people living below the poverty line, and they would say,‘We don’t really work with LGBTQ people.’ And we said, ‘Well, you DO work with them…even if you don’t realize it.’”
Brad recalls that many of the organizations to which they spoke had the mistaken impression that all LGBT people were living their best lives with double incomes and no kids. He and his team had to remind these organizations that while that might be true for some parts of the community, it was not true for everyone.
“We would explain, ‘You know a lot of these people were kicked out of their homes as teens, and they’re still living on
the streets. It’s not like they turn 18 and someone gives them a condo in West Hollywood and a couple of puppies. Well into adulthood, they continue to need the very resources that you can provide.’”
Because of the work of the Williams Institute, Brad believes that there is a broader understanding and a wider acceptance of poverty in the LGBTQ community—particularly regarding issues that impact people who have kids or who are trans or who are people of color.
Brad is proud of the impact that the Williams Institute has had on not only the legal community, but the wider cultural dialogue at large.
“I feel honored to have been part of the LGBTQ rights movement during the past two decades. We have been able to make an incredible amount of progress.”
“But it’s important to acknowledge that our progress is supported by the work of the people who came decades before us—not only at Stonewall but even before that. We have been able to get rid of sodomy laws, achieve marriage equality, make great progress on trans rights, and we’re still making progress.”
Brad candidly acknowledges that, as is the case with any civil rights movement, two steps forward is more often than not met with one step back.
“We’re clearly in a moment where there is a backlash against the progress we’ve made. But backlash means that we’re making progress.”
“Our community has demonstrated so much resilience in getting through so many issues. Look at how we all banded together, and we took care of each other (and are still taking care of each other) during the AIDS pandemic.”
“No matter how dark things are, our community continues to put in the work. I truly believe that if we continue to be out and proud and live our lives openly, we will continue to make progress and create a better, safer world for all of us.”
“I think we owe that to the people who came before us and to the generations of LGBT people that will follow.”
