At a Los Angeles donor appreciation dinner, supporters heard a personal and determined message about protecting LGBTQ+ rights and building lasting equality.
West Hollywood, CA (The Hollywood Times) 10/7/26 – As a Lambda Legal Liberty Circle member, I attended the organization’s October 6 Donor Appreciation Dinner at The Butcher’s Daughter in West Hollywood with a personal investment in its work. The intimate evening was designed as a celebration of the donors and community members who help make Lambda Legal’s work possible. Over dinner, supporters received an insider’s update from Lambda Legal CEO Kevin Jennings on the organization’s current priorities, legal battles and vision for the future.
Jennings delivered the central message with a teacher’s sense of history, flashes of humor and deeply personal stories. Having begun his career as a high school teacher, he joked about using his “teacher voice” before walking the room through the organization’s history and its plans for the future.
“Every generation should be freer than the one that came before,” Jennings said.
The evening also introduced Joey Wasserman, Lambda Legal’s new Western Regional Director, who succeeds longtime regional leader Shedrick “Rick” Davis. Wasserman previously worked at the Los Angeles LGBT Center and SAGE, the national organization serving LGBTQ+ older adults.
In his welcome, Wasserman described a connection to LGBTQ+ community life that began long before his nonprofit career. His family operated a gay bar for decades, a place, he explained, where people could “find connection,” “find community” and “find a sense of belonging.”
That idea of belonging became a recurring theme throughout the evening.
Wasserman invited supporters to think about what first inspired their own connection to Lambda Legal and why they continue to stand behind its work.
Jennings then traced the organization’s role in decades of legal progress, including its work in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court decision striking down laws criminalizing private, consensual same-sex intimacy, and its participation in the legal team behind the 2015 marriage-equality victory in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Those victories, he warned, require continued vigilance.
His presentation centered on “Rising Together,” Lambda Legal’s five-year strategic plan. Its three priorities are straightforward: challenge harmful laws through litigation, advance protective laws through policy advocacy, and change public opinion through education.
Jennings described the stakes in human terms: people living with HIV who need uninterrupted access to care, transgender young people and their families, students and teachers facing censorship, and couples whose marriages deserve protection.
His discussion of HIV carried particular emotional weight. Jennings spoke of losing his first boyfriend, his college roommate and his best friend from college to HIV, making clear that protecting access to care is far more than an abstract policy issue for him.
“We will not let them drag us back,” he said.
The presentation also explored the power of family stories to build understanding. Jennings shared a campaign video featuring a transgender young person expressing gratitude for a supportive mother. Its message focused on something many parents can recognize wanting a child to be safe, loved and free to grow into themselves.
For Jennings, that kind of human connection belongs alongside courtroom advocacy. Lasting equality also depends on how people see and treat one another.
Near the close, Jennings spoke about his Uncle Mickey, a World War II veteran celebrated within his family. Only much later in life did Jennings learn that his uncle was gay and had served at a time when openly acknowledging that identity could have cost him his place in the military.
Jennings connected that family history to a question for the present: How will each of us answer when a future generation asks what we did when rights and democracy were under threat?
The evening also offered very concrete ways to participate.
Speaking about Liberty Circle, Rick-Arlo Yah Lira brought both humor and passion to the fundraising appeal, calling it Lambda Legal’s “co-conspirator program” and describing its members as people who “stand in the trenches with us. Liberty Circle, he explained, “starts at $1,500,” or approximately “$125 a month,” providing sustained support for the attorneys, advocates and staff doing the work.
Yah Lira also shared a deeply personal reason for his involvement. Speaking about growing up undocumented, he described Lambda Legal as an organization that ultimately made him feel “a part of the fabric of America.”
That was one of the evening’s most memorable reminders that supporting Lambda Legal is not simply about financing court cases. It is also about who gets to feel protected, represented and fully included in the life of this country.
Speakers also highlighted the Guardian Society and a Legacy Challenge through which qualifying future bequests can unlock present-day matching support equal to 10% of the gift’s estimated value, subject to the program’s requirements and available funds.
As a Liberty Circle member, I especially appreciated the emphasis on sustained involvement. The evening itself reflected that spirit of appreciation: Lambda Legal brought its supporters together not simply to ask for continued help, but to recognize the community whose commitment allows the organization to keep doing this work.
Jennings ended with a promise to keep fighting. His remarks offered supporters both a reason to stay engaged and a vision of what that commitment can make possible: a future in which LGBTQ+ people and everyone living with HIV can live with greater freedom, dignity and belonging.
By Valerie Milano
The Hollywood Times
