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Portland attorney Lynn Nakamoto is helping to change
the legal landscape for gay men and lesbians by Lisa Bradshaw
rom the 30th-floor reception area in
the offices of Markowitz, Herbold,
Glade &. Mehlhat, the view is amaz
ing. It seems to offer a window to the
entire east side of Portland.
I hoped attorney Lynn Nakamoto would
keep me waiting. She didn’t.
No matter, the view from her office is almost
as good. But most impressive is the work done
here. From this modest comer office, Nakamoto
has been at the forefront in helping to change
the face of civil rights law in Oregon.
Nakamoto’s firm practices employment law,
which consists largely of business litigation—
contracts, corporate matters, commercial trans
actions that “for some reason are not going
well,” she says.
Many of her personal cases, though, are
about employee rights violations, often involv
ing a challenge to discriminatory policies or
unfair employment practices.
In 1992, the American Civil Liberties Union
Foundation of Oregon got a call from Portland
attorney Carl Kiss. He was asking for assistance
on a case involving three lesbian Oregon Health
Sciences University employees who were suing
for domestic partner benefits. Could the ACLU
provide a “friend of the court" to help with
research and to present documentation? The
ACLU turned to one of its volunteer lawyers
who regularly worked with such cases. It was
Nakamoto.
“I said yes. It sounded like a great thing,” she
recounts.
First, Nakamoto enlisted the help of the
Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a
national advocacy organization for gay men and
lesbians, then she got busy on a brief and began
collecting supporting information.
It was important that the representatives for
the plaintiffs present statistics about gay people
that they “weren’t really sure the judge would
have," explains Nakamoto. “You know, that this
is not some bad idea that’s going to cost every
body a lot of money...that this is not unusual; a
lot of people have done it. I think people assume
that if we’re talking about health care for gay
people, that gay men and AIDS are going to just
he a significant upfront cost that’s going to be
prohibitive for employers to make premiums,
and that’s just not been the case.”
Nakamoto’s debunking of gay and lesbian
stereotypes must have had some impact, because
in 1998 the Oregon Court of Appeals not only
awarded the plainrffs the benefits they sought,
it said those same benefits were to be made
available to every gay or lesbian government
employee in the state of Oregon. The now
famous Tanner vs. Oregon Health Sciences Uni
versity decision covers all public agency and
local government workers, while also making it
illegal for Oregon’s private employers to dis-
F
criminate on the basis of sexual orientation. The
ruling went above and beyond what anyone
involved in or closely following the case expect
ed.
“It was thrilling; it was an amazing decision,”
says Nakamoto. “Personally, it was very excit
ing.”
Although other states offer domestic partner
benefits to state employees, Tanner is unique in
the nation because of its basis in the state con
stitution.
A section of the Oregon Constitution, cited
by the plaintiffs, states that it is an unlawful
employment practice to discriminate against a
person because of sex or because of the sex “of
any other person with whom the individual
associates." Therefore, state agencies, by giving
benefits only to the partners of married employ
ees and not to the partners of gay and lesbian
employees, are discriminating based on the sex
of the partners with whom those employees
associate.
“The case as a precedent is just fantastic,
because the court went out there and said gay
people can be considered a protected class.
There’s no appellate court decision that’s not
been overturned by a higher court that says
that,” notes Nakamoto.
Then there was the litigation around Port
land’s civil rights ordinance.
In 1991, Portland passed an ordinance to
protect certain citizens who were not covered by
the state’s laws governing discrimination in
employment, housing and public accommoda
tion. Sexual orientation was included as a pro
tected status in the ordinance, which gave citi
zens the right to file a claim in state court.
In a 1997 case known as Sims vs. Besaw’s
Cafe, a judge ruled the right-of-action clause in
the ordinance was unenforceable.
“The argument by the defendant was you
could have the city investigate and you could
have the city make a determination and you
could have all sorts of administrative remedies,”
Nakamoto explains, but the pro tern district
judge claimed “the city had no right to authorize
people to go into a state court to make a claim
about that violation.”
The city, the plaintiff and the ACLU dis
agreed, and Nakamoto received another phone
call asking her to act as a friend of the court in
the appeal process. She did. They won. Mem
bers of the queer community can continue to
pursue court action for discrimination in the
same way as other protected classes.
Most recently, Nakamoto was in the news
via her role as the attorney representing Damon
Woodcock, a transsexual officer with the Port
land Police Bureau.
The Portland Fire and Police Disability and
Retirement Board recently denied Woodcock’s
claim that he suffered stress from harassment at
work. Nakamoto and Woodcock maintain that
Woodcock had been the target of a bias crime
within the bureau due to his sex-reassignment
surgery, and that the bias incident created fear
and stress. (Woodcock hasn’t worked since a
locker defacement incident last summer.)
Of the board’s decision, Nakamoto told the
media: “We are definitely going to appeal this.”
id Nakamoto expect her career to take her
to the front lines, expect to he part of so
much progressive change? Sure.
“I did go to law school as an idealist, and I
did intend to do public interest sorts of law,” she
says. “That really was a motivator for me to go
to law school—to think that the law could do
good things.”
She even expected the gay rights movement
to provide her with the kind of work she want
ed to do.
“There was a very active lesbian and gay law
students association where I went to law school.
It clearly was going to develop into cutting-edge
public interest law,” she recalls.
Nakamoto grew up in Los Angeles, hut relo
cated to Massachusetts to do her undergraduate
work at Wellesley University, where she
majored in philosophy. Although that chosen
field of study upset her father—an electronics
technician—she thinks she put it to good use in
law school.
“You’re taught argumentation and logic,
putting forward your ideas clearly, articulating
why the other side has not done so and is
wrong,” she says. “I think there’s some applica
tion between the two disciplines.”
While at Wellesley, Nakamoto, now 39, met
her partner. After graduation, Nakamoto head
ed to the Big Apple to attend New York Uni
versity School of Law. A year later, her girlfriend
joined her in New York and attended NYU’s
School of Medicine. After the duo successfully
completed their respective studies, they decided
to head west.
“I told her, ‘You pick anywhere on the West
Coast and I’ll go with you.’ I’d never been to
Oregon in my life,” Nakamoto explains.
Her partner could not resist the residency
program at Legacy Good Samaritan Hosptial.
Nakamoto refers to the differences between
the demographics of Portland and New York as
“shocking” and acknowledges that the transi
tion was somewhat difficult, hut she says they
are here “for the long haul.”
She and her partner have a nearly 2-year-old
daughter, and Nakamoto notes that parenting,
like law, is hard yet rewarding work.
“We’re getting old. We started out a little
late on this parent thing,” she says.
I joke that her dad must he very proud.
“Yeah, I guess it’s OK I’m not an engineer,”
she says.
I guess it’s OK by Oregon, too.
D
■ L isa B r a d sh a w
writer.
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