Bennett Klein Speaks at 2016 Bill Smith Memorial Lecture

Bennett Klein, Senior Attorney and AIDS Law Project Director for GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), delivered the 15th annual Bill Smith Memorial Lecture on October 11, speaking on “Sexuality, Disability, and Irrational Fear: Lessons from HIV Litigation.”

The Bill Smith Memorial Lecture honors the memory of Bill Smith '98, who died in 2001. While at King Hall, Smith was the president of the Lambda Law Students, won the Martin Luther King, Jr. Service Award, and worked on behalf of LGBT and disability rights. Upon graduation, he practiced employment and family law.

This year’s event, which drew a large audience including members of Bill Smith’s family, featured remarks from Senior Associate Dean Madhavi Sunder, King Hall Lambda Law Students Association Co-chair Hannah Bogen ’18, and James Zahradka ’98, Deputy Attorney General at the California Department of Justice/Bureau of Children's Justice, as well as recognition of the 2016 Lambda Students Association Faculty of the Year Award winner, Professor Courtney Joslin.

Zahradka shared reminiscences of his friend Bill Smith, calling him “an amazing person,” “a ball of energy and enthusiasm,” and someone with a deep passion for civil rights, environmental law, LGBT rights, and disability rights.

Following a brief introduction from Associate Dean Sunder, Klein gave a talk focused on key issues in combatting stigma and discrimination against people with HIV. He talked about how negative attitudes about gay male sexuality, irrational fears of infectious disease transmission, and differing social conceptions of disability have presented challenges in litigation and public policy for the LGBT community. He framed his discussion with two cases: Bragdon v. Abbott, a 1998 U.S. Supreme Court case against a dentist with a written policy of refusing to treat patients with HIV (in which Klein was lead counsel), and Doe v. Mutual of Omaha, a pending case involving discrimination against a gay man because he takes pre-exposure prophylaxis to prevent HIV transmission.

Klein also shared his personal experiences of coming out during the 1970s at a time when gay people had few public resources and thus had to depend upon one another for support, and talked about how the LGBT community also came together during the AIDS epidemic.

“We had to take care of each other,” said Klein, “and that I think is one of the most important lessons from this terrible tragedy that has hit our community. We had to come together to take care of each other.  And today we have a chance to end the epidemic. We have the tools to end the epidemic, but to do that, we need to keep the mindset that we are all together, and we are all responsible.”