CHICAGO — Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic nominee for president, is “more than ready for this job,” Gloria Allred told the Washington Blade on the sidelines of an LGBTQ caucus meeting during the Democratic National Convention on Monday.

“I met [Harris] when she was running for District Attorney of San Francisco, and she came to my office to seek my support, which, of course, I gave her,” Allred said. “I was extremely impressed with her at the time.”

“Usually I don’t make time to meet with political figures, frankly, because I’m so busy with the cases,” she said. “And I just, you know, can’t. But for some reason, I said, ‘Okay, I’ll meet her in my office,’ and I did, and I just had a feeling about her. And I’m so happy.”

Allred stressed that “we have to work to make it happen because it’s not going to happen just if we hope for it, we wish for it, we pray for it. We have to work for it.”

She also pointed out the dangers of Donald Trump’s candidacy for a second term in the White House, warning, “The Trump administration was just a disaster and a catastrophe for the country. And what they are doing now, Project 2025 in terms of pro-choice, in terms of gay and lesbian and transgender rights, is just a disaster.”

The former president, Allred said, “wants to distance himself from it” but “he can’t because so many of his employees, or former employees, I should say, from the administration, were involved in writing it — and also, of course, he’s on video talking about how great it was and is.”

An attorney whose career has spanned five decades, Allred has argued some of the most high profile civil rights cases in America, with a particular focus on LGBTQ and women’s rights, often representing some of the most famous public figures, from politicians to entertainers.

“I just want to say, my law firm and I have been involved in advocating and litigating for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights since the late 1970s,” Allred said. “I know what going back means when they we say ‘we won’t go back,’ because I’ve been saying that at pro-choice marches and gay and lesbian protests since that time.”

“No one has ever given women our rights. We’ve always had to fight for women. And this is the same for gay, lesbian, transgender, you know, bisexual, the whole community — no one’s giving us anything. No one ever gave us anything. We always have to fight to win it.”

At the DNC, “that’s what we’re doing here, is organizing, and I’m just really proud of the community that they’re here, educating people and helping to mobilize them,” Allred said. “Because we have to mobilize, we have to organize, and we have to help raise money to win.”

Trump, she said, has “billionaires supporting him,” and while Harris and the Democrats can win, Allred cautioned “we have to be really committed. There are not many days left to do it.”

“We have a real commitment, and we know how much more this election can make in terms of a difference for the community and equal rights for all,” Allred added.

Allred’s precedent-setting LGBTQ rights cases

Allred told the Blade about several landmark cases that she litigated on behalf of LGBTQ clients, going back several decades, including one involving two gay men who attended their high school reunion in the 1980s and were told their photo would not be published in the book because “the publisher felt it was against his religion to publish a photo of two gay men together.”

“We sued them, and after 16 years of litigating it all the way up to the California Court of Appeals, we won,” Allred said. The matter earned media attention, as the publisher “took out advertisements in the newspapers” arguing that “he had a right of free speech and religious expression to not publish” the photo.

“Well, we won the case in California decades ago,” she said.

Allred noted that apart from the role of the California Unruh Civil Rights Act in her case, analogous legal disputes were at issue in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018).

California was, and is, at the vanguard of LGBTQ civil rights movements. So was, and is, Allred and her firm, Allred, Maroko & Goldberg. “We did the right to marry case,” she said, “I did AIDS discrimination cases that we also won up in the California Court of Appeals” which ruled that “you can’t discriminate against someone” because of their HIV/AIDS status.

“We represented Robin Tyler and Diane Olson and Reverend Troy Perry and Phillip Ray De Blieck, his partner, the four of them in our right to marry case in California,” Allred said. “And we were the first in the state to challenge the family code law that essentially said that two people of the same sex could not marry. We challenged that. We went all the way to the California Supreme Court and we won.”

Here, too, Allred’s work crossed paths with Harris’s efforts in the public sector, aided by other allies like California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) who was, during this time, mayor of San Francisco.

“Because we were the first, Robin and Diane were the first, to be allowed to marry in LA County, a day before everyone else, we know that Newsom — actually, the same day that we announced we’re challenging the constitutionality of the law [he] started marrying gay and lesbian couples.”

The attorney — who in 2022 was awarded the highest honor of the LGBTQ+ Lawyers Association of Los Angeles — noted her and her firm’s ongoing work on behalf of transgender clients, which she considers “part of what we think should be always a teaching moment for what happens so that if people see the injustice and the unfairness, then they will join with us in wanting to right the wrongs.”

Allred highlighted another landmark case in the 1980s in which she represented “two lesbian life partners, wonderful women, businesswomen, very articulate” who were “not going to be in the closet” about their relationship when they celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at Papa Choux, a fine dining establishment in Los Angeles.

“One was Latina, the other one was African American,” she said. “They were a couple, and they made a reservation for the romantic booths, which were like a few steps up from the main restaurant” with “sheer curtains, and violinists [who] came in to play” by the tables.

The couple was told that they were welcome to sit elsewhere but “two people of the same sex can’t sit in this romantic section” as a matter of restaurant policy and also per a city ordinance. “They weren’t kissing, they weren’t hugging, they weren’t even holding hands,” Allred said, and they did not want to move. As they would later say publicly, “‘we thought to ourselves, what would Martin Luther King Jr. want us to do? And we decided he would want us to call Gloria Allred.'”

“They came to us,” she said, and “we took the case. We had to decide, is this sexual orientation? Is it sex discrimination? Is it important? Or is it not important? Is it ridiculous? And then we decided, if you think that Rosa Parks sitting in the back of the bus was important, even though the bus would still get there, but she was treated in a way that was not respectful of her right to be treated in a dignified, respectful way, so this is the same thing.”

“So we fought at the lower court,” Allred said. “The trial court said, the judge said, ‘I want to go see the restaurant,’ which was not necessary. It’s a legal issue. But he did, and then he ruled against us, and we went up to the Court of Appeals, and we won, and they reversed, and we set a legal precedent that we’re able to cite in other cases and other attorneys were able to cite that you can’t discriminate against people because they’re lesbian or gay or of the same sex.”

That was 1984. “It’s still a legal precedent in California,” Allred added.