Pioneer, Presiding: Lachs ’63, World’s First Openly Gay Judge, Reflects
June 25, 2021
Stephen Lachs sits in his chambers shortly after his 1979 appointment to the Los Angeles Superior Court.
Within days of his appointment to the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 1979, a landmark event that made him the first openly gay judge in the world, UCLA School of Law alumnus Stephen Lachs ’63 could tell that things would never be the same.
“There wasn’t much question about it,” he says today. “I immediately started getting mail, literally hundreds and hundreds of letters from people all over the world. They would write to ‘Judge Stephen Lachs, Los Angeles Superior Court, Los Angeles, California,’ and it would all get to me. Most of the letters were congratulatory. A number of people wrote to me saying, ‘I can’t tell you how grateful I am for what you’ve done because it has inspired me. I never thought that I, as a gay person, could do anything, and now I see that you can do something with your life.’ I got so many letters like that. Even now, I could just about cry thinking about it.”