Vice President Kamala Harris has piled up endorsements from LGBTQ leaders and groups since she announced her campaign for president — and some of those backers have recalled the work she did on queer issues during her previous stints in office.
The vice president’s decorated public service career — which previously included serving as San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, and US senator before ascending to the vice presidency — has been intertwined with the trajectory of LGBTQ rights in recent decades.
As San Francisco district attorney, for example, Harris officiated some of the first same-sex marriages in San Francisco when then-Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered marriage licenses to be issued to LGBTQ couples in 2004. That historic development, however, was short-lived when those marriages were deemed invalid by a court order.
Harris continued to push for LGBTQ rights later in her seven-year tenure as district attorney. She established a hate crimes unit with a focus on LGBTQ youth in schools and established a national gathering of prosecutors for a conference on how to push back against the use of gay or trans “panic defense,” which is when a defendant defends their actions by saying they acted out because of the victim’s perceived sexual orientation or gender identity.
As attorney general, Harris would not defend Prop 8 — a ballot proposition and state constitutional amendment to outlaw same-sex marriage — and in March of 2011 she submitted a petition to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals calling on the court to repeal Prop 8.
As a US senator, Harris received a score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s scorecard as she co-sponsored legislation like the federal LGBTQ non-discrimination bill known as the Equality Act and took other actions such as when she joined more than a dozen other senators in a letter to then-President Donald Trump calling on his administration to stop removing LGBTQ resources from the Department of Health and Human Services’ website and other federal websites.
However, Harris has faced criticism — especially during her 2020 campaign for president — for some of her actions as attorney general. While some progressives have been uncomfortable with her law enforcement background, she has also taken heat because she once rejected a request from Michelle Lael-Norsworthy, an incarcerated transgender woman, who sought to undergo gender-affirming surgery.
Lael-Norsworthy sued the state for failing to provide adequate healthcare, prompting a federal judge to order the state to allow her to have the surgery. Harris argued against that, saying that Lael-Norsworthy “has been receiving hormone therapy for her gender dysphoria since 2000 and continues to receive hormone therapy and other forms of treatment… there is no evidence that Norsworthy is in serious, immediate physical or emotional danger.”
In response to a 2019 press conference question from the Washington Blade, Harris sought to explain her decision on that issue, saying, “I was, as you are rightly pointing out, the attorney general of California for two terms and I had a host of clients that I was obligated to defend and represent and I couldn’t fire my clients, and there are unfortunately situations that occurred where my clients took positions that were contrary to my beliefs.”
She added: “And it was an office with a lot of people who would do the work on a daily basis, and do I wish that sometimes they would have personally consulted me before they wrote the things that they wrote? Yes, I do. But the bottom line is the buck stops with me, and I take full responsibility for what my office did.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Harris vowed to open a new office for queer issues that would be headed up by what she described as a “Chief Advocate for LGBTQ+ Affairs in the White House.” During that same campaign, Harris told The Root that she supported the decriminalization of sex work but cautioned that “it is not as simple as that.”
“But when you’re talking about consenting adults, I think that yes we should really consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed,” she said.
On the 2020 campaign trail Harris also vowed to decriminalize the transmission of HIV and take action to lower the costs of the HIV prevention drug known as PrEP, among other actions.
As vice president, Harris again had a front-row seat to LGBTQ history in 2022 when President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires states to recognize same-sex and interracial marriages even if the Supreme Court takes aim at marriage equality. During a special ceremony to sign the bill into law, Harris and others delivered remarks before the president signed the bill into law and gifted the pen to Harris — a nod to her work on marriage equality over the years.
Last year, Harris visited the Stonewall Inn and denounced the state-based legislative attacks on transgender rights across the country.
Notably, Harris was fundraising in the LGBTQ hotspot of Provincetown, Massachusetts on the same weekend as Biden announced he was exiting the race.
“When it comes to the fight for LGBTQ rights, I know it’s a fundamental fight for freedom,” Harris told the crowd at a July 20 event co-hosted by Bryan Rafanelli and his husband, Mark Walsh, according to the Cape Cod Times. “You should be able to love and to be who you are openly and with pride. To be free from discrimination and bigotry and hate. The freedom to simply … be.”
