Lambda Honors Alumni and Marks Growth With 40th Anniversary Gala

Under lavender lights at the neighboring Forum Hotel’s ballroom, the Lambda Law Alliance celebrated its 40th anniversary gala April 12 and recognized two alumni for their contributions to the LGBTQ+ community.

Lambda billed the gala as its “coming out” party, celebrating both its growth in membership and the achievements of its 130-plus members, and telegraphing its goals for the future.

“This event was something we wanted to try to do on our own, with outside sponsorship, to signify that this is an organization that has truly grown and developed in ways that people even five years ago couldn’t have imagined,” said James Hornsby ’24, co-chair of the gala’s organizing committee and last year’s Lambda president. “We were able to raise $60,000 for the gala from sponsors mainly because of how many students are openly identifying as queer ... A good chunk of the school is in this organization, and we’re ready to make a difference.”

The organization was founded in February 1984 by two straight white men who responded to a mysterious posting in the Virginia Law Weekly announcing the first meeting of the “Gay and Lesbian Law Students Association,” which would serve as a support and rights advocacy group.

Within two months, GALLSA — which changed its name to Lambda in the early 2000s — had won explicit assurance from the faculty that applicants would not be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation.

That change laid the groundwork for the representation Lambda members have today. With nearly 20% of the current first-year class self-identifying as LGBTQ+ — up from 12.5% of current third-years — 13 other student organizations and three law journals are headed by Lambda members, according to the organization.

In her opening remarks, Dean Risa Goluboff emphasized those leadership numbers.

“It’s not just that Lambda contributes to Lambda,” Goluboff said. “It’s that Lambda contributes to the whole of this community and makes a home for all of you so that you feel like you can then spread your wings and go everywhere else in the Law School and lend your talents to everything that we do. And that is just a beautiful thing.”

Lambda attributes much of its growth to one of the night’s two honorees, former assistant dean for admissions Cordel Faulk ’01, who came out as gay himself nine years after graduating from the Law School.

Faulk started the practice of working with Lambda to reach out directly to self-identified LGBTQ admitted students to give them a better sense of how welcome they are at the Law School. He also initiated welcome dinners for incoming LGBTQ law students. Faulk was recognized for his efforts by the University’s Serpentine Society in 2018. (That UVA alumni network changed its name back to its original name, QVA — Queer Virginia Alumni — in 2022.)

Faulk was also instrumental in creating Lambda’s annual dinner, recognizing that it could help students and alumni forge long-lasting professional relationships. He also played a role in creating the annual Alvarez-Coughlin Award that was presented to him at the gala Friday. Faulk left the Law School in 2020 to become the director of global admissions at Schwarzman Scholars in New York.

In his remarks, Faulk spoke of his decision to come out in order to support LGBTQ+ students and expressed his gratitude for the support he received.

But, he said, “I really didn’t need the support because my desire was never for you to endorse me. The only thing I wanted was for everyone in this room to know people at UVA Law endorsed you.”

The night’s other Alvarez-Coughlin honoree, Susan Baker Manning ’98, served as co-president of the organization in 1997, the same year the organization changed its name to BGALLSA to ensure it represented students who identified as bisexual. At the time, the organization had just 15 members.

While directing pro bono litigation at her former firm, Morgan Lewis, Manning coordinated the business community’s efforts to file amicus briefs in Obergefell v. Hodges, which struck down same-sex marriage bans nationwide. In July, she became general counsel of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

She reminded students in attendance that they will be able to make a difference in the world regardless of whether they work in the public or private sector.

“There is not just one path to being able to do all of those things, like I [initially] thought there was,” Manning said. “Take the pro bono case, talk to your political officials — you don’t have to wait to start. Just do the work. Take the first step, then take a second step and keep going.”

Lambda’s Alvarez-Coughlin Award is named for the award’s first two honorees, Law School Foundation President and CEO Luis Alvarez Jr. ’88 and Professor Anne Coughlin, who has served as the faculty adviser of Lambda and its predecessors since she joined the faculty in 1995.

Scott Migliori ’12, the first openly transgender student at UVA Law, was on hand to accept the 2023 award because he was unable to attend last year’s dinner and awards event in person. Last year’s other two honorees, U.S. Judge Jamar Walker ’11 and Daniel Richardson ’18, also attended the anniversary gala, as well as a number of other Lambda-affiliated alumni from across the years.

A special section of the evening highlighted the work of QVA, which has provided more than $300,000 in scholarships to Lambda members over the years.

Representatives of more than 30 major law firms and the American Civil Liberties Union attended the event, Hornsby said.

By celebrating Lambda’s presence and highlighting its growth, the organization hopes in part to attract more funds to support its mission, which includes advocating for the wider LGBTQ community, Hornsby said.

“There are something like 349 pending anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the U.S. alone and plenty of other countries around the world that still are very comfortable with discriminating against LGBTQ+ people,” Hornsby said. “Those are places that we could send our students to help advocate and do legal research, but we’ve never been able to do big things like that because we’ve never had this many members and we’ve never had the resources to do it.”