THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Patricia Logue, senior counsel of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund's Midwest office, has been in the ring of 'the people's fight' since she graduated from Northwestern University's law school in the mid-1980s. Accused (and rightfully so, she admits) of donating too many hours toward pro bono work while employed by prestigious Jenner & Block, Logue reined herself in but continued applying her legal talents to those cases in which she could effect social and political change.

'It was fair, really,' Logue said, dropping her gaze toward the steaming cup of tea in her hand. 'I was there to be a workhorse. I think they got their money's worth out of me.'

Logue, 43, highly values her four years (1986-'90) as a rookie attorney at Jenner & Block. Lambda was one of Logue's pro bono clients at the law firm and, in 1988, she joined Lambda's board of directors.

'I got excellent training,' she said. 'They really teach you about what it means to be a thorough lawyer there. I've really gotten to work with some excellent lawyers who have taught me about the particular skills of litigating, but also the influence on the litigation process. At Jenner, the first question was always 'Who's your judge? Who's the audience? What is it about this judge we need to know to understand if we can win this case and how we can win this case?' Very practical stuff, really excellent writing.'

Folks in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas might not be as familiar with Logue, but they will be.

Working with Ruth Harlow, Lambda's legal director, and others, Logue helped draft the brief filed Jan. 16 with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging laws in those four states that make consensual sex between two persons of the same sex a crime. The high court is scheduled to hear arguments in the Lawrence and Garner v. Texas case today, March 26, where Lambda is representing Houston's John Lawrence and Tyron Garner.

The two men were arrested in Lawrence's home in 1998 after police, responding to a false report of an armed intruder, burst into the residence to find the men entwined in intimacy. Under current anti-sodomy laws in 15 states—including Michigan—police can barge into a home and arrest an individual for engaging in sodomy. Eleven of those states consider sodomy between heterosexuals criminal, too. It's just Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas applying the law solely to homosexuals.

'We know the primary purpose of these (same-sex anti-sodomy) laws is to officially approve of discrimination against gay people,' Logue quietly said, sipping more hot tea in her living room, pussy willow branches shooting up behind her right shoulder. 'The primary purpose of the laws, at this point, is to keep gay people in their place.

'Sodomy means different things under different statutes. In Texas, it means oral sex, anal sex, sex with an object, which apparently has been interpreted to include one's hands … it's literally like deviate sexual intercourse between two people of the same sex.'

As Logue playfully and sarcastically points out, heterosexuals are treated differently.

'If you're the opposite sex, you're married, you're having an affair, you met someone an hour ago, it's legal,' she said, 'but when gay people do it, it's immoral and criminal.'

It's not hard to understand the inner combustion that keeps Logue, a lesbian with a political science upbringing, fired up about civil liberties for the LGBT community. Youthful days were spent wandering the calm Quaker streets of Swarthmore, Penn., near Philadelphia. In a town where the population actually dropped between 1990 and 1996—it still hangs around 6,000—Logue was born fifth in a family of six kids and attended public high school.

'We used to march against the Vietnam War, those sorts of things,' she said, highlighting the pacifist influences that surrounded her as a child. 'A lot of my family was in public service in one way or another— teaching, politics, urban planning, whatever. So that sort of ran deep in my childhood. I worked at age whatever on whoever the Democratic candidate for president was— McGovern or Humphrey. When I was a kid, my dad had me licking envelopes and doing all this stuff.'

Political science might run in the Logue bloodline. Her parents met in Yale's political science department, which Logue's mother had chosen for graduate school. The two moved to Chicago and began pursuing doctorates in the field, but motherhood stopped Logue's mom shy of her dissertation. Logue's father built his career as a political science professor.

'Mom was trained as a political scientist and did some teaching, but mostly wrote for the newspaper,' Logue explained. 'My father's three brothers are all lawyers. Uncle Ed was head of the redevelopment authority of New Haven, Conn.; Uncle Frank was mayor of New Haven at some point. My conception of what a lawyer did had to do with public policy. None of them were litigators. I thought if you want to do something good in the world, you become a lawyer and that was it.'

Of the six Logue kids, two are attorneys. Pat's brother Michael works for a firm in Alaska, spending lots of time on legal aid representation.

Swarthmore College, with its student population of less than 1,500, the Peace Library and the campus's forward-thinking mentality, appealed to Logue.

'I probably would've gone to Swarthmore if I didn't live in Swarthmore,' she said, grinning. 'I wanted to leave home. I picked Brown (University) because it wasn't Yale. Mom, Dad and all Dad's brothers had gone to Yale. I was attracted to Brown because you can design your own education.'

Brown University, perched on a hill in Providence, RI, was established in 1764, making it the seventh college established in America. Ten percent of the freshman admitted in 2002—(no, it's not one of those 10 percent statistics)—were valedictorians or salutatorians of their class. Brown's reputation draws many of the brightest.

'I took 'The Politics of the Legal System', a prominent course on campus,' Logue said. 'It shaped your understanding of the legal system as a political entity and what are the forces that work in that system.'

The class, the professor, or perhaps just that point in her college career directed Logue toward the horizon of becoming an attorney.

'The main decision people make in law school is 'are you going to be a litigator or transactional, litigation or corporate?' I tried to take all the constitutional and civil rights courses that I could, as well as labor and employment,' she said. 'I was mostly occupied during those years (at NU's law school) with the Women in Law Conference, a major national conference that had a lot of feminist and lesbian content. We orchestrated to have it brought to Chicago my third year; 175 workshops. We were going to law school, working … it was a busy time. And I hated Chicago. It was so cold. I didn't have a car and I'd get off the 'L' and walk (toward campus) directly into the lake wind.'

Aside from the formal training Logue found at Jenner & Block those four years after law school, she also was able to pay down $40,000 in school loan debt and pay off a car. Then it was time to follow family tradition, time to move full throttle into public policy work. At Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI), Logue's top two challenges, simply referred to as the ComEd case and the Gautreaux case, kept her both exhilarated and fatigued.

'ComEd was building all these nuclear power plants and they were trying to charge the consumers, even though there was no need for these plants. It was this total David and Goliath thing,' she explained. 'We ended up with $1.3 billion in refunds and got the first order ever stopping a rate increase from happening. It was two or three of us (from BPI) working against this army of lawyers from Sidley and Austin (now Sidley Austin Brown and Wood), though we worked in coalition with all these government agencies and other lawyers. It was really hard because commerce proceedings are very accelerated. They are NOT on your side. It's a very pro-utility environment and you have a law firm with the capacity to just throw paper at you and bury information and you're trying to find these needles in a haystack and you're trying to figure out where you can have some impact. So, you let 90 percent of the case go by and you focus on the main issues. We would write a brief a day for the commerce commission. When we were writing in the Illinois Supreme Court, our briefs would be 120 pages long and you would have like 10 days to write them. It was very, very difficult, but very rewarding.'

When ComEd wasn't consuming all of her time, Logue worked on the Gautreaux case, named after African-American public housing tenant Dorothy Gautreaux who in 1966 ignited the pursuit of desegregated public housing in Chicago. BPI, regarded as one of the nation's foremost public interest law and policy centers, formed in March 1969 and has devoted vast resources to the Gautreaux case over the past three decades.

'We got to play a role in stopping the Chicago Housing Authority (from pursuing renovation plans that did not resolve issues raised in the case),' Logue said. 'We worked a lot to push the process that's underway now to change the landscape of public housing. It's highly imperfect and, as an outsider, there's only so much you can do.

'Both those cases were about litigation, but also politics and what really effects change, what are the pressures on government officials at different levels, what influences them, what influences the court, how reality-based and fact-based these decisions are.'

Lambda's Midwest office opened in June 1993, primarily with funds willed to the organization by Bon Foster, a law student one year behind Logue at NU. Foster, who passed away from AIDS complications, had specified in the gift that the money must be used within two years to open a Lambda office in Chicago. While still at BPI, Logue took the lead on this project.

'A lot of my focus became laying a groundwork in the city and the gay community to have Lambda come here,' she said, 'to figure out what the receptivity would be, to work with the press to build some visibility. I decided in there that I wanted to come to work for Lambda. My friend Mary tells me that I said in law school that I wanted to do gay-rights work, but I don't really remember that.'

Lambda's Chicago staff originally was a team of two: Logue, the attorney, and Mona Noriega, who doesn't recall her original job title.

'We were sharing one phone, one desk and a table,' Noriega said, laughing.

Originally an office manager, of sorts, Noriega stayed with Lambda until 1997 at which time she left to pursue full-time her M.B.A. at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Absent from the Lambda office a few years (inlcluding to work at Lambda Publications/Windy City Times, where she had worked prior to Lambda Legal with it was Outlines newspaper), Noriega rejoined Logue and a larger staff in January 2002 as Midwest Office regional director.

'I find Pat to be incredibly smart—smart's not even the right word,' Noriega said, trying to encapsulate her perception of Logue. 'It's her keen observation of the issues that our community faces and a consistent analysis of the best ways to address those issues. Even in her quietness, she's thinking.'

A sense of humor best compared to the humidity level of the Sahara, Logue is rumored to tell great stories.

'I also think Pat is able to bring it down to the experience of the people,' Noriega continued. 'Though (an issue) is national in scope, she brings it down to the everyday person's reality.'

Logue appears reserved, private, guarded about those things that fall outside her professional life. However, she and her partner, Marcia Festen, held a union ceremony last August at the Women's Club of Evanston where approximately 150 people, a third of whom were family, witnessed their vows to one another. It was a celebration inclusive of haikus, poems and a Van Morrison song.

'We were surrounded on three sides by our family and friends,' Logue said, smiling. 'It was interesting to do it and see what it meant for other people. We were doing it for very personal reasons. We've been through some really difficult things and it just felt like the right time.'

Their single-family home just south of the St. Ben's neighborhood is run by the couple's two five-year-old felines: Penny, a calico from a shelter, and Sam, a tuxedo Pat gave Marcia on an anniversary. Festen has published a book—How Effective Non-Profits Work—while Logue longs for the day her own novel will be finished.

'Writing is probably the thing I love most in the world,' she said.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of people in the United States, even the ones who don't know her name, who are grateful she's given so much of herself to public interest law.