Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vizchen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change, for aggressive, in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Brian Seams, former Pennsylvania State Representative, civil right attorney, an LGBTQ plus everyday, who sees both the inside of power in a ways it's just people out. Brian and I met in Hong Kong about two, three years ago, and one of the cities largest LGBTQ plus events. A powerful moment for visibility, inclusion, and connection. In this two-part series, Brian shares what it was really like to make history, to get silenced, meet speech, but to keep showing up anyway. He has traded the might for new kind of efficacy, one that is built on strategy, data, and a little less ego. Less type, Brian. Good morning to you, Brian. I haven't seen you in person for like how long? Two, three years? About two years, good morning, our good evening Viz. Well, a lot of things have happened in two years time. Brian, how are you? How have you been? It always feels like such a loaded question. And I'm at least here in the United States, especially where minute by minute, hour by hour things seem there's a lot of change, often change for the bad. I find myself asking people how they are today. How are you this moment? To answer your question, in the two years since we've seen each other in person, I've gotten married. I actually write about the time that we were meeting. I proposed to my then boyfriend, and we've been planning a wedding for this upcoming September for quite some time with friends and family, but with the recent political changes in the United States, I'm extremely fearful that a marriage equality won't exist for LGBTQ people by the time that we had our wedding plan for. So we went ahead and got married just about two months ago. And so can't you maybe more of your question? I'm personally good. I'm in love and I'm living with the person that I love. And those things are important, but I also, I not only work in politics, I work for politics meet civil rights. And here in the United States, those two things are colliding right now in ways that we've never seen before. You are a tree lawyer. Use studied, business, politics, and law. And at some point, you entered politics, serving as a house representative. We'll dive deeper into each of those roles. But first, give us a quick overview of your journey, what you've done professionally. Then we'll trace things back to your roots, your family, your upbringing, and circle back to the different roles you played throughout the year and the rights you've been fighting for. I started my career, my career as a lawyer in Philadelphia. I moved to Philadelphia after law school and practiced first disability law and civil rights law. It became what's called the in house council for the Philadelphia Bar Association, the sort of collective of lawyers in Philadelphia, which was the, and still is the oldest in the country. And really began my career around lawyers being a lawyer for lawyers in addition to doing civil rights work. And as is often the case with with people trying to pay off student debt and student loans, there was work I needed to do to earn an income and there was work I needed to do to sleep well at night. And I, those two things happened. I had a day job and a gay job as I like to describe it. And ultimately, at some point, I had the privilege of the benefit of being able to make a decision between doing work that was more morally important to me. There was more ethics and value driven than income driven. And I left, I left my work as an attorney to run our LGBTQ equality organization in the state that I lived for some time. And in doing so was required to interact with the politics of my state. I was living in a state that had very little civil rights for LGBTQ plus people like myself. Even though I was living in a city that had almost all of the equality that we could ask of a municipal government. And I existed in that space for a little while trying to impact equality through an equality organization. And hoping that we could have an impact on our elected officials on our, on our decision makers. And at some point, after being unable to change those minds, I tried, I decided I needed to change the people whose minds we were focusing on. And I focused a little bit more on electoral politics for several years. And at some point, my close friends sat me down and said that I was the person that I had been looking for to run. And I ran for office when I was 31 years old. I ran against the 28 year incumbent. She had been an office since I was three years old. And I won my very first race on a very small margin, 233 votes. And I was the first out LGBTQ person ever elected to my state legislature with which came with both a lot of responsibility and a ton of opportunities. And tried to avail myself of both of those as often as I could for the 10 years that I served in office. At the end of it, I retired from my seat in the House of Representatives and actually supported a close friend who ran for my seat. I also ran for Lieutenant Governor of my state, a race that I was not successful in. I during that whole time, it's been a lot of years teaching colleges and companies how to be active in LGBTQ equality and civil rights. And so I did that for my career for the first year that I was out of office, which is when we met. And now for the last six months or so, I've run an organization that uses a lot of data and campaign information to focus on elected officials that are attacking civil rights the most and to try to knock them out of office. We'll say those stories for later, especially the part about knocking them out of office. But let's go back to your roots. You mentioned growing up in a fairly disciplined environment. Both of your parents were military officers. I've always believed that who we are today, what we do and what we strive for tomorrow are all shaped by our past. And I think your origin story plays a big role in who you are and what drive you. What was your childhood like? I certainly agree. I think good favors and bad behaviors often have a lot of roots in how we were raised. In my case, I was lucky enough to be raised by two incredible parents. They're both still alive. They're both still in love. And my mom and dad are retired Lieutenant Colonel's in the Army. In the 1960s, the United States was involved in the war in Vietnam and my father was drafted and sent to Vietnam and my mother left college and went to join the Army as an nurse. And my parents met soon thereafter and stayed active duty in the Army for most of their adult lives, which meant for me as one of their children, there's four of us, I have a twin brother, an older brother, a younger sister, that we got to grow up all over the continental United States from Kansas in the very middle of the country to Alaska and the sort of wilderness of Alaska. And I think when people hear that my parents are milled-perried, they assume that there was a lot of discipline, which there was, but there was also a kind of creativity. There was a ton of love in my household. There was music in my household. There was good food and bad food in my household. And one of the ways that I know it shaped me aside from that I'm very proud to be an adventurer like my siblings are, I think we're very comfortable being in places that are new to us and that we don't exactly understand. But my mom was by and large, one of the only women in women officers that I ever was around as a young person that I was ever around on army bases. Most of my friends, fathers were soldiers or officers, but not ever their mothers, but of course mine was and it was very apparent to me from a very young age how in my household my parents had a wonderfully co-equal relationship and they each had tasks and chores that aligned with their case, and their likes not necessarily with their genders. And outside of the house I knew that my mom was treated differently than other mothers and that my and I didn't exactly know what that meant as a young person, but the older and older that I got and the more that I began to focus on public policy in my life, it became easier for me to luckily draw from my own personal experiences to understand what not just equality looks like, but being proactive about equality. Why? What being an ally means as about the things you do, not who you say you are? Can we go deeper into your mother's story? We know she was a military officer and a practicing nurse and I love to hear more about her from your perspective beyond the titles. Growing up, how did you see her as different from other typical American mothers around you? My sister likes to joke that when my mom passes away on her tombstone will be engraved, I bet I could do that. My mom was someone who had a confidence that was based upon her output. It was based upon her experiences. It was not misguided. It was not arrogance, but my mom always knew who she was and it was always very clear to us as her children. I can remember very fine, very specific examples of male soldiers, not recognizing that my mom was an officer and that moment where my mom let them know that she was an officer and their recognition of what was going on in that situation. As a very little kid, taught me a lot about knowing your worth, knowing your value, knowing who you are and why you are. Those are very elusive lessons, by the way. I don't know if I've ever fully learned them, but I did know with my mom that my mom was confident enough to not let, for example, bad actors around her behave poorly in front of us. I remember multiple times as a kid. My mom stopped me from saying absolutely not with that behavior, especially in front of my children. I learned that the difference between the confidence it takes to intervene. I serve on a board of an organization that fights bullying. One of the words that they often use is an upstander. The different queen of bystander is somebody that watches something happen and does nothing, an upstander is somebody that watches something happen and decides to do something, engage. My mom was the consummate upstander in my life and that came from having to decide for her. She had to be, she was the only woman of her kind on any base she was ever on. My mom has a short haircut, has her whole adult professional life. I'm sure she was accused of being a lesbian, at least once a week in her career in the military in the 80s and the 90s. And, and it didn't harden her, it strengthened her. Yeah, it's really funny that you mentioned the haircut ever since I was a kid, I've always had short hair. Thinking back to those times, it wasn't exactly the norm. So, people shut me out, stare at me, when I enter the ladies washroom, for example. So, anyway, that's the experience for having short hair in the era when long hair for women, for female, was still the main dream, always still is. Especially in those days for a woman, and I don't even, to be honest with you, I'm not even certain that she was allowed to have long hair as a woman in the military. But I also know, without question, that, that, yeah, silly bigots who think that a haircut has a gender would have thought that my mother's haircut was inappropriate. And it's just a simple tiny thing, and I've never asked her, and I have no idea. But I know I've been doing this work long enough, and I know where the root of a lot of people's silly bigotry can be placed. And I know that I am certain that she had to deal with men that did not think that she was equal to them because she was a woman. Men that didn't think that her experience as a combat nurse was as important as their experience as a combat soldier. And I'm happy to say I never confused the two. Yeah, exactly. There were, and still are, all many stereotypes. The whole image of the ideal woman, being someone with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and if not the house wife type, then polished, corporate woman in a tailored suit with that cookie cutter ash sword. And I was like, well, that's not me. This is, this is something to do with substance or success. Totally agree. Now, you mentioned that you grew up moving across different parts of the US. And within one country, that you get exposed to a wide range of cultures and communities. I can see how that shade you lens on diversity and why the seats of DEI were planted so early in your life. Part of the DEI is also the LGBTQ plus experience. I was wondering when did you decide to come out? And what was that conversation like when you did? I like to say that I didn't exactly get to decide. It was decided for me, but in a really wonderful way. I was a much bigger person when I was a teenager and when I was in my early 20s and I played American football in grammar school and high school and then I played in college. And my college football team went to a national championship and I was the captain of that football team. And we lost. And about a week and a half later, I was visiting another college. A college where my twin brother attended with some of my teammates. And they used that sort of private moment to ask me if I was gay. I think they had these were my closest friends. These were people that I had lived with or around for the part of four years. And I think they were waiting for a moment when it wouldn't put me at risk to ask me. And I was honest with them. They were honest with me. We had a lot of questions for one another. And it was one of the most uplifting, not moments because it was extended over months. But for months of my life in my early 20s, after 22 years in the closet, my closest friends really wanted me to know how important I was in their lives, how close we all were. And in the years that followed when I was first getting into LGBTQ civil rights, I often would say I want everybody's experience to be like mine. Yes, I was still in the closet. And I heard I was an athlete and I heard lots and lots of awful things in my teens. And I, yes, I had lots of insecurities. But when I did finally come out, I did so to the support and love and kindness of a bunch of people who often, I even now joke, they didn't know how to offer love and support and kindness. But they did in their own ways. And these are people that I'm still close with 25 years later because of it. You were raised in a household founded in both love and independence. And if I'm here and you write, your mother played a big part in that. She stood up for herself, lived on her own terms, and didn't let the expectation of her era dictate who she was. And that example shaped you. When you're turned king, in a time of change, you stood up for yourself too, openly, honestly. And I imagine that same foundation is what drew you to study law, to focus on civil rights. And to use your skills to support others who may not have had the same resources, protection or voice that you did. Would you say that's part of what guided your path? I sure hope so. I sure hope so. I believe that. I have a plaque that my parents gave me when I was 22 years old when I got into law school and then mailed me this plaque. And there's a quote by one of our former presidents and it's about law and human rights and kindness. But my parents bought it when I was maybe 12 years old. They waited 10 years to give it to me. And I knew from a very young age, I told people I was going to be a feminist lawyer. And the little kid that was the jolly, some people wanted to be a firefighter and astronaut. As I got older, I learned that I met women's and reproductive rights and civil rights and I met access and agency and autonomy. And by at the time, I knew what feminism was and I knew I wanted to be an attorney. I took my entrance exams to law school when I was 16 years old the first time, long before college. And it was just, I knew I wanted to be a feminist lawyer. And when I finally got to law school months after I came out of the closet, it had already been my approach to what I wanted to do. It already changed a little I was doing international law, largely international human rights law, mostly European union and South American law, along with what I was doing, having to learn all the laws in the United States. And I think the language that I learned in feminism, the approach to equality that I learned through feminism luckily for me was then the lens that I got to look upon myself when I finally came out of the closet. When I fully realized that I was a gay man, I had five, six, seven years of the language of feminism can help me see myself through that lens. It was a savior and it just reinforced that I wanted to do that work professionally. Back in 2012, you got elected and found yourself as the only out person in the room that must have been a powerful moment but also a complicated one. While the country was virtually becoming open towards LGBTQ plus issues, it was still a very different climate from today. What was the first term experience like for you being visibly out navigating politics and hooding space in a room where no one else shared that same lift experience? I it felt like a big responsibility, no question. All of us have had big responsibilities in our lives and some of them we recognized in the moment, some of them when we recognized in hindsight, I was very aware from the moment I won my election until I took office eight months or so later that I was the out person there. Now I served with over a dozen closeted elected officials, almost all of whom 90% 80% were supportive of anti-LGBTQ bills. It wasn't just that they were not out, it's that they were actively hurting the community. And so I knew I needed to focus on them first, which I did do, but to answer your question, what I remember thinking at the time was, I've learned to be the advocate I am that just got me elected because of my work with women's and reproductive rights and racial and ethnic justice, two things that need lots of work still in our capital. And I look just like the people who attack women's rights and racial and ethnic justice. And so I decided that my first term, especially my first year, everyone knew I was LGBTQ, everyone knew I was an LGBTQ activist, there were a couple of really bad moments I'd been shut down on the house floor from speaking because of it, I'd been discriminated against in front of my colleagues a few times. And myself and my staff and my team, we decided to use that attention to show people what an ally looked like and that I would, I introduced a whole bunch of women's rights bills I signed on to every women's rights bill, I introduced a bunch of ethnic intimidation act bills and a bunch of racial and ethnic justice bills to show people. Yes, I am gay, yes, that's part of the reason I was elected here and it informs the work I do. But I can introduce these bills and show you why that matters and hopefully you will understand why the things that impact my life matter. And it did have that effect, which I was grateful for. So on the one hand, your identity helped you get elected. It was a source of strength, visibility and representation. But once inside the house, it also made you a target for this agreement, even exclusion. Did you consciously tear that tension into a strategy, building alliances with those who didn't necessarily share your identity but shared your policy interests so you could amplify your voice and make real progress? It is. I'll give you a really good example. Very early on in my first term, before I had ever spoken on the House floor, there was a good ruling from the Supreme Court came down about marriage equality for LGBTQ people. And at the end of session, that day, at the end of our legislative session, a couple months into my first term, there's a moment where legislators get to stand up and talk about major events and how they will impact law and policy. And I rose to speak about that. And I got a half a word out and my microphone was cut. That's it for today. Ryan shared how he stepped into politics, not because he wanted to be a politician, but because he wanted different people in the room. But in part two, we go inside that room, what it was like to get silenced and to learn how to fight smarter. Don't miss it. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top rated reviews, check out our website and follow me on social media. I'm Viz Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.
