Jon Sweitzer-Lamme
Durham, North Carolina
During a summer spent interning with both a gay and lesbian advocacy group and with the North Carolina legislature Sweitzer-Lamme got to work for gay rights legislation and see it passed right before his eyes.
The summer before his senior year, Sweitzer-Lamme interned with a statewide gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy group called Equality North Carolina (ENC). For ENC, he worked on petition initiatives and data entry. “I made a scorecard for legislators to grade how they were voting on issues important to ENC,” he says. “My supervisor showed me where to find the bills, how to research the votes. I ended up with this massive spreadsheet with all this data. It was really interesting to see how the demographics worked out; liberals from the big cities [voted one way], and the conservatives from the rural areas voted the other way.”
During that same summer, he also interned in North Carolina’s House of Representatives, where he was able to witness the final vote and passage of an anti-bullying bill called The School Violence Prevention Act. “That was exciting,” says Sweitzer-Lamme, a Quaker who was also involved during high school with programs sponsored by the Friends General Conference. “That was the first time gender identity had been included in the language of a bill in any southern state. It passed by one vote, cast by the Speaker as a tiebreaker.”