Arizona Equals K.M.

In today’s episode, we talk with K.M. Bell, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Arizona and a long-time civil rights advocate. Topics include the importance and challenges of networking, the realities of a career as an attorney, the value of travel, and some of the daily choices queer professionals face. Additional context for the conversation * The ACLU of Arizona * The Bridge Improv Theater * The Marijuana Policy Project * Alan Dershowitz * Wizards of the Coast: Dungeons & Dragons * Grover Norquist: My first Burning Man * The National LGBTQ+ Bar Association Arizona Equals is a conversational interview podcast rooted in the idea that stories have power. Each episode, we sit down with an LGBTQ+ person living in Arizona to talk about their community ties and experiences in the state. Visit our website to listen to the full archive or to sign up to be a guest on a future episode of the podcast. Full Transcript 00;00;00;21 - 00;00;09;19 Jeanne Hi. Thanks for listening to the Arizona Equals Conversation. My name is Jeanne Woodbury and I'm the policy and communications director for Equality Arizona. 00;00;11;03 - 00;00;37;21 Jeanne Arizona Equals is an interview podcast rooted in the idea that stories have power. Each week I sit down with an LGBTQ+ person living in Arizona and talk with them about their communities and the experiences they've had in the state. Today on the show, I talk with K.M. Bell a staff attorney for the ACLU of Arizona. Just recently, we hosted a town hall with K.M. about the Maricopa County attorney election. 00;00;38;04 - 00;01;01;11 Jeanne Like all of K.M.'s work, I found it thoughtful, thorough and informative, and I'd encourage everyone to check out the recording of the Town Hall, which you can find on our website at equalityarizona.org/events-archive. If you're looking for other ways to get involved with Equality Arizona, our monthly Spectrum Academy event is this Saturday, August 27th. 00;01;02;05 - 00;01;27;00 Jeanne You can sign up today at equalityarizona.org/events. In our conversation, K.M. and I get pretty into the weeds and we also cover a lot of ground. From Alan Dershowitz to Burning Man. So I've provided a lot of links for additional context in the shownotes. One of my favorite parts of the conversation was our discussion about code switching and about picking our battles as queer professionals. 00;01;27;10 - 00;01;47;24 Jeanne But I don't want to get ahead of myself. So for now, I'll let K.M. introduce themselves and get the conversation started. 00;01;52;10 - 00;02;22;11 K.M. I am K.M. Bell. I use they/them pronouns. I'm a staff attorney at the ACLU of Arizona. Although I should say at the outset that any opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not represent the views of the ACLU or any other organization I'm affiliated with. Outside of work, I perform occasionally as an improv comedian and a theater in Tempe called The Bridge, and also enjoy yoga and playing with my cat. 00;02;23;01 - 00;02;24;22 Jeanne Wonderful. Thanks for being on the show. 00;02;25;06 - 00;02;25;29 K.M. Thanks for having me. 00;02;26;10 - 00;02;48;08 Jeanne I saw that you changed your title recently in your job, so I wanted to congratulate you on that and also ask. We had worked together at the Capitol. That's not always a fun time going to those committee meetings and listening to what can feel like nonsense for hours. Are you transitioning away from that kind of work and what are you going to be doing now? 00;02;48;29 - 00;03;13;14 K.M. I am. Yeah. I started my career as a judicial clerk and then as a civil and criminal defense litigator on the East Coast in Maryland. And then I started doing policy work because I wanted to keep people out of my office in the first place. So for several years, I worked to reform our country's marijuana or more properly, cannabis laws. 00;03;14;02 - 00;03;35;27 K.M. And that was a great experience it is such a common way that people get caught up in the criminal justice system. And the criminal justice system is quite biased against black people. LGBT people are also very overrepresented in the criminal justice system. And as you mentioned, I was doing lobbying here in the state of Arizona and I focused on criminal justice reform. 00;03;36;14 - 00;03;53;08 K.M. I really wanted to get back to litigation and the sort of highest and best use of my legal training. So I'm very excited to have the opportunity to do that with the ACLU and hopefully be able to challenge some unconstitutional laws. 00;03;54;03 - 00;04;04;22 Jeanne When you got started in that kind of policy work around cannabis laws, was that something you were doing while you were still on the East Coast in Maryland, or did you come here to start that work? 00;04;06;00 - 00;04;30;27 K.M. Well, I was working for a national organization called the Marijuana Policy Project. So that organization works across all of the states. At one point I was covering a dozen different states, and with registered lobbyists in four of those, most actively in Maryland and New Jersey, which as you can imagine, the political scene there is a bit different than what we have here in Arizona. 00;04;30;27 - 00;04;31;19 Jeanne It's a little. 00;04;31;19 - 00;04;48;24 K.M. Just a little. So I was doing state level lobbying, but on a narrow band of issues across a bunch of states. Whereas of course, the ACLU works on a lot of different issues and at the state affiliate in one state. So it's sort of the inverse of what I had been doing before. 00;04;48;29 - 00;05;09;28 Jeanne Right. I think I feel a little ill equipped to ask questions about like, what's the career path of someone who gets a law degree and does a clerkship? I think I would really appreciate it. And probably listeners like me might appreciate, like what is that path look like and kind of like a general way and what did it look like for you? 00;05;10;21 - 00;05;35;14 K.M. I actually spoke to a master's in social work class here in Arizona, specifically about the career track to working in policy. And I have talked to a number of people out of going to law school who don't actually want to practice law, as you know, because I believe you are also not an attorney. You can be a lobbyist without being a lawyer. 00;05;35;20 - 00;06;09;22 K.M. You can't be a litigator without being a lawyer. So there's that consideration. I had the misfortune of finishing my law school and my clerkship in 2008 when the economy tanked. And so finding any job was quite challenging at that point. I always tell people to really give some thought to exactly what it is they want to do and reach out to folks who are in that field. 00;06;10;18 - 00;06;43;17 K.M. They want to lobby on LGBT issues, and so they reach out to you, you know, and have a conversation with people who are working in the field, because the reality of what it's like is not necessarily what you imagine. And it's really good and important to develop a network early on, which I did not do because I graduated from law school when I was only 23, having only ever worked like summers waiting tables in a restaurant. 00;06;44;02 - 00;07;00;05 K.M. So I don't advise coming out of law school with that little idea of how their professional working world works. So if anything, I would tell them to learn from my perhaps errors. 00;07;01;06 - 00;07;23;25 Jeanne So what was the decision then? I mean, that's I think people I've met who have gone into law school, usually it's later, at least by a few years in their lives. And it can be kind of a long process of preparing for that. It seems like you were able to get into that really quickly. So what was your kind of thought process or intention behind that? 00;07;24;06 - 00;07;27;05 K.M. I knew I wanted to work at the ACLU when I was 13 years old. 00;07;27;15 - 00;07;29;26 Jeanne Oh, that's amazing. It was like a childhood dream. 00;07;30;14 - 00;07;53;23 K.M. Yeah, I am pretty sure that I was seven. I — very small when somebody asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I thought I was going to say like ballerina or… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit equalityarizona.substack.com