A new collection guide and exhibit at the UConn Law Library share the legal battle between an alumnus of the school and the U.S. Department of Defense over his departure from the U.S. Naval Academy for being gay.

Joe Steffan ’94 JD donated his personal papers, correspondence and legal files, known as the Steffan Papers, to the Thomas J. Meskill Law Library. He was a student at the law school while the suit was ongoing and wanted to preserve the documents and make them available for others to study.

“I particularly wanted the correspondence (from other people sharing their own difficulties) to be preserved to bring context to the issue in future decades or centuries to help humanize the nature of what people faced,” Steffan says.

“Obviously there are many legal documents and briefs and drafts of briefs, drafts of my book, and other things we thought might be interesting to legal scholars as they try to delve into the minutia of how these issues were litigated during our time, which might not be as apparent to people in the future,” he adds, also joking that he was tired of moving the boxes around.

He recently spoke about the case and his experiences at an event on campus hosted by the library as well as the Lambda Law Society and Veterans and Armed Forces Legal Out Reach (VALOR) Society student organizations.

“It was important to honor Joe Steffan and his gift,” UConn Law archivist Rebecca Altermatt says. “I found the challenges he had to navigate still relevant today and envisioned an exhibit of the actual court documents, correspondence, and news media from the lawsuit. We knew hearing from Joe himself would resonate with the students, as well as the greater law school community.”

Altermatt spent nearly a year organizing what became 100 boxes of materials and writing up a guide to the collection, which features material from both lawsuits. Like the rest of the law library, the exhibit and collection are available to the public. The exhibit is located inside the main entrance, and the collection can be viewed upon request.

Steffan was two weeks from his last round of final exams and six weeks from graduation from the Naval Academy when he was put under investigation for being gay in 1987.

At the time, he held one of the ten highest command ranks at the academy, a battalion commander, and had received all As in military performance. Those As were changed to Fs based on the claim that a gay person was incapable of serving in the military.

“One of things that really drove me to ultimately pursue this lawsuit was a profound sense of unfairness that I had done really well at the Academy. I had succeeded in all of the ways the Academy and the military wanted someone to succeed and yet something about me, that had no bearing on my performance, had disqualified me,” Steffan says. “It was that sense of injustice that gnawed at me.”

With assistance from the Lambda Legal Defense Fund, he sued the Department of Defense in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

Steffan summarized the outcome that he lost, he won, he lost, he won, he lost.

The case went back and forth between the district court – where the judge referred to Steffan by a derogatory slur, prompting Steffan’s lawyers to ask the judge to recuse himself, which he refused – and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In the end, the Court of Appeals decided in favor of the Department of Defense in a 7-3 split that followed political party lines.

According to Steffan, Lambda Legal declined to bring the case any further because the organization was “very worried about bringing the question of equal protection for gay and lesbian people to the [U.S.] Supreme Court for the first time in the military context because there is such a strongly embedded deference to military decision-making that they thought it would result in an adverse ruling.”

While his case was ongoing, the military had adopted the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy, which Steffan called “a farce.”

During his time at UConn Law, Steffan and fellow students brought suit, supported by the ACLU, to prohibit the military from recruiting on campus, given that their actions did not adhere to the school’s anti-discrimination policy. They won that case at trial and before the Connecticut Supreme Court.