Justice Martin Jenkins, California’s first openly gay high court justice, has spent much of his life “reconciling” his main identities: his Blackness, his queerness, and his Catholicism.

Martin was born in 1953 in San Francisco, and has spent much of his life in the Bay Area. His father, a survivor of Jim Crow, reinforced Martin’s community obligations, saying: “your life is not your own,” an idea that Martin still carries. Young Martin already had a jurist’s understanding of systems: at church, he felt embraced while giving confession, and at school, he “play[ed] the dozens” with classmates.

When a close friend, Sherwin Bailey, was paralyzed in a car accident, changing Martin’s life. Sherwin’s faith and resilience when faced with devastating injuries inspired Martin, and the two remained close until Sherwin’s death in 2009. Sherwin’s love of football also inspired Martin to play professionally after graduating from college.

After undergrad, Martin, who was then wrestling with his sexuality, signed as a rookie cornerback with the Seattle Seahawks, calling football “the most manly thing I could think of to prove to myself that I wasn’t gay.” While he liked football’s intellectual challenges, it wasn’t his passion, and he believed he’d find greater intellectual satisfaction studying law, so he quit and left professional football to attend  law school. He got his JD from the University of San Francisco in 1980, and became a prosecutor for the Alameda County DA in 1981. Since then, he’s served as a trial attorney for the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (1983–1986) as well as corporations like Pacific Bell.

The move from football to law helped Martin feel comfortable about his sexual orientation.  However, almost twenty years passed before he began to feel comfortable enough to come out to  a small circle of people, including his mentor and fellow colleague on the federal district court—who also was the first African American hired as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice in Washington D.C.  During Martin’s tenure as a federal district judge, he  his colleague on the court received hate mail attempting to out him.  His  conservative colleagues who received the hate mail denounced the attempt as “filth,” which he found reassuring. Martin’s equanimity as a judge has earned him career-wide bipartisan respect; President Clinton made him a federal district judge in 1997, and he was appointed to the state appeals court by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2007. Martin also co-authored the Jenkins-Laporte Doctrine, which defines the rights of people accused of copyright infringement. He received a Stonewall Award for this from the American Bar Association in 2021. In 2022, he received the Justice Lewis Powell award from the American Inns of Court, “bestowed upon an attorney or judge who has rendered exemplary service in the areas of professionalism, ethics, civility and excellence.”   

Throughout his 40’s and into his 50’s , Martin felt that “being [both] gay and Black were not acceptable” within the Black community, nor could he reconcile his orientation with his Catholic faith. His efforts at reconciliation of these seemingly inconsistent aspects of his life were spearheaded by a close friendship he developed with his Ken Norman, a fellow Black gay judge). . After decades of friendship, a dying Ken told Martin in 2003 that his final wish was for Martin to “begin to live life.” This catalyzed Martin’s journey of self-acceptance, culminating in meeting his partner, Sidney Shand, and formally coming out in 2019 before his 2020 Supreme Court of California appointment. 

Martin has proudly reconciled his identities, and reflects that “sometimes my experience as a Black gay man is not particularly relevant, [but] …that experience produces a kind of empathy that helps me understand and bridge my understanding of a legal issue that’s before the court and the impact of those issues on the lives of people!”

Bio Author: Charlotte Lang-Bush