We were excited to catch up with Sam Salar Rahbarpour, Esq., Class of 2020, at his belated graduation ceremony held on Friday, June 17, 2022, at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles. In celebration of PRIDE month, we invited Sam to participate in the following Q&A. We hope you enjoy it.

UWLA: Tell us a little about yourself.

Sam: Thanks so much for talking with me on a subject that is very important to me. I’ll start by saying I’m an out and proud gay male (my pronouns are he/him), and I’m an equally proud graduate of UWLA School of Law. I passed the California Bar in May, so I earned every bit of that Esquire suffix at the end of my name. I’m a working attorney with my law practice and I’m of counsel to Beverly Hills-based Tofer & Associates. I guess pride is a bit of a life theme here because I am an Iranian Jew born to immigrant refugee parents, of whom I couldn’t be any more proud or grateful.

UWLA: What does PRIDE mean to you?

Sam:  Pride to me means being able to close my eyes and no longer feel scared or worried. When I am asked, “what does pride mean to me?” I naturally want to say that it means to be able to live an authentic life and not to live a lie anymore, to stop pretending to be someone I am not.

As a young boy, I taught myself to be someone I wasn’t; I trained my mind and body to act and react to life the way everyone else did. By the time I was 19, I better understood what I had done to myself. I had become disingenuous, and I was angry and irrational. My life had become difficult to manage, and I struggled with handling my identity. Instead of caving in, I refused to conform to societal norms, and I started to identify as a gay man. When I did, I felt this rush of being revitalized. It was then that I became familiar with the feeling of what it meant to have pride. For a person like me, being free from oppression is how I would genuinely define what pride means.

UWLA: How was UWLA supportive of you as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community?

Sam: By the time I entered UWLA Law School, I was more confident in myself. Yet, at times, there were challenges I had facing others who had an issue with me being a man who was openly, proudly identified as gay.

When it comes to being singled out, I believe most people would feel as uncomfortable as I did. I can only name a few times, very few encounters at UWLA when a person made me feel uncomfortable identifying as queer, and it did not affect me as much as one might imagine. I am proud to say that in those instances, I remember students and faculty who immediately responded on my behalf and stood up for me. To me, it was in those times that I felt most at home; it was then that I knew I was accepted.

The support I received at UWLA was more than I could have ever asked for. I think gay men generally tend to develop tougher skin to protect themselves. I was ready to face my challenges by myself because that’s all I knew. Yet during those few encounters when my peers and professors stood up for me, I felt supported. I could not be more grateful for them. Since these types of situations could occur anywhere in the world, it’s best to be able to defend yourself and surround yourself with allies whenever possible. I am truly blessed to have been a student at UWLA and have had such great classmates and faculty – true allies – who supported me and my identity as a gay man.

UWLA: What are your plans after graduation?

Sam: I am a firm believer in paying it forward. One thing I experienced with other students and the alumni of UWLA is the concept of paying it forward, by which I mean I like to respond in kind to every ounce of good that others have done for you … to pay that forward to the next person in need. With that always in mind, I have combined my passion for law with my desire for the growth and stability of the LGBTQIA+ community to form a network called Legally Queer – my way of paying it forward.

Seeking and securing sound legal advice and representation is a real challenge for many people from all backgrounds and minorities. Because of my diverse heritage, I understood the struggle at a young age, especially when a family member struggled with getting adequate legal representation because we did not have the financial capacity to pay for or the status to obtain it.

These struggles I mention are readily apparent within the LGBTQIA+ community, which is why I have dedicated my career to paying it forward to my peers. My goal is for those who need it to have access to sound legal advice with capable legal representation. I’ve established Legally Queer so that the people who identify as queer have the legal resources they can rely upon through a new legal network, one comprised of affiliated attorneys proud to be their allies and supporters. I hope that with Legally Queer, anyone who identifies as LGBTQIA+ can overcome their struggles and the misconception that they need massive financial means or traditional, cisgender status to have justice on their side.

UWLA:  Thanks for your time and openness, Sam. We wish you the best of luck and great success on your journey. We’ll continue to be here to support you!