Fighting back: Lambda Legal unveils campaign to protect LGBTQ+ rights from Trump-era attacks
October 30, 2025
By Christopher Wiggins
All Rise for Equality Lambda Legal campaign
Lambda Legal is taking its fight from the courtroom to the digital stage. With its new national campaign, "All Rise," the nation’s oldest LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organization is turning a familiar courtroom command into a rallying cry — and a fundraising lifeline. The campaign, built around short- and long-form videos, paid digital ads, and a coordinated influencer blitz rolling out during LGBTQ+ History Month, is designed to keep Lambda Legal’s lawyers in courtrooms across the country as the Trump administration accelerates efforts to roll back hard-won rights.
Backed by creators including Under The Desk News, Rose Montoya, Pattie Gonia, Isaias Hernandez, Blair Imani, Jesse Sullivan, and Chella Man, All Rise blends grassroots donor outreach with emotional storytelling. It marks Lambda Legal’s largest digital awareness push to date and a call for unity and urgency from a group describing itself as the LGBTQ+ community’s “last line of defense.”
For more than five decades, the legal nonprofit has fought in courtrooms for LGBTQ+ people and those living with HIV. But in the second term of the Trump administration, which has banned gender-affirming care for trans minors, restricted diversity programs, and barred transgender people from military service, the group’s work has become existential.
“This is a break-the-glass moment,” Kevin Jennings, Lambda Legal’s CEO, told The Advocate in an interview. “Everybody needs to throw everything at this right now. Their agenda is nothing less than the destruction of our democracy as we’ve known it.”
A movement facing its reckoning
Lambda Legal’s message arrives amid an unprecedented wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Nearly 2,000 bills have been introduced nationwide over the past two years, and more than 200 have been enacted into law. “We’ve lost the White House, we’ve lost Congress,” Jennings said. “The courts are our only recourse at this point.”
So far, the organization has sued the Trump administration six times and won four cases. Two remain pending. “We could end up six for six,” Jennings said.
According to Lambda Legal’s “Tracking Trump” case tracker, the group currently has six open cases against the administration targeting transgender rights, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and health care. The tracker also notes two preliminary injunctions granted in active cases regarding transgender service members and health care coverage.
The tracker reaffirms Lambda Legal’s long-term success rate: the organization reports an 86 percent win rate against the first Trump administration.
“There’s reason to be hopeful, but don’t be optimistic,” Jennings said. “Optimism assumes it’ll just get better by itself. Our only hope is if people rise together and fight back.”
This is not a rhetorical flourish. In June, Lambda Legal announced the largest fundraising campaign in LGBTQ+ history — $285 million raised through its “Unstoppable Future” initiative. The haul exceeded its goal by more than $100 million, with $80 million in cash on hand and $200 million in long-term commitments. Nearly all of it came from individual donors, not corporations. The infusion allowed the group to expand its legal staff by more than 40 percent.
Jennings described that surge of support as a message to those seeking to dismantle equality: “We will not go back.”
Turning a legal command into a moral imperative
To bring that defiance to life, Lambda Legal turned to Jason Keehn, founder of the mission-driven agency Accompany Creative. Keehn, whose firm was named Ad Age’s Purpose-Led Small Agency of the Year in 2024, said he approached “All Rise” as both a creative brief and a civic duty.
“The phrase has urgency,” Keehn told The Advocate. “It’s about standing up for all of us within the LGBTQ+ community, but also about what happens next if we don’t. Human rights are being eroded, and the message is: you’re next.”
Rather than rely on the anxious tone familiar in political advertising, Keehn said he and his team sought to inspire without numbing audiences. “We didn’t want to add to the toxic negative swirl,” he said. “You can’t be lighthearted about what’s happening, but we also don’t need more messages freaking people out. The better choice is to shine a light on what we can be.”
A portrait of the community under fire and a message of hope
Directed by queer filmmaker Lucio Castro, the campaign features trans military members, trans youth, LGBTQ+ families, and attorneys who represent them in court. “You see lawyers saying directly to the camera, ‘I’m fighting for you every day,’” Keehn said. “That makes the work tangible.”
The videos — some only six seconds long, others a full cinematic arc — are designed for the realities of the modern attention economy. “You need something thumb-stopping on Instagram and something that stays with people longer,” Keehn said. “It all has to ladder up to one big idea.”
The campaign’s insistence on hope, not as sentiment but as strategy, distinguishes it from the darker, fear-based tones that often dominate political messaging. Jennings calls this a deliberate choice. “The ultimate goal of our opponents is to make people feel hopeless,” he said. “Because if you have no hope, you won’t fight.”
Keehn agreed. “Civil rights aren’t just about voting or hiring practices,” he said. “They’re about how we choose to spend our energy and use our talents, and this is our way of doing that.”
For Lambda Legal, the campaign is not an aesthetic exercise but a call to arms.
“You have four assets: your voice, your vote, your time, and your money,” Jennings said. “Some people can write checks. Some people can march. Some people can sue — that’s what we do. Just figure out what you can do and do it.”
Jennings often returns to a simple, chilling analogy. “They picked on trans people first,” he said. “Just like the Nazis picked on Jews.”
It is a warning, not hyperbole — a reminder that authoritarianism rarely begins with mass repression. It starts with tolerated cruelty.
“Hope is not optimism,” Jennings said. “Hope is the belief that if we fight, things might get better. But we have to fight.”