The Life and Impact of Trey Yates

“I had a happy childhood, for the most part,” says Houston attorney Trey Yates. “It just came with difficulty and struggles that were unnecessary. And I wanted to be accepted, as we all do at that age. I think my parents knew I was gay long before I knew it.”

The youngest of three children, Yates was born on March 6, 1956, in New Orleans where his father was in medical school and his mother was a nurse. After his father graduated, the family moved to Atlanta where he took up his medical residency. Eventually, the family moved to La Marque, Texas, near where his father worked at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. His father later gave up his medical practice and became an attorney, practicing in Austin and then Houston.

Yates describes his mother as “very driven,” and the person he credits for his own sense of drive and determination. She loved being a nurse and worked her way up to head Austin’s Brackenridge Hospital School of Nursing. As an OB-GYN nurse, she loved delivering babies, though she also believed in a woman’s right to choose whether or not to continue an unwanted pregnancy. Collaborating with attorney Sarah Weddington and another attorney brought in by Weddington, Yates’ mother helped write the medical aspects of Roe v. Wade, the 1972 Supreme Court case that made legal abortion available to all women in the United States (until the Court reversed its decision in 2022). “We got death threats,” Yates says. “It was interesting.”

An Eagle Scout at 13

Yates attended elementary school in La Marque and spent his junior high and senior high years in Austin. He loved scouting, joining the Cub Scouts and finally the Boy Scouts. By the age of 13, he had achieved the rank of Eagle Scout and remembers going to Austin and meeting the governor.

“I liked camping, and I liked rope tying,” Yates says. “And there was a lot of male testosterone.” One weekend when Yates was at a campout, a friend suggested they walk into town and buy some wine. “That sounded exotic and dangerous,” he says. “We waited outside of a 7-Eleven store and got a hippie to buy each of us a bottle of Boones Farm apple wine. I had never tasted alcohol, and didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to drink the whole bottle. After that I didn’t remember anything, but was told I threw up in the campfire. My parents were summoned, and I was asked not to return to the troop.”

High School Musical

In high school, Yates was drawn to classes in English and literature. He became active in the Drama Club, pursuing a goal to become an actor. Though his father’s life passion was sports, Yates says his father “was very accepting” of the fact that his son’s gifts and inclination were not in that direction.

“I grew up in the South, and we had a domestic that lived with us and cooked,” Yates recalls. “She could only cook vegetables if they were fried. She could bake peach cobblers, but they were dripping in lard.” It was no mystery, he says, why he carried so much extra weight or that school bullies taunted him as “a fat faggot.” 

Involved in the school’s student government and a member of the debate team, “I was as popular as I could be, not playing football,” he remembers. But the ever-present bullying still made life challenging. “You just somehow get through it,” he says, “but it wasn’t pleasant at the time. I think my experience was quite typical of gays and lesbians at that age.”

Yates often played the lead roles in the school’s student productions and showed he could handle any role. He appeared in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and sang and tap danced in a musical version of Winnie the Pooh.

For a regional acting contest, he was cast as George in vignettes from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “I remember that they smoked a lot of cigarettes in the play, and our drama teacher allowed us to smoke in the scenes.” Yates especially enjoyed playing the part of the emcee in a production of Cabaret. “I wore fingernail polish, lipstick, and fake eyelashes. It was all pretty exotic.”

Yates dated female classmates and had girlfriends. His desirability was no doubt enhanced by his father’s gift of an Oldsmobile Delta 88, one of the most coveted sports cars of its day.

“This was before iPhones and the internet, and I was left to explore on my own and try to figure it all out,” he says about discovering his true sexuality. “I had a crush on my drama teacher. One night I snuck into a gay bar with friends. And there my drama teacher was, with his boyfriend.”

Yates was aware of the Stonewall Inn riots because of published reports in major magazines, but his awareness of a growing national gay community came from two magazines that he read at a local newsstand. One was After Dark, a slick, glossy magazine that often featured black-and-white portraits of male ballet stars in their tights, as well as reports on the scene at the legendary New York City disco Studio 54.

The other was Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. “It was oversized and had that sort of newspaper feel to it. But I couldn’t buy them and bring them home. That would have been way too bold a move for me at that point. I did think the most exotic place to be at that time was either New York or San Francisco.” 

Yates has always loved music of all kinds. One day, a friend of his bought a copy of the Jesus Christ, Superstar album. “We went to his home and played it on a little turntable,” he says, “and I thought it was just amazing! Every year the best of Broadway was published in book form, complete with pictures. I remember spending hours at the school library reading that, and wanting to be that.”

Finding His Own Tribe

“I didn’t really have any mentors,” Yates confides. “The only obvious gay men were usually flamboyant and over the top. I see some pictures of me in those days, and I think ‘Who is this person?’ At one point I had a Peter Frampton-style Afro. The country was firmly into the disco age, and I wore platform shoes and high-waisted bell-bottom pants. Things were androgynous. It was the age of David Bowie and Mick Jagger.” Yates says he came to feel safe in gay discos because there were so many other people that looked like him. “I could openly express myself without condemnation,” he recalls.

The family of his childhood attended a conservative Christian church. “I sang in the choir and did little musicals for the church,” he says, “but being gay was also the worst thing that you could be from a Christian standpoint. So I was in great conflict, because I really enjoyed the church environment, and I had made friends there. But from the pulpit, being gay was an abomination. I was very spiritual, but I rejected all of that formal dogma.”

College and Beyond

After high school, Yates attended the University of Texas. By this time, he was out of the closet and frequenting Austin’s gay bars. “I spent more time having a good time than studying,” he confides. After a year, his parents, now living in Houston, summoned him home.

He took a job working in retail sales in a department store in Houston’s Town and Country Mall. First, he worked in the fine china and glassware department, then moved to women’s sportswear. Some of the older gay men who worked in the store soon enlisted him to work in display, dressing mannequins and creating vignettes.

After a year and a half at the department store, Yates enrolled at the University of Houston and subsequently began working as a waiter. “You could go to school, have fun, make some money, and go to bars,” he says about this change of pace. “You could get away with two hours of sleep. But I wanted to be an actor, so I told my parents I wanted to go to Dallas. They were bewildered, but supportive.”

Once in Dallas, Yates found a job as box office manager for Theater Three, where he was also able to appear in small roles. He lived in the Oak Lawn area, which had Dallas’ highest concentration of gays at that time.

Do You Know the Way to San Jose?

Yates finally auditioned for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles and was accepted. He jumped into his little Chevette and drove to California to fulfill his longtime dream. “I was poor as a church mouse, but thought that if I’m going to be poor, then I’ll be poor in a warm climate.”

His once-again baffled parents paid for the tuition. “Those were some of the happiest days of my life because I was with other oddballs—people that were creative, had energy, and explored.”

In Los Angeles, Yates studied kabuki theater, traditional stage, fencing, and even ballet. Many of the classes were taught by people in the film industry. But after a year and a half, he noticed that “every waiter in Los Angeles looked like they were 50 and still waiting for their agent to call with that big role. Acting is extremely competitive, and it’s a profession in which you must get used to rejection. I realized I just wasn’t good enough, and that was a sobering thought. I called my father and asked if I could return home to try to figure out my life.”

A Calling in Law

Yates’ father had changed his own career from medicine to law, so he suggested that his son might also be interested in a legal career. Now in his mid-20s, Yates returned to school and earned an undergraduate degree in political science, then enrolled in St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio.

The choice proved to be a good one, and Yates says it gave him an opportunity to really shine as the new person he was becoming. He joined the debate team, was elected to the student council, and made many good friends. It was through one of these friends that Yates became a willing escort to Dallas debutantes seeking a date for the many parties and other events that their positions demanded. “I had a tuxedo, two formal shirts, and a blue blazer,” he recalls, and that got him into some wonderful parties where he didn’t have to pay for a thing.

Law school was a kind of finishing school for Yates. “I was already pretty articulate and well read, but I hadn’t known how to do deductive thinking or how to argue,” he explains. He sat for the Texas State Bar exam and passed it. Soon he was offered a job at a major law firm in Dallas.

Assigned to negotiate personal injury settlements, Yates remembers it was an amazing time for him. “Money was falling from the sky, and suddenly I was making more money than my father was in Houston,” he says. After only three years of the good life, however, the partners of the firm began in-fighting and he decided the time had come to exit. He took up his father’s offer to introduce him to the Houston legal community.

Building a Life in Houston

In 1987, Yates opened a small practice in Houston and began learning about the business end of running a law firm, as well as the art of arguing cases in court—something the lucrative field of personal injury settlements had never demanded.

He soon joined the Houston Volunteer Lawyers, where he worked with pro-bono family-law cases such as divorce and probate. “I liked knowing that I was making a difference in people’s lives,” he confides. He also began taking on various leadership roles in the Houston Family Bar and sat on the board of the Houston Volunteer Lawyers as he was building his practice.

By now, AIDS was rampant within Houston’s LGBTQ community. “Those were dark times,” Yates says. In response, he helped form the first AIDS Outreach Committee of the Houston Bar Association. Volunteer lawyers came to the Houston GLBT Community Center and helped draft wills for people who were dying from the disease. “We helped restore a sense of dignity for them,” he confides in a somber tone.

As Yates’ circle of friends broadened, he helped create The Assistance Fund, whose mission was to raise funds to help people pay for their COBRA insurance premiums after they had been laid off from their jobs. He formed a friendship with society caterer Jackson Hicks, whom he describes as “such a tireless advocate for those with HIV and AIDS.” Yates also remembers other friends who volunteered at the Omega House hospice, sitting with people as they made their transitions. Corporate sponsors were sought, and Continental Airlines was one of the first to sponsor major galas.

As head of The Assistance Fund board, Yates helped hire Ken Malone as the first executive director. Yates also began helping the AIDS Foundation Houston and the Houston Names Project, which was part of the national AIDS Memorial Quilt. “We used to meet each other at the discos, but now we were meeting each other at funerals,” Yates recalls.

“My involvement with Trey began in 1988 during the formative years of The Assistance Fund,” Malone remembers. “Trey was a true visionary, taking what was a struggling group of volunteers and then molding them into a board and ultimately setting up the organization with a professional staff to guide its growth. Trey used his contacts to produce Le Cirque Fantastique, a very successful fundraiser which featured The Pickle Family Circus. We launched The Assistance Fund into the world of grants and grant writing. He truly made a difference in the way we did business and charted our growth, so that we would be able to serve many more clients while reducing our reliance on fundraising.”

Finding and Losing Love

Yates lost his partner, Victor Borgeson, in the early 1990s. “He was such a sweet guy, and very interested in the theater,” Yates remembers. What struck him most was the drastic change in Borgeson’s appearance. “He was a tall, cute, muscular guy. And in a very short period, he basically wasted away. He always had such a great spirit. We had two dogs, and even at his worst he insisted on walking them. He went in for a procedure for his heart and had a stroke on the operating table. It was the first time I’d really committed to someone, and then he was gone. It was tough. It certainly brought all the activism directly home.”

Yates found love again with Donald Browning while serving on the board of The Assistance Fund. Browning was taken away by cancer after 13 years of companionship. “He was a beautiful man—kind, generous, and quite mischievous. I still miss him.”

Sara Selber was the executive director of AIDS Foundation Houston (now Allies in Hope) from 1994 to 1999. She looks back on those years: “It is hard to describe Trey Yates’ work and dedication to AIDS Foundation Houston without also thinking of Don Browning. It was as if we always had two individuals for the price of one. They worked tirelessly to bring programs that ensured clients were able to die with dignity. And then as medical advancements occurred, they helped create incredible opportunities that helped clients live with hope and optimism.”

A Tireless Activist

Yates also worked with his attorney colleagues Mitchell Katine and Connie Moore. “We fought for dignity for our relationships and the right to adopt. I didn’t win a lot of cases because the cards were stacked against us, but by bringing those cases before the judges, we created awareness. With each experience, I became a bit more politically savvy. I still had an idealism of justice and equality. I felt it was important to live my life with integrity.”

Attorney Veronica Jacobs met Yates in 1995 through Houston Volunteer Lawyers. “At that time, there were attorneys who didn’t even want persons living with HIV or AIDS in their offices,” says Jacobs, “but I always knew that Trey would respond without reservation. He helped make clients feel that they were worthy of having an attorney. We were working in a climate that was very hostile. Some of the hardest cases were divorce proceedings that included custody of children. There were people who thought if someone was HIV-positive or had AIDS, they should not be allowed to take care of children or even visit them. There was one woman whose family made her drink out of only one glass, and she had a designated plate, glass, and silverware. 

“At Christmas time, we would help some of our clients who had few resources to have money for Christmas. We expanded it to include single men and women whose families had abandoned them due to the disease. Trey said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna help these people.’ He was just magnificent, even though he didn’t know whether or not he was putting his career on the line.”

Funded by the Houston Bar Association, the Houston Volunteer Lawyers “also learned how to write grants for federal, state, and Ryan White Care Act funding,” says Jacobs.

Attorney Michelle Goldberg met Yates on the Houston Bar Association’s AIDS Outreach Committee in 1995. She remembers “will-athons” that Yates organized. He pulled together volunteer attorneys, notaries, witnesses, and paralegals to give pro bono legal assistance to people with AIDS who were sick and had little or no money.

“He was so dynamic! I showed up one day to volunteer and was blown away,” says Goldberg. “In room after room, people were being helped in drafting up wills and powers of attorney. Paralegals were typing up the documents, really cranking them out. People were also being given advice about life insurance policies that were either being left to a partner or being sold.”

Goldberg has also worked with Yates over the years to provide legal help for clients who had dependents with special needs. “He is a leader in this field, and he’s got a whole niche on this. He’s like a unicorn with family-law cases because he is so good,” she says.

If Yates was working on a divorce case where there was a special-needs dependent involved, Goldberg says, “He knew how to ask the right questions and get a whole team involved.” She says that Yates helps make clients make plans for the entire course of life of a special-needs dependent. “Opposing counsel didn’t always want to do this, but Trey would not back down. He gave people answers and hope,” she adds.

Shelley Kennedy served with Yates on the board of the annual Black Tie Dinner fundraiser, and together they helped create a Houston chapter of the Human Rights Campaign. Kennedy notes that Yates is “a quintessential gentleman, wonderful friend, community activist, and advocate. We’ve known each other for decades and were in the trenches together during the AIDS crisis. Time spent in Provincetown with Trey and Don is among my fondest memories, and our friendship is one of my greatest treasures.

“His knowledge of the law, coupled with his willingness to help so many people and organizations, is priceless. When someone in our community is faced with divorce, child custody fights, lawsuits, or other legal challenges—which is often an especially challenging situation in the LGBTQIA+ community—Trey’s kindness and sense of humor bring immediate comfort to the situation. No one ever wants to be arguing against him in court, across a board room, or over cocktails.”

Despite his enormous contributions, Yates was troubled for years with imposter syndrome. “I didn’t think I was good enough to be in these leadership positions. It was all in my mind, but I think it came from those younger years when I was called ‘a fat faggot.’”

Learning with Every Case

Yates has constantly looked for new ways to serve his clients, his community, and the city. Living in an international metropolis, Yates has never been afraid to represent clients from diverse ethnic or religious backgrounds.

As he looks back on the past 40 years, Yates admits that working as a divorce attorney has taken a toll. “It’s a very toxic, stressful environment for the lawyer, as well as the families.” But it has also given him a much-deserved sense of purpose and fulfillment. “I have enjoyed having to think on my feet, processing a thousand things at a time in my head.” 

Yates has also served on the boards of the Houston Grand Opera, Unity Church, and Bering Omega Foundation. He is an ombudsman for people needing long-term care. “Some Medicaid facilities are horrible. People have no idea.”

As a board member of the Hermann Park Conservancy, Yates was involved in the successful efforts to restore the park to its original plan. “It was designed by the same man who designed New York’s Central Park. Then World War I happened, and the original design had never been completed.” Presently living near Memorial Park, Yates confides that he also loves to walk in the newly expanded areas there.

Reflecting on a Blessed Life

Yates is bewildered by the political scene today, which doesn’t make sense to him. “I have this fight within myself: do I continue to lean in? It’s so distasteful, and turning it off and not listening to it is also a temptation. Is decency still a virtue? It seems that telling the truth doesn’t mean much anymore. Things have become so crude and angry. But I live in a bastion of liberal friends.”

Yates does feel that it is important for voters to become more educated about the people they elect who can have a direct effect on them, sometimes with the simple stroke of a pen. “I have a lot of gay clients, and they are worried about the results of the recent election.”

Yates also sees the rights of transgender children being eroded, and feels that the Supreme Court may try to undo marriage equality. “It would send things into chaos and basically return marriage-equality issues to the states. One day a kid would have two dads, and the next day he would have none.”

Life with his two rescue dogs, Moxie and Bruno, help Yates deal with it all. “I can’t wait to get home to them at night. There is nothing like walking through the door and feeling that unconditional love. If people listened to how I talk to them, they would think I was insane. But they are my kids.”

Yates feels that he has lived a blessed life. “I live a life of abundance—not just money, but my relationships, loving a job that I get to do, the spiritual journey I am on, a sense of curiosity, and the supportive community I live in.” Now, he says, he is focused on the future, looking for other opportunities to help his community and the city. 

For more information, visit treyyateslaw.com or follow Guide to Good Divorce on Facebook at facebook.com/GuideToGoodDivorce.