Pride Month Spotlight: Louisiana Attorney Nicholas Hite Opened His Own Law Firm to Help LGBTQ+ Clients

Amid escalating legislative attacks on LGBTQ+ rights in the South and beyond, Nicholas Hite, one of Louisiana’s leading queer legal experts, is an unsung local champion for his community.

Hite has helped more than 1,000 clients — many of whom are members of the LGBTQ+ community — seek protection from abusive partners, pursue custody in contentious divorces and, particularly with trans and nonbinary people, obtain updated birth certificates with proper names and gender designations. He often also works with victims of sexual assault and intimate partner violence.

Hite, 37, is the founder and principal of the Hite Law Group, the only openly queer-run and -oriented law firm in Louisiana. Hite founded the practice in 2013 to offer affordable, sliding-scale legal services to LGBTQ-identifying people. It's an important job, as one in three U.S.-based LGBTQ adults live in the South, according to the Movement Advancement Project/Campaign for Southern Equality.) 

For Hite, who grew up in a small town an hour north of New Orleans, his personal and professional lives have plenty of crossover. He’s in a 13-year relationship with a transgender man, and growing up, he and his brother were raised by a single mom who, he says, realized Hite was gay even before he did.

“She actually asked me, because she had seen some notes that I had been passing with classmates from school,“ Hite says. “One morning over breakfast she asked me, ‘Are you gay?’ And my stomach dropped, but I knew I couldn't lie. So I told her, ‘Yes.’ She said, 'Okay, that's fine. Just make sure that you look after yourself, and make sure that you stay focused on school,’ and that was it.”

Hite’s experience of coming out as a teen helped spark his dedication to social justice and advocacy — because, needless to say, not everyone around him was as encouraging as his mom.

“[I was] dealing with classmates who were far less supportive ... so there was a pretty serious period in my life where there was a lot of conflict, there was a lot of fighting, there was a lot of choosing to stand my ground when people had something to say about me,” he reflects. “Everybody deserves to be treated with respect and kindness and fairness, which sort of underpinned this idea of going into the law.”

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After getting his B.A. at Louisiana State University and graduating from Tulane Law School in 2011, Hite worked at a few smaller firms, where he found himself disillusioned by both the work and the atmosphere.

“I just didn't enjoy it,” he says. “I didn't enjoy the people that I was working with. I didn't enjoy the way that the clients were being treated. I felt like maybe practicing the law was actually the wrong choice.” 

He quit and spent the next year working as a barista and a dog walker, “essentially getting paid for pet therapy every day,” he laughs.

Hite put that extra change toward opening his own firm, a choice he came to as a last-ditch effort to revive his passion for the legal system.

“[I thought,] let's just give it one more shot, but I'm going to do it the way I want to do it. And if it works, great, and if it doesn't, then I know for sure I've tried everything that I can try, and it's just not for me," he says.

With heaps of community support, the Hite Law Group was formed in 2013 — and it was a hit. “I [wanted] to do it for us, and basically as soon as I made myself available, the need was there, and it just sort of took off.”

Today, Hite’s business is flourishing. He's the only legal resource in Louisiana recognized by the Transgender Legal Services Network, the Transgender Law Center and the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund. He's a co-founder and managing attorney for the nonprofit Family Justice Legal Center and, last year, he was recognized as one of the 40 Best LGBTQ+ Lawyers Under 40 by the national LGBTQ+ Bar Association.

As his reputation builds, so has his comfort being authentically himself in a legal world that can often feel like a straight White men's club.

“The longer that I've done this, the more ... confident I've become in my own abilities and [in being] deserving of respect from the court and from colleagues,” he says. “I've been more willing to bring my fuller self into those spaces. Whether it means coming in with a fresh manicure, or talking more openly about my boyfriend, [I want] to make it very clear that this is who I am, and I'm fine with that, so you should be too.”

But on the flip side, Hite says, “I have had folks, and continue to have folks, who treat me differently ... or flat-out make derogatory remarks. I have absolutely had folks use slurs in relation to me. I think the bigger issue for me that continues to persist is the more subtle sort of thing; the sense that I'm more likely to get interrupted or talked over because I perhaps don't present in a more traditionally masculine way in the courtroom.”

In today’s ramped-up anti-LGBTQ climate, what keeps Hite pushing for the rights of his clients is, he says, partly the sheer force of will — he describes himself as a “stubborn son of a b----.” Plus, being in a longterm relationship with a trans man, Hite says he can’t afford to step back from the fight. 

“Advocacy for trans folks is not this sort of conceptual thing for me. It is my family. It is my home too. I have skin in the game,” he explains. “I'm not one to back down from a fight. I particularly am not going to back down when I feel like my own community, my own home, and my own family are on the line.”