Love, Medicine, and Advocacy: Dr. Sean Kenmore and Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan Receive Inspirational Relationship Award

By Cesar A Reyes

Dr. Sean Kenmore and Dr. Eric Rafla-Yuan have built lives and careers rooted in healing, advocacy, and a shared commitment to making healthcare and mental health systems more just for LGBTQ+ people. This year, they are being honored with the Inspirational Relationship award at the Spirit of Stonewall Awards, recognizing not only their individual contributions to medicine and policy, but the way their partnership reflects care, courage, and visibility in action. Together, they represent what it looks like when professional purpose and personal truth are fully allowed to exist side by side.

For Sean Kenmore, the journey to this moment carries a deeply personal weight. Now chief of hospital medicine at the VA San Diego Medical Center and an assistant clinical professor at UC San Diego, he has spent years building programs that support LGBTQ+ learners and patients, including co-directing an elective focused on LGBTQ+ health and co-founding RainbowMed+ for trainees across institutions. But behind that professional path is a story of delayed self-acceptance and quiet isolation. “I came out later in life, to myself, to my friends, to my family. No one knew about this essential aspect of my being,” he shared. “I had fully resigned myself to remaining in the closet forever and being alone for the rest of my life.” Finding love and partnership changed the trajectory of that story. Receiving this honor, he said, brings a sense of gratitude he once never thought possible. “I am in this relationship with the man I love, and I am celebrating it instead of hiding away.”

Eric Rafla-Yuan’s path to San Diego and into this work has been shaped by both clinical practice and national policy. A psychiatrist, he has focused his career on the systems that shape mental health outcomes, from hospital settings to federal legislation. His work in Congress included authoring the 988 Implementation Act, helping shape how the country responds to mental health crises. He has also worked on housing and homelessness policy, and currently serves as President-Elect of AGLP, the oldest LGBTQ+ professional psychiatric organization in the United States. For Eric, visibility is not abstract, it is urgent. “When you cannot count a community, you can deny it exists, and when you deny it exists, you can justify withholding the resources, protections, and policies it needs,” he said. “Visibility is the antidote to erasure.”

Both Sean and Eric see San Diego Pride as more than a celebration. It is a space that fills real gaps in connection and care across a large and unevenly resourced region. Eric described Pride as a community connector, something that creates access to mentorship, support, and belonging where it might not otherwise exist. For Sean, it is also deeply personal. He reflects on earlier years attending Pride quietly, without fully feeling seen, compared to today, where that experience has transformed. “Not only can we walk to Pride from our home, but we can walk in Pride,” he said. “That is a joy I never imagined for myself when I was younger.”

At the heart of their recognition is not only their partnership, but a shared belief in collective responsibility. Their chosen WORD reflects that ethos clearly: “We all have a part to play.” As they put it, whether through medicine, policy, or everyday acts of care, every contribution matters in shaping a more just and affirming world.