President Joe Biden has nominated a gay California state superior court judge to the federal bench. It follows criticism that the Biden administration has been slow to appoint LGBTQ federal judges. Friday, July 29, Biden announced he had nominated Judge Daniel Calabretta to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. If confirmed, Calabretta would be the first openly LGBTQ judge to serve on the federal district court. Calabretta had served as a law clerk for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens from 2004 to 2005. The year prior he had clerked for U.S. Circuit Judge William Fletcher, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which includes California. In late 2018 former California governor Jerry Brown named Calabretta, his deputy legal affairs secretary, to the Superior Court of Sacramento County. Calabretta, who graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 2003, joined the state bench in early 2019. He had served as deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice from 2008 to 2013, during Brown’s time as California attorney general then for two years under Kamala Harris, now Biden’s vice president. Between 2005 and 2008 Calabretta was an associate at the California law firm Munger, Tolles and Olson LLP. Born Daniel Joe Powell, he grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Princeton University in 2000. In 2014, Calabretta married Jonathan McClean Calabretta. Daniel Calabretta was among nine judicial appointments that Biden announced Friday. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Rita F. Lin would be the second Asian American woman and first Chinese American woman seated on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, while Araceli Martinez-Olguin, a supervising attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, would be the second Latina to serve on the federal district court. The Senate Judiciary Committee will now take up the judges’ nominations. In announcing them, the Biden administration called the jurists “extraordinarily qualified, experienced, and devoted to the rule of law and our Constitution.”