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This chapter argues that the attainment of marriage equality will not push it in a starkly different trajectory. It discusses several different factors that limit the movement’s ability to change directions in significant ways, including its diversity and fragmentation; its organizational emphasis on professional advocacy over grassroots participation; and its identity-based civil rights orientation. Within those restraints, the chapter predicts that the movement, post-marriage equality, will seek to increase LGBT representation among elected and other government officials and placing greater emphasis on LGBT rights issues in other countries. It also argues that the movement would benefit from moving beyond issues of civil rights, and the policing of nondiscrimination obligations, in order to focus more explicitly on efforts to engage and educate institutions of civil society, such as corporations and schools, on the need to adopt policies that make LGBT individuals feel safe, secure, and respected as equals.

Kathleen E. Hull and Timothy Ortyl consider whether LGBTQ people support the movement’s focus on the right to marry. Through in-depth interviews with community members, Hull and Ortyl show that there is substantial support among LGBTQ constituents for the movement’s broad goals, including the focus on marriage and family concerns.

Amy Stone finds that the Christian Right has developed anti-same-sex marriage discourse that appeals not just to conservative voters, but to liberal and undecided voters as well. She argues that, while same-sex marriage may seem to some like assimilation, the strong opposition it has generated suggests that it continues to challenge dominant cultural norms.

This chapter analyzes the tactics used by the Religious Right against the LGBT movement from 1974 to 2009. The Religious Right mobilized interested local activists, affected public opinion, and grew as a movement by fighting LGBT rights at the ballot box through direct democracy, the proposal and passage of laws through voters rather than legislators. Their tactics included everything from the most virulently moralist homophobic attacks to legalistic arguments about changing civil rights laws. The chapter studies the Religious Right’s “experiments” on referendums, such as the Colorado Amendment 2, and their formation of “stealth” initiatives that did not even mention sexual orientation and included same-sex marriage bans.

Introduces the volume by setting the chapters squarely in the context of the debate within the movement over the desirability of marriage. Mary Bernstein and Verta Taylor survey the history of same-sex marriage, outline the different positions from which gay and lesbian activists have critiqued marriage, and address the projected consequences of marriage for the gay and lesbian community and movement.

This chapter traces how the groundwork of the LGBT movement was laid out during the 1970s and 1980s. It shows that the movement’s initial response to Religious Right-sponsored ballot measures against homosexuality was weak due to the absence of a real social movement infrastructure, especially strong national and statewide organizations, to support local campaigns. The chapter also examines the increasing relationship between social movements and campaigns during the period, which was a time of tactical innovation and experimentation, wherein activists tried direct-action protests, new forms of political messaging about privacy, LGBT-sponsored initiatives, and professional polling. The period also saw LGBT activists develop new tactics such as political messaging about LGBT rights, and counterpetitioning, which confronted and educated both voters and petition collectors.

This chapter studies the “winning streak” of the LGBT movement against the Religious Right during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Between 1997 and 2003, more campaigns than ever before used tactics such as voter identification, large-scale use of volunteers, and narrow messaging. Campaign victories had a “domino effect” on other areas, such as increased lesbian and gay visibility in mainstream media, the passage of numerous state hate-crimes legislation, and passage of nondiscrimination legislation. The chapter analyzes events that happened in Michigan during this period as a case study to demonstrate the use of campaign tactics in “battleground” states.

This chapter analyzes the growth of sophisticated model campaign tactics used by the LGBT movement during the 1990s. The period saw LGBT activists focusing their attention on four key elements: improved voter contact, development of effective messaging, successful fund-raising, and an increase in professional campaign staff. These four were essential tools in their model campaign, and would dominate LGBT campaigns for the next two decades. The model campaigns are credited with several statewide victories between 1992 and 1996, including in key states such as Maine, Idaho, and Oregon. Aside from the use of model campaigns, LGBT activists also utilized new tactics to attack the weaknesses of legal-restrictive initiatives, such as their questionable constitutionality and evident unfairness. The chapter examines how these tactics challenged three known legal-restrictive initiatives: Colorado Amendment 2, Cincinnati Issue 3, and Alachua Charter Amendment 1.

This chapter argues that the attainment of the marriage equality goal offers the LGBT movement the opportunity to push for reforms that reduce the legal salience of distinct gender and sexual identities. A growing number of Americans, especially young ones, are becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea of fluid and changing notions of gender and sexuality. The chapter contends that the movement should prioritize encouraging the state to adopt laws and policies that recognize and protect gender and sexual fluidity and multiplicities. This objective can be pursued through political and legal campaigns that, for example, seek (1) to promote an understanding of sex and sexual orientation antidiscrimination law that is unmoored from the protection of distinct identities and (2) to remove one of the last gender-based barriers to accessing public spaces by ending gender segregation in bathrooms and similar facilities. The chapter explains that these types of objectives represent reforms that are not grounded in the need to protect individuals based on distinct—and ostensibly fixed and static—gender and sexual identities. Instead, the attainment of these goals would promote the equality rights of all individuals regardless of how (or even whether) they identify, or of how society identifies them, along gender and sexuality continuums.

This chapter examines changes in the tactics used by the LGBT movement in response to the passage of numerous statewide anti-gay ballot measures, such as Proposition 8 in California. The movement’s losses started during the November 2004 General Election, where it won only eight of the thirty-eight referendums and initiatives on the ballot. This losing streak continued for five years, reaching its peak with the passage of Proposition 8 in 2008 which prohibited same-sex marriage. This string of defeats led LGBT campaigners to rethink the model campaign, turning their focus to movement building and efficacy and also changing their approach to messaging.

The twelfth chapter discusses the transformations of the nuclear family ideal, of its gendered and heteronormative patterns in the wake of the women’s movement and the LGBT movement. At its center stand a lesbian couple and their daughters in San Francisco, supported by the gay fathers who also take responsibility in the family. The author interviewed both couples. The chapter presents their life and the politics of queer families, gay marriage, and the so-called gayby boom in relation to the powerful recent discourse on the “crisis” of the family and to the fatherhood movement, its different and often revisionist subgroups and their politics. At the same time, the chapter presents a queer family as the embodiment of a slow but persistent transformation of the hegemonic nuclear family model that has come about since the 1970s. They represent a historic change toward a greater recognition of patchwork families in general and of many different kinds of living arrangements, particularly in metropolitan centers. Yet the chapter also shows how the current politics of gay marriage and queer families oscillates between a total disintegration of the nuclear family on the one side and the reassertion of its values of love and mutual responsibility on the other side.

This chapter examines the conflicts among social justice movements with common concerns, including the intersex movement. Women, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, and people with an intersex condition differ in their experiences, including the harms they endure from society. Homophobia, transphobia, and sexism, however, are interconected as part of an overall cultural system of patriarchy, heterosexism, and rigid binary sex and gender norms. This chapter considers whether the intersex movement could advance its goals by developing legal arguments in conjunction with other social justice movements. It begins with an overview of the history of the development of social justice movements that focus on discrimination based on sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. It then discusses the intersex movement's actions related to forming alliances with feminist and LGBT movements, and highlights the problems that have arisen among the intersex, gay/lesbian/bisexual, transsexual, and feminist movements.

This chapter examines the conflicts among social justice movements with common concerns, including the intersex movement. Women, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, and people with an intersex condition differ in their experiences, including the harms they endure from society. Homophobia, transphobia, and sexism, however, are interconected as part of an overall cultural system of patriarchy, heterosexism, and rigid binary sex and gender norms. This chapter considers whether the intersex movement could advance its goals by developing legal arguments in conjunction with other social justice movements. It begins with an overview of the history of the development of social justice movements that focus on discrimination based on sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. It then discusses the intersex movement's actions related to forming alliances with feminist and LGBT movements, and highlights the problems that have arisen among the intersex, gay/lesbian/bisexual, transsexual, and feminist movements.

Mary Bernstein and Mary C. Burke analyze cultural representations of and discourse about gay marriage in mainstream and LGBT newspapers in Vermont. They find that normalizing arguments predominated in mainstream newspapers, yet marriage equality activism was ultimately responsible for making the public aware of the criticisms that have been leveled against marriage by LGBT activists.

Kristine A. Olsen examines why Connecticut’s highly successful marriage equality organization, Love Makes a Family (LMF), decided to close its doors after the 2008 Kerrigan v. Commission of Public Health ruling made Connecticut the second state to legalize same-sex marriage. She argues that the exclusive collective identity of LMF equated same-sex marriage with complete equality for gay men and lesbians, reflecting the worst fears of queer critics who argue that the achievement of same-sex marriage will signal an end of the LGBT movement.

This book concludes with a discussion of how intersex activists may benefit from forming mutually beneficial alliances with other social justice movements having similar goals and concerns, such as feminist and LGBT movements. In particular, it considers the potential for such alliances to help the intersex movement advance its agenda through the assertion of legal claims. Because current medical practices are driven by a combination of normative assumptions about sex, gender, sexual orientation, and disability, the intersex movement could adopt a number of legal strategies to ensure that decisions about the appropriate treatment for infants with an intersex condition are made under optimal circumstances.

This book concludes with a discussion of how intersex activists may benefit from forming mutually beneficial alliances with other social justice movements having similar goals and concerns, such as feminist and LGBT movements. In particular, it considers the potential for such alliances to help the intersex movement advance its agenda through the assertion of legal claims. Because current medical practices are driven by a combination of normative assumptions about sex, gender, sexual orientation, and disability, the intersex movement could adopt a number of legal strategies to ensure that decisions about the appropriate treatment for infants with an intersex condition are made under optimal circumstances.