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This book is about placing sexual orientation politics within feminist theorizing. It is also about defining the central political issues confronting lesbian and gay men. It brings the study of lesbians from the margins of feminist theory to the centre by critiquing the analytic frameworks employed within feminist theory that render invisible the difference of lesbians from heterosexual women. The basic features of lesbian and gay subordination are also addressed by exploring the differences between heterosexual dominance and gender and race relations. Throughout the book, the aim is to re‐centre lesbian and gay politics away from concern with sexual regulations and towards concern with the displacement of gays and lesbians from the public sphere of visible citizenship and from the private sphere of romance, marriage, and family.

This book examines interracial intimacy in the beginning of the twenty-first century, an era rife with racial contradictions in which interracial relationships are increasingly seen as forward-thinking symbols of racial progress, even as old stereotypes about illicit eroticism endure. With extensive qualitative research, this book examines the racial dynamics of everyday life for lesbian, gay, and heterosexual Black/White couples. It disputes the notion that interracial partners are enlightened subjects who have somehow managed to “get beyond” race. Instead, for many partners interracial intimacy represents not the end, but rather the beginning of a sustained process of negotiating racial differences. This research reveals the ordinary challenges that partners frequently face and the myriad ways in which race shapes partners’ interactions with each other, as well as with family members, neighbors, coworkers, and strangers.This book analyzes contemporary interracial lives through the lens of “racework”: the everyday actions and strategies by which individuals maintain close relationships in a society with deeply rooted racial inequalities. It explores how racework operates in three realms: public spaces, the internal dynamics of relationships, and in the construction of interracial identities. Comparing the experiences of gay and lesbian partners with heterosexual partners, it argues that sexuality and gender play a significant role in how partners use racework in negotiating public spaces and identities, but a minor role in how partners deal with inequalities inside their relationship. With a focus on racework, this book positions interracial intimacy as an ongoing process, rather than as a singular accomplishment.

This book is a comprehensive social history of twentieth-century family law in the United States. The book shows how vast, oceanic changes in society have reshaped and reconstituted the American family. Women and children have gained rights and powers, and novel forms of family life have emerged. The family has more or less dissolved into a collection of independent individuals with their own wants, desires, and goals. Modern family law, as always, reflects the brute social and cultural facts of family life. The story of family law in the twentieth century is complex. This was the century that said goodbye to common-law marriage and breach-of-promise lawsuits. This was the century, too, of the sexual revolution and women's liberation, of gay rights and cohabitation. Marriage lost its powerful monopoly over legitimate sexual behavior. Couples who lived together without marriage now had certain rights. Gay marriage became legal in a handful of jurisdictions. By the end of the century, no state still prohibited same-sex behavior. Children in many states could legally have two mothers or two fathers. No-fault divorce became cheap and easy. And illegitimacy lost most of its social and legal stigma. These changes were not smooth or linear—all met with resistance and provoked a certain amount of backlash. Families took many forms, some of them new and different, and though buffeted by the winds of change, the family persisted as a central institution in society. This book tells the story of that institution, exploring the ways in which law tried to penetrate and control this most mysterious realm of personal life.

The book sees the governance of personal relationships as the exercise of power, from the traditional assumptions of patriarchy and the control one generation seeks to exercise over its successor, to the ideology of welfarism, where state institutions protect the interests of the vulnerable in accordance with its own perceptions of their interests. It argues that perceptions of rights are a significant counterpoise to such exercises of power. Against that background, it explores the interrelationship between the regulation by law of people's personal lives and the values of friendship, truth, respect, responsibility and community. A variety of controversial issues are examined in the light of those values including the legal regulation of gay and unmarried heterosexual relationships, freedom of procreation, state supervision over the exercise of parenthood, the role of fault in divorce law, the way parenthood is allocated, the rights and responsibilities of parents to control their children, the place of religion in the family, the rights of separated partners regarding property and financial support, and of separated parents regarding their children. The book offers a new picture of intimacy at the centre of personal relationships and sets out the elements for a conceptual framework according to which regulation of people's personal lives can be justified in an open society.

Gay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are “gayborhoods” destined to disappear? This book provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why they are changing today, and their prospects for the future. Drawing on a wealth of evidenc—including census data, opinion polls, hundreds of newspaper reports from across the United States, and more than 100 original interviews with residents in Chicago, one of the most paradigmatic cities in America—the book argues that political gains and societal acceptance are allowing gays and lesbians to imagine expansive possibilities for a life beyond the gayborhood. The dawn of a new post-gay era is altering the character and composition of existing enclaves across the country, but the spirit of integration can coexist alongside the celebration of differences in subtle and sometimes surprising ways. Exploring the intimate relationship between sexuality and the city, the book reveals how gayborhoods, like the cities that surround them, are organic and continually evolving places. Gayborhoods have nurtured sexual minorities throughout the twentieth century and, despite the unstoppable forces of flux, will remain resonant and revelatory features of urban life.

The institution of marriage stands at a critical juncture. As gay marriage equality gains acceptance in law and public opinion, questions abound regarding marriage's future. Will same-sex marriage lead to more radical marriage reform? Should it? Antonin Scalia and many others on the right warn of a slippery slope from same-sex marriage toward polygamy, adult incest, and the dissolution of marriage as we know it. Equally, many academics, activists, and intellectuals on the left contend that there is no place for monogamous marriage as a special status defined by law. This book demonstrates that both sides are wrong: the same principles of democratic justice that demand marriage equality for same-sex couples also lend support to monogamous marriage. The book displays the groundlessness of arguments against same-sex marriage and defends marriage as a public institution against those who would eliminate its special status or supplant it with private arrangements. Arguing that monogamy reflects and cultivates our most basic democratic values, the book opposes the legal recognition of polygamy, but agrees with progressives that public policies should do more to support nontraditional caring and caregiving relationships. Throughout, the book explores the meaning of contemporary marriage and the reasons for its fragility and its enduring significance. Casting new light on today's debates over the future of marriage, the book lays the groundwork for a stronger institution.

This book offers a close study of the works that have come to be known as constituting Friedrich Nietzsche’s middle period: Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and the first four books of The Gay Science. Some of the value in reading these works is genealogical — they show how the later Nietzsche became the thinker he did. A related benefit of reading them is the help they give in avoiding generalizations about Nietzsche — views and attitudes associated with Nietzsche come to be seen as peculiar to one of his periods or some of his texts. However, it is also argued that these are rich and fruitful works, deserving attention in their own right. The Nietzsche delivered by a reading of these works is a more careful, moderate, and modest thinker than he is usually interpreted to be. In these works, Nietzsche offers many subtle psychological insights, and has a powerful sense of the dialogical nature of identity. He values relationships like marriage and friendship, and eschews some of the misogyny, individualism, and elitism of the later works.

Before the movement commonly described as “gay liberation” was well under way, queer life in the United States is sometimes thought to have been a veritable prison of shame, repression, illegality, and invisibility. Indeed during the 1950s, on the very eve of the “liberation,” the United States experienced an especially harsh, widespread outbreak of homophobia—with countless arrests, lost jobs, even lost lives, in a fierce cultural orgy of mandatory heterosexuality. Focusing on several American males who lived before the “liberation,” in stories of agency as well as agony, of fulfillment and pleasure as well as thwarted desire and self-loathing, Men without Maps freshly explores the actual quality of life for those “of the generation before Stonewall” who yearned for and sometimes experienced sexual involvements with other men. A few of the men studied are moderately well known today, but most are not. The involvements of some with other men were examples of long-lasting gay domesticity, while the encounters that others had were fleeting. Relying mostly on archival material--such as letters, memoirs, and snapshots--previously unused by a scholar, the book first explores those midcentury males, more numerous than usually realized, who lived as part of a male couple; it then examines experiences of solitary queer men who found coupling to be either unappealing or simply unattainable. Men without Maps joins John Ibson’s acclaimed previous books, Picturing Men and The Mourning After, to form a trilogy of studies, from varying angles, of male relationships in modern American society.

Constitutional “losers” represent a thorny and longstanding problem in American constitutional law. Given the adversarial system in the United States, the way that rights cases are decided means that regardless of whether a losing side has committed any actions that cause harm to others, they typically suffer unnecessary harm as a consequence of decisions. In areas such as affirmative action and gay rights, the losers are essentially punished for losing despite neither intending nor causing injury. This book draws upon conflict resolution theory, political theory, and Habermasian discourse theory to argue that in such cases, the Court must work harder to avoid inflicting unnecessary harm on Constitutional losers. But for this to happen, the book contends, the role of judges needs to be reconceptualized. It contends that the Court should not perceive itself simply as an adversarial forum, but also as a “transactional” one, where losers are not simply losers but participants in a process capable of addressing and ameliorating the effects that come with loss.