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In a 1999 assessment, New York Times journalists Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney stated that “it seems likely that the movement for gay identity and gay rights has come further and faster, in terms of change, than any other that has gone before it in this nation.” The evidence supports their claim. The Encyclopedia of Associations, for instance, shows that the number of organizations devoted...

In her provocative recent book, Split Decisions, Janet Halley argues that left political movements have suffered from a “convergentist” assumption: They assume that forms of critique or intervention that serve the interest of one group, for example, feminists, also serve the interest of other groups, for example, gay/lesbian or queer activists. She contends that we ought to set aside this kind of...

This Article interrogates the sexual morality of Equal Protection. Gender equality jurisprudence reveals the unacknowledged influence of a traditional, heteronormative conception of sexual morality—the sexual double standard—that often sets the parameters of gender equality. When the U.S. Supreme Court frames a gendered law as limiting participation in education, the workplace, or civic life, it...

This Article highlights both the rewards in accepting and the risks in rejecting a claim of sex discrimination as one constitutional basis for invalidating restrictions on marriage for same-sex couples. It argues that recognition of same-sex marriage and elimination of enforced sex roles are as inextricably intertwined as the duck is with the rabbit in the famous optical illusion. As the Article...

Critics of litigation seeking to establish the right of same-sex couples to marry argue that it has produced a backlash undercutting the movement for marriage equality. In this account, movement lawyers emerge as agents of backlash: naively turning to the courts ahead of public opinion, ignoring more productive political alternatives, and ultimately hurting the very cause they purport to advance...

As once-accepted empirical justifications for discriminating against lesbians and gay men have fallen away, the major stumbling block to equality lies in a set of intuitions, impulses, and so-called common sense views regarding sexual orientation and gender. This Article takes up these impulses and views, which I characterize as “sticky intuitions,” to consider both their sustained influence and...

We have arrived at a crossroads in terms of the intersection between law, sexuality, and globalization. Historically, and even today, the majority of accounts of LGBT migration tend to remain focused, in one scholar’s words, on “a narrative of movement from repression to freedom, or a heroic journey undertaken in search of liberation.” Within this narrative, the United States is usually cast as a...

It is a remarkable fact that rhetorically the state is gendered male, while state-on-state violence is continually represented as sexual violence. This Article applies the insights of queer theory to examine this rhetoric of sexual violation. More specifically, it analyzes the injury of colonialism as a kind of homoerotic violation of non-Western states’ (would-be) sovereignty. It does so by...