Sodomy Reform, the Right to Be Sexual, and the Emergence of LGBT Rights

• In Event: 594 - Regular Session. Sociology of Sexuality: Sexualities, Social Movements, and the Law

Abstract

How did the politics of gay liberation become the politics of LGBT rights? How did our understanding of sexuality become tethered to an identity-based model? This article studies intra- and inter-organizational debates within the LGBT legal organizations. Taking dissent over litigation strategy, the right to be sexual, and sodomy reform as a starting point, the article rejects the simple liberation to assimilation narrative. Instead, sodomy reform—and ultimately LGBT rights—always included a concern with the right to be sexual. The right to be sexual stood in tension with the right to privacy. This tension drove the development of LGBT rights as a category.

Through this article, we get a richer sense of how sexuality as a category is constructed in and through the law. We see how the inchoate goals of the right to be sexual become LGBT rights. But we also see moments of historical contingency, real possibilities of other legal strategies around the right to be sexual. By taking this contingency seriously, rather than looking for how it was resolved, we can better appreciate the ambiguous and contested meanings of LBBT rights. This has payoffs for how we think about the development of the LGBT legal movement as well as how we think about constitutional law.

Author

• Jeffrey Kosbie, Northwestern University