Marie-Amélie George
In 1960, consensual sodomy was a crime in every state in America. Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the fundamental right to marry. In the span of two generations, American law underwent a dramatic transformation. The fight for marriage equality has received a considerable amount of attention from scholars and the media, but it was only a small part of the more than half-century struggle for queer family rights. Family Matters uncovers these decades of advocacy, which reshaped the place of same-sex sexuality in American law and society – and ultimately made marriage equality possible.
This book, however, is more than a history of queer rights. It reveals that national change resulted from shifts at the state and local levels, where the central figures were everyday people without legal training. Family Matters thus offers a new way of understanding how beleaguered minority groups may be able to secure meaningful legal change.
NOTCHES: What drew you to this topic, and what questions do you still have?
Marie-Amélie George: I went to law school and worked as a lawyer before enrolling in a PhD program. While in law school, I took a class on social movement mobilization from Suzanne Goldberg, who had spent a decade litigating for Lambda Legal. Our semester focused on the benefits and limitations of legal advocacy: What can lawyers achieve? What compromises do they have to make? Are the costs worth the benefits? To what extent can the law secure meaningful social change? Those questions have stayed with me and continue to drive my research.
NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?
MAG: The monograph is primarily a history of gay and lesbian rights, rather than LGBTQ+ rights. That is in large part due to its subject matter. The book analyzes how American law transformed from a regime that criminalized consensual sodomy to one that recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry. It focuses on reforms to penal codes and family law doctrines, examining how the changes ultimately made marriage equality possible. Although the discriminatory laws I detail harmed all members of the LGBTQ+ community, gender conforming gays and lesbians were the main players in these rights battles. At the same time, Family Matters’ focus is also a product of the historical evolution of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. Until the late 1990s, the movement was explicitly gay and lesbian, rather than LGBT. It has only become LGBTQ+ in recent years.
NOTCHES: This book engages with histories of sex and sexuality, but what other themes does it speak to?
MAG: This book is as much a history of legal mobilization as it is a history of sexuality. The U.S. LGBTQ+ rights movement has moved at lightning speed—at least as compared to efforts to secure civil rights for Americans of color and women. Its extraordinary success has mystified legal academics, leading many to ask whether the struggle for queer rights serves a model for the many other groups clamoring for their rights. What I show is that the LGBTQ+ rights movement is distinctive, because historical forces beyond advocates’ control often shaped the law’s evolution. At the same time, the movement’s past offers new ways of understanding how reform movements are able to attain consequential legal change. It underscores the importance of reforms at the state and local levels, where non-legal actors are often able to secure changes that would be impossible in other parts of the country. These small-scale experiments can provide the foundations for national change. This book is consequently as important to understanding the systemic manner in which rights become embedded in law and society as it is to understanding the state of the law around same-sex sexuality.
Family Matters is also very much focused on the power and rhetoric of religious conservatives in the United States. The rise of conservativism and religious fundamentalism in postwar America had a significant influence on LGBTQ+ rights advocacy, making strategic concessions necessary to attain legal gains. This history is of course not unique. Scholars of other rights movements have demonstrated how conservative political pressures channeled, narrowed, and consequently defined the parameters of postwar liberalism, influencing the arguments that legal organizations could successfully pursue. What I demonstrate is that, although the religious right ultimately lost the fight over marriage equality, it indelibly shaped the evolution of queer rights by constraining the arguments that advocates could make.
NOTCHES: How did you research the book?
MAG: Family Matters tells a story of national law reform across the United States. Unlike many legal histories, however, it does so by examining law from the ground up. I pieced together episodes in large cities and small towns throughout country, then weaved them into a larger narrative to explain the transformation of American law writ large. To do that, I combined archival fragments with a range of other sources. Much of the information in this book comes from the records of queer rights organizations. But to fill in the gaps in those documents, I also conducted dozens of oral history interviews with individuals involved in battles over LGBTQ+ rights—including attorneys, activists, elected officials, government administrators, social scientists, and educators.
Some of the materials for the book were particularly difficult to obtain. Family court decisions are typically unreported and sealed for the protection of the children involved, while the records of criminal courts are often spotty when they are first created, and are not always maintained for posterity. I consequently had to track down the unpublished judicial opinions and case files that lawyers, litigants, and advocates had entrusted to libraries, as well as collect reports of decisions scattered in the newsletters of local LGBTQ+ rights organizations. To find more ephemeral materials that were crucial to the fight for queer rights, such as television commercials, I scoured internet databases, contacted producers, and visited some far-flung repositories. A particular useful find was the Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive in Normal, Oklahoma, which has collected decades’ worth of political advertisements from around the United States.
NOTCHES: Did the book shift significantly from the time you first conceptualized it?
MAG: It’s almost unrecognizable from how it started! Like many first books, it began as a dissertation. And, like all dissertations, it changed significantly over time. I wrote six drafts of my dissertation prospectus, and what I finally submitted looked nothing like the proposal that my committee approved.
After getting my PhD, I took a few years away from the manuscript to focus on other projects. I had the good fortune of being accepted to the American Society for Legal History’s Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors. The participants helped me refine the project substantially. It was particularly useful to hear from historians in other fields, who responded quite differently to the material than those immersed in the topic. They seized upon some arguments that I had considered less important, which helped me reframe the narrative.
NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality?
MAG: That’s like asking how I became interested in food or water—I always have been! In undergrad, I look as many courses as I could in women, gender, and sexuality studies, then went to law school to become a sex crimes prosecutor. During the first year of the JD program, I realized I might be interested in academia, so took a leave of absence to complete an M.St. in Women’s Studies at Oxford. There, I wrote my thesis on gender confirmation surgeries in 1930s Germany, which examined the role of law reform in prompting social and scientific developments.
Conducting that research was exhilarating, but I also knew that academia was a challenging path. After getting my JD, I worked as a lawyer for several years, which only made me more confident that a PhD was the right move. Family Matters is the product of a very long and winding path!
NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?
MAG: This book could be used in a survey course on history of sexuality, as well as classes on LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. It could also serve as a text in classes on social movements or legal history.
In any of these classes, I would ask students to compare the history the book presents with events in the present day. Students will find many parallels, which they will likely find interesting—and disconcerting. They will also identify sharp differences, which should prompt them to evaluate what has changed. The book will therefore allow students to better understand contemporary rights debates and contests.
NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?
MAG: Mark Twain is frequently credited with the aphorism: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” I see echoes of my book every day, especially in my home state of North Carolina. Like many other jurisdictions in the United States, it has enacted laws that limit what students can learn in schools about sexual orientation and gender identity, prohibited trans students from participating on sports teams that align with their gender identity, and restricted minors’ access to gender affirming care. These legislative battles have been waged over claims of child protection and calls for parents’ rights—much like the attacks on gay and lesbian rights that I detail in Family Matters.
It is in many ways the same playbook, being adapted for the modern day.
At the same time, it is important to recognize that the sequel is different from the original. Although the legislative onslaught on LGBTQ+ rights has been demoralizing, legal protections for the queer community are much more extensive and robust than they were even a few decades ago. That both law and society have changed for the better in the recent past should inspire optimism for the future.
NOTCHES: Your book is published; what next?
MAG: The fight for queer family rights secured significant legal changes, but the movement was in many ways very conservative. It was not just that their goal was to gain access to marriage, a traditional institution. It was also that the arguments advocates used to attain that marriage equality emphasized how same-sex couples were just like straight ones. In other words, the LGBTQ+ rights movement did not press for a reformulation of American society, one that accepted more diversity and multiplicity. Instead, they asked for gays and lesbians to be included as part of the majority.
In my next project, I want to look at radical legal advocacy within the queer rights movement. That framework might seem oxymoronic—the words “law” and “radical” do not typically go together. Lawyers tend to make conservative arguments in favor of incremental reform that gradually improves society. Radical activists, on the other hand, demand immediate, transformative change that undermines existing structures of power. But there are numerous examples of queer radicalism within the law, both historically and in the present day. I’m excited to delve into when radical legal advocacy emerges and what changes these movements are able to secure.
Marie-Amélie George is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law, whose work focuses on both U.S. queer legal history and contemporary LGBTQ+ rights. She is a three-time recipient of the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the most influential U.s. sexual orientation and gender identity scholarship.
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