Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights

Abstract

This project examines a central paradox of recent queer history. Between the late 1960s and the present, a progressive coalition consisting of LGBT activists, mainstream liberals, feminists, and others challenged the stigmatization of LGBT people as sex offenders and secured new sexual rights for LGBT people. The pro-queer progressive coalition won new restrictions on the policing of gay bars and achieved the nationwide legalization of “sodomy” between consenting adults in private, along with the fall of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the rise of gay marriage.

During this same period, a bipartisan coalition of victims’ rights advocates launched a new phase of the war on sex offenders that had begun in the 1930s. Alongside its official purpose of punishing sexual harm, the new war on sex offenders has also had the effect of criminalizing a range of other non-harmful but stigmatized and marginalized modes of sexual conduct and gender expression that gay and sexual liberation activists had once sought to legalize in the 1960s and ’70s. Together, the project’s three case studies in California, Texas, and Massachusetts form a national study of the simultaneous legalization of some forms of queer gender and sexuality but re-criminalization of others along with their relation to the changing politics of race and gender.

My project bridges the history of sexuality and the history of the American state, rewriting the narratives of both subfields by placing sexual conduct and gender expression at the center of its analysis. When viewed from this perspective, the trajectory of LGBT rights appears not as a path of linear progress but as a redistribution of legal stigma. At the same time, the criminalization of sexual conduct was surprisingly central to the expansion of the American state in both its carceral and regulatory dimensions.