George Chauncey

Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: An Introduction

R e c e n t l y , there has been a small but discernible “transnational turn” in lesbian and gay studies and queer theory. Queer study groups on globalization have appeared at numerous universities and colleges, and a handful of national and international conferences have been held, including “Queer Globalization,” organized by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York in April 1998. This issue of GLQ is the outgrowth of one such initiative, a yearlong seminar on sexual identities and identity politics in transnational perspective that was organized in 1997-98, under the auspices of the Chicago Humanities Institute, by the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago.’ University of Chicago faculty had applied to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1993 for a grant to organize the seminar and three small related conferences, which proposed to examine the effect of the increasingly transnational mobility of people, media, commodities, discourses, and capital on local, regional, and national modes of sexual desire, embodiment, and subjectivity. The impetus for the yearlong seminar was a growing sense that transnational sexual diasporas were transforming the sexual politics and cultures of many nation-states. Postcolonial nations were witnessing the emergence of sex-based social movements whose political rhetoric and tactics seemed to mimic or reproduce Euro-American forms of sexual identity, subjectivity, and citizenship and, at the same time, to challenge fundamental Western notions of the erotic, the individual, and the universal rights attached to this fictive “~ubject.~’ New forms of “gay/lesbian” or “queer” identity, of sexuality, of intimacy, erotics, and community were emerging in these hybrid cultural fields and calling into question dominant

What Gay Studies Taught the Court: The Historians' Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas

The historians’ amicus brief reprinted here was submitted by a group of ten professors of history to the U.S. Supreme Court as it considered the constitutionality of Texas’s “homosexual conduct law” in the case of Lawrence v. Texas. The Court cited the brief in the decision it issued on June 26, 2003, which overturned that law and the rest of the nation’s sodomy laws. Although legal observers immediately began to debate the implications of the decision and the merits of its legal reasoning, there is no doubt that it constituted a major victory for the gay movement. Although the two plaintiffs in Texas were not the only ones to face such charges, few consenting adults had been prosecuted for sodomy even before the decision. But by criminalizing homosexual activity, the sodomy laws had effectively criminalized all lesbians and gay men, and opponents of gay rights had regularly used this imputation of criminality in public debates and court decisions to justify everything from the exclusion of gays from the military to the removal of children from the homes of their lesbian mothers. Sodomy laws were an ideological cornerstone in the legal edifice of antigay discrimination. In declaring those laws unconstitutional, the Court repudiated its decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, then only seventeen years old, which had upheld Georgia’s sodomy statute. The Court is generally reluctant to reverse itself so quickly and therefore needed to offer an extensive explanation of why it had done so. To the surprise of the brief ’s authors, many commentators credited it and two other his-

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.

A fascinating look at a gay world that was not supposed to have existed, this book shows that gay life in prewar New York was extensively integrated into the straight world. Based on years of research, the book is the first to show the thriving urban gay male subculture that flourished prior to the gay rights revolution of our time.