Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

An Earth Day Blog Post There was a strange stillness…. It was a spring without voices.  On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and wood and marsh…. ….A […]

What new politics and ethical imperatives emerge when the rights of lesbian and gay people begin to gain traction, and when the state becomes a partner in defending those newly-won rights? In Dating the State: The Moral Hazards of Winning Gay Rights, just published by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, I offer a critical […]

The guy who has been the voice and puppeteer for Elmo, Kevin Clash, resigned today from Sesame Workshop on account of recent accusations that he had sex with under age boys.  Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t – we don’t know yet.  But Sesame Workshop wanted him out as we head into the holiday […]

As many now know, CIA Director and retired four-star Army General David Petraeus has resigned his post at the CIA on account of newly emerging information that he had what the media calls an “extra-marital” affair with Paula Broadwell, who is also married.  Broadwell is the author of the flattering Petraeus biography All In: The […]

The essay below written by Professor Katherine Franke appeared in Tikkun magazine in a debate on the meaning of Pinkwashing in Israel/Palestine: I applaud Tikkun’s willingness to provide a forum for the discussion of a complex range of perspectives on LGBT rights in Israel/Palestine. The opinion pieces written by Richard Silverstein and Arthur Slepian, along […]

Rainbow flags and corsages were waving high in front of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village last night.  There’s much to celebrate about the 9th Circuit’s ruling issued yesterday confirming the lower court finding that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional.  As I noted yesterday and Nan Hunter pointed out as well in her reading of the […]

Public Sex, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Afterlife of Homophobia, forthcoming in Petite Mort: Recollections of a Queer Public (Carlos Motta & Joshua Lubin-Levy eds. 2011) Katherine Franke[1] Consider two events that dominated the news in the summer of 2011: Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress after it became public that he had been tweeting to some […]

It’s funny, when I was writing my dissertation many years ago, my adviser said to me: “Katherine, you’re really a libertarian when it comes to gender, aren’t you?”  At the time I resisted the moniker, but is “libertarian” worse than “liberationist”?  Who, on the 4th of July of all days, wouldn’t want to be called […]

This is exactly what I was worried about when I wrote the Op-ed in the New York Times last week.  From today’s Wall Street Journal: Gay Couples Losing Perks Legal Same-Sex Marriage in State Leads Companies to Cut Partner Benefits By JOANN S. LUBLIN And DANA MATTIOLI The legalization of gay marriage in New York […]

From today’s New York Times (and the headline wasn’t my choice, I preferred Marriage: It’s Complicated).  It’s hysterical that the Times is running ads for diamond wedding rings right above the Op-ed. Marriage Is a Mixed Blessing WILL the New York State Legislature ultimately put itself on the right side of history by allowing same-sex […]