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Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people face the same family issues as their heterosexual counterparts, but that is only the beginning of their struggle. The LGBT community also encounters legal barriers to government recognition of their same-sex relationships and relationships to their own children. Policy Issues Affecting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Families addresses partner recognition, parenting, issues affecting children of LGBT parents, health care, discrimination, senior care and elder rights, and equal access to social services. Sean Cahill and Sarah Tobias provide up-to-date, accurate analysis of the major policies affecting LGBT people, their same-sex partners, and their children. This valuable resource offers literature reviews of demographic research as well as original research based on the U.S. Census same-sex couple sample. It also provides a look at the 30-year history of right-wing anti-gay activism and the intra-community intellectual debates over the fight for marriage.

An innovative, data-driven explanation of how public opinion shifted on LGBTQ rights The Path to Gay Rights is the first social science analysis of how and why the LGBTQ movement achieved its most unexpected victory--transforming gay people from a despised group of social deviants into a minority worthy of rights and protections in the eyes of most Americans. The book weaves together a narrative of LGBTQ history with new findings from the field of political psychology to provide an understanding of how social movements affect mass attitudes in the United States and globally. Using data going back to the 1970s, the book argues that the current understanding of how social movements change mass opinion--through sympathetic media coverage and endorsements from political leaders--cannot provide an adequate explanation for the phenomenal success of the LGBTQ movement at changing the public's views. In The Path to Gay Rights, Jeremiah Garretson argues that the LGBTQ community's response to the AIDS crisis was a turning point for public support of gay rights. ACT-UP and related AIDS organizations strategically targeted political and media leaders, normalizing news coverage of LGBTQ issues and AIDS and signaled to LGBTQ people across the United States that their lives were valued. The net result was an increase in the number of LGBTQ people who came out and lived their lives openly, and with increased contact with gay people, public attitudes began to warm and change. Garretson goes beyond the story of LGBTQ rights to develop an evidence-based argument for how social movements can alter mass opinion on any contentious topic.

The invention of AIDS activism came soon after the AIDS epidemic emerged in gay communities in the United States in the early 1980s. AIDS activism by and for people with AIDS, distinct from gay activism responding to the threat of AIDS on the behalf of the whole community, started as a way of resisting the phenomenon of social death. Social death, in which people are considered "as good as dead" and denied roles in community life, posed a unique threat to people with AIDS. An organized political response to AIDS began among gay men with AIDS in San Francisco, California, and New York, New York, formalized in a foundational document later called the Denver Principles. The ideas and language of these first people with AIDS influenced later AIDS activism movements. They also help to illustrate the importance of considering an epidemic from the point of view of people with the disease.

This article focuses on the West German gay subculture and its early reactions to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It analyses how gay men coped with an uncertain epistemological situation in which the medical, social and political status of HIV/AIDS was far from being evident, and in which the ambivalent connection of AIDS, risk and gay sexuality became the object of strong scientific and public interest. The article argues that gay men distinguished between two dimensions of AIDS risk: risky sex and risky language. On the one hand, they developed a strong awareness for the riskiness of their sexual behaviour, resulting in the will to consider AIDS as a disease of their own. On the other hand, they were irritated by the ambiguity of the public AIDS discourse. Its imagery went far beyond AIDS as a medical entity and was believed to conceal antigay politics behind medical facts. In analysing the emerging gay risk strategies, the article points out that gay activists and organisations critically adopted virological knowledge and promoted Safer Sex practices, both strategies which eventually empowered them to represent their interests within the emerging expert networks of AIDS politics since 1985/6. Central to these strategies was the attempt to disentangle a sphere of politics and morality from a sphere of the natural world of viruses, an attempt which was aimed at ending the supposed dangerous spread of antigay AIDS metaphors in the public. The article concludes in trying to interpret the HIV/AIDS controversies as reactions to the general epistemological uncertainties of "risk societies" in the late 20th century.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the hidden history of AIDS activism among the sexual minority of those living with HIV (PLWH) who practiced societal envisioning from the 1990s to 2000s. The concept of "societal envisioning [shakai-koso 社会構想]" has been developed by sociologists in Japan. Based on research data from the life and oral histories of 22 PLWH, two biographies and related life documents were examined. One biography focused on the founder of a gay-content magazine, the other on the editor of a medical information journal for PLWH. The former aimed to create a gay community through societal envisioning in cooperation with neighbors and visitors. The latter not only collected medical information but also used biographies to cultivate hope for survival and empowerment. By focusing on the concept of societal envisioning, this article contributes to Global Sociology as a way of exploring and discussing how people can confront and enable solidarity to change the lives of those who are colonized, oppressed, and marginalized by prejudice and discrimination.

Includes bibliographical references

Cover -- THE PATH TO GAY RIGHTS -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- PART I. INTRODUCTION -- 1. A Transformed Society: LGBT Rights in the United States -- 2. Understanding Affective Liberalization -- PART II. A PRELUDE TO CHANGE: LGBT MOVEMENT DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICAL INTEGRATION -- 3. The Spread and Intensification of Gay and Lesbian Identities -- 4. The Capture of the Democratic Party and the Clinton Victory -- PART III. PUBLIC RESPONSE AND THE NATURE OF SOCIAL CHANGE -- 5. Issue Evolution? Gay Politics in the Early Clinton Years -- 6. Coming Out, Entertainment Television, and the Youth Revolt -- 7. The Persistence of Political Conflict over Gay Rights -- PART IV. LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE -- 8. The Global Shift in Attitudes toward Homosexuality -- 9. Social Change in Liberal Democracies -- Appendix 1. Additional Information on Statistical Methods -- Appendix 2. Additional Information on Data and Variable Coding -- Notes -- Index -- About the Author.

Outlines history of human rights abuses suffered by homosexuals, and examines impact of international gay and lesbian activism on international institutions, international law, and nongovernmental organizations.

An analysis of gay male reviewers' responses to major commercial publishers' expanded offerings of fiction by and about gay people during the 1970s reveals how reviewers constructed a machinery of gay-identified criticism, negotiated new definitions of gay identity, and forged a community of gay intellectuals and authors intent on using their own mainstream success to make evident to all the creativity and value of contemporary gay life. By decade's end, this gay literary elite had developed ideas about gay cultural politics and the proper relationship between activism and commercial cultural production that differed distinctly from those of gay political organizations and other gay activists. These developments sketch a richer and more complicated story of the evolution of gay identity and gay politics—particularly the politics of visibility—after Stonewall.