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Over the past half-century, students of democratic representation have investigated the extent to which elected officials act as their constituents prefer. Less attention has been paid to the fact that in addition to popular sovereignty, however, modern republican democracy is characterized by the values of liberty and equality. Democratic theorists suggest that these latter values should prevail in cases of conflict when the issue in question speaks to citizens' fundamental rights, as is the case with gay marriage. We examine this question of representation and responsiveness with respect to gay marriage, an issue of importance to the gay community—a small and intense group that struggles to achieve policy success. We find that neither majoritarian nor capture-based theories of representation fully account for the lack of elected official responsiveness to this particular constituent interest group. Instead, our evidence supports the theory of subconstituency politics. Consequently, we find little reason for optimism that legislation supporting gay marriage is likely to pass both because gay marriage is opposed by a competing subconstituency, Evangelical Christians, who are intense and larger in number and because the systemic design inhibits the ability of minority groups to succeed legislatively in the face of comparable minority opposition.

The legacy of the first twenty years of the Charter for lesbians and gay men is a contradictory one of victories and defeats. At the level of doctrine, strategy, and politics, both the victories and defeats have been precarious and contradictory. While gaining formal equality rights, lesbians and gay men have not been able to secure rights to sexual freedom. And while formal equality has displaced the heteronormativity that denied legal recognition and subjectivity to lesbians and gay men, this formal equality has come at a cost. Lesbians and gay men are being reconstituted in law: some are being newly constituted as legal citizens while others are being re-inscribed as outlaws. The first twenty years of the Charter is a legacy of transgression and normalization; these new legal subjects are both challenging dominant modes of legal subjectivity and its insistence of heterosexuality, while being absorbed into them.

The importance of offering a lesbian and gay American history course was initially impressed upon me in 1986. A newly minted Ph.D., I was teaching my very first class: a U.S. history survey at San Francisco State University (sfsu). The course required each student to review a book of his or her choice on any topic in U.S. history. One student chose John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 from my list of suggested titles and wrote a thoughtful, enthusiastic review.1 At the bottom of the review was a handwritten note: "Thanks for recommending this book. As a gay man, I didn't know I had a history." Didn't know he had a history?! My fellow historians will share my sense of dismay and my determination to remedy this unthinkable state of affairs. I have always included the history of gay men and lesbians in my various classes, not as a sop to "political correctness" and not because it is an amusing/interesting "add on" to "real" history, but because it is a vital component of a more complete understanding of American political, economic, social, legal, military, and religious history. For example, my courses that focus on the twentieth century include the significant role that the campaign against homosexuals played in McCarthy-era persecutions; in "U.S. Historical Geography" (which examines the role physical geography has played in the development of the United States), we study how and why the coastal cities of New York and San Francisco emerged as major centers of homophile populations; in women's history courses we examine the controversy and contributions lesbians brought to various feminist movements.

As laws change and we move several generations away from the times of greatest struggle, the atmosphere that created the contemporary scene for gay and lesbian citizens, their culture and politics, becomes increasingly remote and potentially forgotten. As recent historians have recalled, though, "This was a population too shy and fearful to even raise its hand, a group of people who had to start at zero in order to create their place in the nation's culture," –an "invisible people" (Clendinen, 11). The movement for gay and lesbian rights in the United States, considered by many to have originated with the rebellion at the Stonewall Inn in New York on June 28, 1969, had taken a long time to reach that night's critical mass of public resistance among gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals against institutional prejudice. The Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 in Chicago, was the first recognized gay rights organization in the United States, and activists went on to form the Mattachine Society in 1950 in Los Angeles and the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955 in San Francisco. Coinciding with these early stirrings of resistance during the McCarthy era in the early '50s, hundreds of those considered to be homosexual were denied employment from the federal government and discharged from the military services. Many justified this bias by making reference to the American Psychiatric Association's 1952 inclusion of homosexuality in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental disorder. In 1959 gays and transgender people protested in Los Angeles, and in 1966 drag queens, hustlers, and transvestites rioted outside Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco when police began arresting transvestites. Nonetheless, the "riots" that went on for five days at Stonewall received greater attention and are now commemorated throughout the United States in the month of June in a series of Gay Pride parades and other events. In 1973 homosexuality was removed from the list of mental disorders in the DSM, and the pace of gay, lesbian, transgender, as well as bisexual and queer rights accelerated.

The Nancy N. Boothe papers, 1980-2009 [bulk 1990-1997], are composed of articles, notes, reports and a wide variety of feminist publications. Much of the material documents the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, which Ms. Boothe attended as Executive Director of Atlanta's Feminist Women's Health Center. Artifacts, artwork and textiles relate to the conference and to other women's and health issues. ; Born in Battles Wharf, Alabama (1948), Nancy N. Boothe graduated from the University of South Alabama as a registered nurse (1971). She received a B.S. in nursing from the Medical College of Georgia (1976), and a master's degree in Counseling from Troy State University [Florida Region] (1981). Boothe served in the U.S. Nurse Corps in the U.S. and Korea (1970-1984), and worked as clinical director and consultant at a number of health facilities in Louisiana and Florida. She became Executive Director of the Atlanta Feminist Women's Health Center in 1994. In 1995, she attended the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, where she taught the workshop, ""GYN Self-Help."" Boothe has served on the boards of All Women's Health Services in Portland and Eugene, Oregon; the Sexual Assault Center, Atlanta, Georgia; and the Jeanette Rankin Foundation, Athens, Georgia. She is also a member of the Feminist Majority Foundation's ""Women's Commission for Congressional Oversight"" and A.P.D. Citizen Review Panel.; Founded in California in 1971 by Carol Downer (1933-) and Lorraine Rothman (1932-2007), the Feminist Women's Health Center was established to empower women through self-knowledge, education and self-help groups. The Atlanta Feminist Women's Health Center was established in 1977. Its mission is to ""provide accessible, comprehensive gynecological healthcare to all who need it without judgment. As innovative healthcare leaders, [they] work collaboratively within [their] community and nationally to promote reproductive health, rights and justice. [They] advocate for wellness, uncensored health information and fair public policies by educating the larger community and empowering [their] clients to make their own decisions.""; The United Nations convened the Fourth World Conference on Women, September 4-15, 1995, in Beijing, China, with a Platform for Action that aimed at achieving greater equality and opportunity for women. Three previous World Conferences were held in Mexico City (International Women's Year, 1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985). 189 governments and more than 5,000 representatives from 2,100 non-governmental organizations participated in the Beijing Conference. The principal themes were the advancement and empowerment of women in relation to women's human rights, women and poverty, women and decision-making, the girl-child, violence against women and other areas of concern. The resulting documents of the Conference are The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. The U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women manifested a global women's movement for change and has been called ""the Woodstock of the women's movement.""; The World Conference on Women was also accompanied by an informal meeting (August 30-September 8) of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This NGO Forum on Women, Beijing '95, brought together thousands of women from around the world to exchange information and ideas, celebrate women's achievements and contributions and draw attention and develop solutions to discrimination facing women world-wide.

"Courts and legislatures grant a heterosexual couple the legal right to marry. (Krause 37) Why has this legal right not been extended to include gay and lesbian couples? The legal definition of family has no doubt broadened. Even the legal substitutes for marriage, common-law marriage and marriage by contract or declaration, have been denied to gay and lesbian couples, while available under some jurisdictions to heterosexual couples. Is this prohibition of same-sex marriage constitutionally justifiable? Are the proposed interests of states in prohibiting same-sex marriage justifiable by the standards of constitutional law? These two questions will structure the course of the argument to follow in favor of legitimizing gay and lesbian marriage."--from pages 26-27

From homosexual law reform to drag kings; from HIV/AIDS to lesbian artists; from old age to moviegoing – gay and lesbian life in Australia has always been a vibrant canvas. In this collection, the sixth in the Gay and Lesbian Perspectives series, established and newly emerging Australian historians cast an eye over the past hundred years or so. Drawing on sources as diverse as government records, police and court documents, archives and memoirs and oral histories from across the nation, they have unearthed stories that will surprise, delight, and inform. It will be of great interest to those working and studying in the fields of sexuality and gender studies, sociology, Australian history, politics and other social studies, as well as to those in the specific fields of HIV/AIDS, queer literature, violence in Australia, ageing, and media studies. These are histories that aren't taught at school – but should be!

This article addresses the issue of how the development of International Human Rights Law and other legal systems of states often times undermines the acceptance of sexual orientation and gender identity that ultimately impacts on how minimum are the protection toward lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders. More concretely, this article tries to explain this issue by using international human rights law instruments such as International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and other regional human rights convention such as European Convention on Human Rights and Inter-American Convention on Human Rights. Moreover, on the basis of comparison this article also uses various judicial decisions of several human rights judicial bodies such as the European Court of Human Rights and Inter-American Court of Human Rights and also judgments of several states' Supreme Court on cases regarding the rights of LGBT where states, in their legal and religious discourses, whether directly or indirectly, often put the LGBT people as their subject of discrimination, torture and other ill-treatment, arbitrary detention, and were not granted civil liberties such as freedom of expression and freedom of association. When emphasizing substantial differences among current states' policies and the international human rights law, this article also shows the current tendencies of states to include the LGBT people on rights that were once forbidden for the LGBT people to obtain, such as the right to adopt, right to have same-sex marriage, and right to change their biological sex by the use of medical examinations, and so on. Keywords: LGBT, homosexuality, human rights, ICCPR ABSTRAK Artikel skripsi ini membahas mengenai bagaimana perkembangan hukum hak asasi manusia (HAM) internasional dan sistem hukum di banyak Negara seringkali tidak sejalan dalam hal penerimaan orientasi seksual dan identitas gender yang pada akhirnya berdampak pada minimnya perlindungan terhadap kaum Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, dan Transgender. Dalam artikel ini selanjutnya menggunakan instrumen-instrumen hukum HAM internasional seperti International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, dan berbagai konvensi HAM regional seperti European Convention on Human Rights dan Inter-American Convention on Human Rights. Selain itu, digunakan pula putusan peradilan dari beberapa badan peradilan HAM seperti European Court of Human Rights, Inter-American Court of Human Rights dan putusan dari Mahkamah Agung berbagai Negara sebagai perbandingan praktek-praktek hukum dan tradisi agama dalam suatu Negara, baik secara langsung maupun tidak langsung yang meletakkan kaum LGBT sebagai korban diskriminasi, penyiksaan dan perbuatan kejam lainnya, ditahan secara sewenang-wenang, dan tidak diberikan kebebasan dalam menyatakan pendapat dan kebebasan berkumpul atau berorganisasi. Seraya menekankan perbedaan antar satu Negara dengan Negara lain dalam praktek diskriminasi maupun gagalnya perlindungan hak-hak lain terhadap kaum LGBT, artikel ini juga membahas perkembangan akhir-akhir ini dimana gerakan perlindungan hak kaum LGBT mulai dicanangkan dan berdampak pada beberapa Negara mulai menyertakan kaum LGBT dalam pemberian dan perlindungan hak yang mulanya dilarang seperti hak untuk mengadopsi anak, untuk melangsungkan pernikahan sesama jenis, mengubah jenis kelamin melalui proses medis, dan lain sebagainya. Kata kunci: LGBT, homoseksual, Hak Asasi Manusia, ICCPR

This study takes its point of departure in human rights, equality and personal freedom, including support for the rights of LGBTI persons. Its intention is to combine these principles with respect for African communities, cultures, and the fortitude with which Africans face many challenges. Human rights law demands that people be protected against human rights violations committed by private actors. The Human Rights Based Approach to Development (HRBA) looks at the potential of non-state actors as partners. In contexts where many public services are delivered by non-state actors, many areas of family and private law are governed by customary or religious institutions and norms, and where the outreach of the state is limited, examining the roles of non-state actors takes on a particular urgency. Thus, this study devotes as much or more attention to structures and norms based in religion and society as in the state. In practice, these various norm sets are very often mixed together with one another. Some may argue that African societies are not yet ready to take on the challenges of a debate on issues such as sexual orientation and gender identity. There are many responses to this. Most obviously, African societies are taking on this challenge, either on their own account or as a consequence of living in our globalized world. African LGBTI persons and activists, like those in other parts of the world, are not waiting for a date in the future to start challenging prejudice. Neither are their opponents. All sectors of society, including media, politics, religion and the education and health sectors are increasingly addressing these issues. Representatives of all of these sectors testify to the public's thirst for knowledge, as well as for a firm moral foundation on which communities can live together. African societies and the deeply human values they embody contain resources to face challenges, including in this sensitive domain.

Does anyone do 'lesbian and gay studies'? The formulation likely sounds quaint when gender and sexuality studies now aims its sights at so much more than what these identities designate. Just as feminist, queer and trans theory hotly debated the political and philosophical shortcomings of 'identity' in the 1980s and 90s, the 2000s and 2010s have given us the frameworks of homonormativity, homonationalism and queer liberalism to articulate how lesbian and gay identities in particular can become acute vectors of a racist modern governmentality. Across a range of politically-engaged scholarship, non-identitarian positions continue to seem like the most sophisticated ones. Yet, in other ways, identity still looms large across our lives, outside and inside the academy. Social and political emergencies continue to make the work of identity-based movements urgent and necessary. Scholarly controversies often circle back to identity: in 'Trans* Studies Now', a recent issue of TSQ (Transgender Studies Quarterly), a special forum responds to the argument that, of all things that could have been decentred in trans studies, it has, curiously, been transsexual identity. The Black Scholar has oriented a recent issue around the question 'What was Black Studies'?, not to signal its end, but its vitality. Outside of the interpretive humanities, 'lesbian' and 'gay' read differently and ground work in disciplines such as history and sociology. Recent events beyond the Anglophone world—for example, in Poland and Hungary—show that these identities have not lost the political urgency that they may seem to have done in other contexts. So what happened to 'lesbian and gay studies'? In what ways does such a formulation seem retrograde, if it does? What would the field have looked like without the strong impulse to self-deconstruction on which it was founded? How does this impulse relate (or not) to the structure of other identity knowledge domains? If 'lesbian' and 'gay' do not seem like the most urgent or necessary political ...

This is the published version also available here http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2960229 ; Morality politics theory predicts that gay rights policy will reflect the influence of religious groups, party competition, and partisanship while interest group theory suggests that these policies will correspond with interest group resources, elite values, and past policy actions. Using multiple regression on a 50-state data set and a county-level data set for gay rights initiatives in Oregon and Colorado, we found gay and lesbian politics are no different from those for other policy issues. When gay and lesbian rights are not salient, the pattern of politics resembles that of interest group politics. If individuals opposed to gay and lesbian rights are able to expand the scope of the conflict, the pattern of politics conforms to morality politics.

Working with lesbians and gay men is a largely neglected area of social work practice. This book provides social workers and other professionals with an overview of a number of key challenges and concerns that play a significant part in the lives of lesbians and gay men. Despite positive changes in legislation, social work can still fail to meet the needs of lesbians and gay men, and remains a marginalised area in practice, research and teaching. This book promotes an understanding of these issues and proposes ideas for social work practice that are inclusive of lesbians and gay men in assessment and the provision of services.

Much recent research on sexual minorities has used couples-based samples, which—by construction—provide no information on nonpartnered individuals. We present the first systematic empirical analysis of partnership and cohabitation among self-identified gay men and lesbians using two independent, large, population-wwbased data sources from California. These data indicate that 37%–46% of gay men and 51%–62% of lesbians aged 18–59 are in cohabiting partnerships (compared with 62% of heterosexual individuals in coresidential unions at comparable ages). Unlike previous research, we find that white and highly educated gay men and lesbians are more likely to be partnered, and we confirm that same-sex cohabiting partners in our data have demographic characteristics that are similar to California same-sex couples from Census 2000. We also present the first detailed analysis of officially registered domestic partnerships in California. We find that almost half of partnered lesbians are officially registered with the local or state government, while less than a quarter of partnered gay men are officially registered. We conclude with implications of our findings for couples-based research on gay men and lesbians, as well as recommendations for survey data collection.

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) voters may have a disproportionate impact in some key races in the upcoming election. An analysis of the GLB population in districts and states with competitive races shows the following: • In competitive House races with a Republican incumbent, an estimated 4.2 to 4.3 percent of adults are GLB, a figure above the national estimate of 4.1 percent and higher than proportions in tight races with an open seat or Democrat incumbent. • In Senate races with a Democrat incumbent, an estimated 4.5 percent of adults are GLB. • Among states with voter referenda that would ban marriage for same-sex couples, Arizona and Colorado have the highest proportions of GLB residents, 4.5 and 5.1 percent, respectively, and are the only two states with GLB population proportions above the national average.