Document Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
2011
Center/Program
Center for Gender & Sexuality Law
Abstract
The summer of 2011 marked an important turning-point in the geography and politics of sex: public sex, previously a domain dominated by the specter of a hypersexualized gay man, became the province of the irresponsible, foolish, and self-destructive heterosexual man, such as Anthony Weiner. Meanwhile, homosexuals were busy domesticating their sexuality in the private domain of the family. Just as hetero-sex shamefully seeped out into the open, homo-sex disappeared from view into the dignified pickets of private kinship. In this essay I examine the panic that unfolded in connection with Representative Weiner’s tweets as a kind of afterlife of homophobia; an afterlife that was not unrelated to the success of same-sex couples’ demand for marriage equality rights.
Recommended Citation
Katherine M. Franke,
Public Sex, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Afterlife of Homophobia,
DOES PUBLIC SEX MATTER, p. 156, 2011; Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 11-289
(2011).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/1710