Family Matters : Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition

In 1960, consensual sodomy was a crime in every state in America.

Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the fundamental right to marry.

In the span of two generations, American law underwent a dramatic transformation.

Though the fight for marriage equality has received a considerable amount of attention from scholars and the media, it was only a small part of the more than half-century struggle for queer family rights.

Family Matters uncovers these decades of advocacy, which reshaped the place of same-sex sexuality in American law and society – and ultimately made marriage equality possible.

This book, however, is more than a history of queer rights.

Marie-Amélie George reveals that national legal change resulted from shifts at the state and local levels, where the central figures were everyday people without legal training.

Consequently, she offers a new way of understanding how minority groups were able to secure meaningful legal change.