Editorial more and reward and in the end instead of six hours we went close to ten hours. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Good afternoon. I am the director of the institute for research on women, gender and sensuality and it is a great pleasure and great honor to be used this afternoon to moderate this panel and the celebration of a wonderful new book, a book on marriage eat quality by catherine frankie. What we are going to do this the afternoon is have some presentations and responses to the book and then open up for questions and discussion. We have assembled a stellar panel of the people who are just the right people to undertake this discussion and introduce them all briefly altogether and they will speak in deep water that we determined. It is all going to begin with a presentation of the book end its main issues of history by catherine frankie. She is the professor of law, director of the center for gender and sexual along which is a wonderful institution if we are happy to collaborate with and the author of wedlock, the perils of Marriage Equality and why you press 2015 just recently on. Catherine has been working on marriage, gender justice, transitional justice, gender issues of gender and grace in law, she is a legal theorist, academic, activist, public intellectual and an amazing human being. I am happy to be celebrating her this afternoon. Our speakers will go in this order. We are first going to have patricia williams, professor of law at columbia, the author of balcony of race and rights, the roosters egg, the blind goddess, and you know doubt know her through her monthly column for the nation magazine, diary of a mad law professor in which you can subscribe to at www. Mattlotprofessor bliss second speaker will be the ssc professor of sociology at Barnard College who code directs the Resource Center for Minority Aging Research at ucla school of medicine. Research examines intersections of race, gender, class and Sexual Orientation and her recently first book is invisible families, and a identities, relationships and motherhood among black gay women, published in 2011 by the university of California Press and winner of the 2013 outstanding book award by American Sociological Association section on sex and gender. She is working on a second book project entitled the shadow of sexual out monday, social history and social support among africanamerican elders, looking forward to it. Our third speaker Kendall Thomas is professor of law and director of the center for the study of culture which he cofounded with catherine frankie. Campbell, as his, editor of Critical Race Theory, the key writings that founded the movement and also coeditor of what is left of pherae with Judith Butler and john boehner. His most recent writing has focused on the law and culture of Death Penalty politics, racial democracy in brazil and law and politics of racial neil liberalism after the obama presidency. Tell me welcome Kathryn Frankie liberalism after the obama presidency. Tell me welcome Kathryn Frankie. Thank you so much. Iron teach in a room like this and manipulate these things along with my students. Here it is the book, very exciting. [applause] thank you all for coming, is wonderful to have you come out and honored this work and honor thinking about marriage and a complicated way. I know many of you do that in your own work, your own politics, your own lives so i appreciate having company because the kinds of perspectives i have on Marriage Equality are not always the most popular within the Gay Community. You are my community right now. Thank you. And thank you to i risk for cosponsoring this event along with the center for gender and sexual of moneyity. When i went to college sexually sodomy was a crime. It criminalize to i was or at least things i did. Twice when i was a student i was insulted by police and they hurled homophobic epithets at the. Another time i was beaten up by some guys in Riverside Park and police stood by and watched. For people of my generation, certainly for me, the idea that we would turn to state regulation as a way to be freer and more equal people struck me as a strange move and still strikes me as a strange move that not many years after our intimate lives were criminalize by the state and we were prosecuted for it both publicly and privately, that we would invite the stage into our intimate relationships and asked the state to regulate them, that always struck me as an odd political objective. And i thought i would write a book about it so that is what what what is. I also thought gay people, samesex couples are not alone in that experience of having the state regulate their lives in the form of marriage shortly after or as part of the Civil Rights Movement or a movement about emancipation. Of the people. So i turn to what africanamericans went through or they were not even africanamericans at the time because they were not citizens but what black people in this country went through during and after the civil war when they could marry for the first time and i thought maybe there is Something Interesting to learn from that experience as we have turned in the Gay Community as a form of liberty and the quality and it turns out there is quite a bit weak and learn and that is what this book does, each chapter offers parables for todays movement, not to equate homophobia and racism as the same thing, not to say that the experience of violence and torture and enslavement black people have suffered in this country is the same thing that gay people have suffered, various forms of homophobia but to create a juxtaposition between two movements so as we formulate our bowl, articulate our values and pursue our political projects today we do so mindful of other movements we are juxtaposed with. And who can teach us those movements, teach us about possibilities and perils of certain political and legal claims and so that is what the book aims to do, to bring these movements together to see what lies there and it turns out Marriage Equality does indeed have a racial history. It also has our racial present and that is one of the stake home points of this point, not only be careful what you wish for, but the distinction, the difference between homophobia and racism, difference between Marriage Equality today and in the Nineteenth Century for newly freed people point out something about the racial and down in todays Marriage Equality movement has enjoyed and the ways in which marriage has been an enormously successful method by which to read brand homosexuality as takes the sex out of homosexuality. And to redeem gay people, particularly certain gay couples who are able to be respectable and seem entitled, make a plausible claim of entitlements to the blessings of marriage. In doing so, they contrast themselves to those deserving of exile from the institution of marriage, deserving of social judgment and social stigma and almost always those are people of color in this country. And so this juxtaposition helps us understand i think how unfortunately some of what we have won in the Marriage Equality movement has been a 0 sum politics or 0 some rights where gay people and some samesex couples have won the right to marry at the expense of others both implicitly and explicitly in the arguments that have been made in the Marriage Equality cases so let me sail little bit about what a couple of the chapters do in terms of the careful what you wish for. Marriage and rights in particular can become a form of discipline, particularly a form of discipline when many sectors of Society Still hate you and that was certainly true for newly freed people at the end of the war. Not the abolition of slavery abolished racism. Reason took new forms, or persisted in old and familiar forms and being able to marry for the first time inaugurated in a way and regulatory relationship and a new disciplinary relationship for black people with the state. And so when black people coming out of the enslavement who lived together as husband and wife were automatically married by operation of law unwittingly in many cases and their relationships broke up which in any population will be the case and people hook up with new partners mostly black men were prosecuted for bigamy or adultery which was a felony, which meant they would lose their right to vote which would put them in prison and renders them subject to the convict leasing system developed after the end of the civil war because there was this body of workers that were available to do the agricultural work enslaved people had done before. The convict leasings system was more deadly for black men than agricultural work while enslaved. Marriage rights, particularly the law of divorce and lot of monogamy and around marriage end ed up giving the state a new power to discipline, punish and sometimes kill black men just at this moment when they were freed from the crushing affects of slavery and the crushing reality of slavery. Part of this was a civilizing mission. There is an enormous backlash against there was an enormous backlash against africanamericans at the end the war and theres not backlash against samesex marriage now mostly done undertaken in the name of religion but not only. To the extent we had smooth sailing today on the rights of samesex couples to marry it has been local in many contextss and many parts of the country, marriage rights are not something pete people feel they can exercise because they dont feel free to come out and they know there will be retaliation against them. They experience or metabolize that fear against a backdrop of this message from both people in the Gay Community and outside the Gay Community who say being married will civilize you, will tame those wild sort of lascivious emerges of gay men who dont know how to sign up for one another and commit and the monogamous, we heard the same about africanamericans at the end of the war that they had savage section walid that needed to be disciplined through the institution of marriage of the civilizing aspects of marriage, the values it carries in its own portfolio, sometimes overwhelm the values of the communities that seek to exercise these rights and the book tries to answer it as well or address those questions. One other place there is a similarity or at least a particularly compelling lesson to learn from the historical connection is how the right to marry can collapse into a compulsion to marry. On the level of there are some people who marry in every state, they have a diagnostic problem of overmarion. There is not that kind of compulsion. The state will compel you to marry. In the Nineteenth Century we saw even before the end of the civil war in order for fleeing slaves who were leaving the plantations, the safety of northern troops to set up refugee camps around military operations they were conducting, a minister was placed at the gates of many of these they called contraband camps that refugee camps and you could not gain entry into these camps without marrying. That was seen as the most pressing problem, that these folks were coming in in complicated families. People had lost their spouses and their children and their owners have sold away and they were reassembling and coming to the safety of these refugee camps and the northern soldiers and missionaries that were running some said we cant let you in in those debauched families, we are going to marry you at the gates of the right to marry turned into a compulsion to marry in many contextss and we see that today as well not just generally but at columbia university. As soon as in new york state gained the right for samesex couples to marry the university abolish domestic partner benefits and said you had a year to marry your partner and if you dont they will be kicked off of the health plan. Shocking but the Secular University would get in the business of promoting and enforcing marriage, think to the organizing of a bunch of us at the university we got them to reverse that policy. But not for different sex couples. The president had promised they would keep domestic partner benefits for same and different sex couples because in new York City Domestic Partnership Law recognizes same and different sex couples but they only reinstated domestic partner benefits samesex couples so actually now the university discriminate against straight people. Gay people are paid for, samesex couples are paid more in the sense that you can get benefits for your partner whether or not you married but if you are heterosexual or have a different sex partner you have to get married. These are some of the difficult questions that have come up in history around marriage and how marriage ends up overwhelming the politics of a Larger Movement that might have wanted to recognize more complex families both for africanamericans and for gay and lesbian people today and we have launched queer families as the subject of gayrights in the same way we fought for them 10 or 15 years ago. Many of us who were early advocates working on issues of lgbt family rights sought marriage as actually a problem. It was a sexist institution written, legally to preserve property and usually male property. Creating viable life outside marriage was our political project and something happened. Something happened and the movement got overtaken by marriage politics. One last thing i want to offer and i would love to hear from my colleagues alike feel badly we are racial desegregated up here. I may integrate the cable. Have never talked publicly about this but when i was in college, coming awakening as Many College Students to to the lesbian. I describe myself as gay. I was reading may sarton has a lot of vested, a poet and novelist and memoir, very well known in the 70s indeeds and she wrote a journal of solitude, very moving and important for me and many of my friends and as i was coming out, i thought i am going to be lonely when i am told. She wrote about being old and alone and i worried that the only way to not be alone when you are old is to be married and i didnt want to be heterosexual and i didnt want to be married so i wrote her a long letter and she wrote me back so here is what she wrote me, i wont read you the whole letter, this is oldfashioned typing. She said the you imply what you want as law as a sideline and solitude as the main current. I dont see this as possible. Love without commitment is pretty cheap. This is where marriage comes in. I read you were terribly afraid of being caught and people to marry because they want marriage often find themselves caught. It looks to me as though you have never loved a man enough to want to marry him. Which was true. And it is as simple as that. When you do and i hope you will, there wont any argument and wouldnt you want children . She goes on to discuss how lonely the life of the unmarried person will be and she hopes that i wont be that person so let me quote quickly from Justice Kennedy. Bad decision from the Supreme Court recognized their constitutional right for samesex couples to marry. Among the things he says is this. Marriage response to the universal fear that a lonely person might call off only to find no one there. Offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other. Really . There is no life of this and dark loneliness if you are and married . This is the price of winning the right to marry, life outside of marriage with a huge use its board find yourself there for complicated reasons is a grim, lonely, dark life. That is not a clear value in my mind. I think we can look to the Africanamerican Community to see enormous resilience, creativity and flourishing in life outside marriage. Thank you so much. [applause] it is a wonderful to be part of this conversation. 84 inviting me and congratulations catherine, wherever you are. This book is really the most interesting excavation of this history imaginable. Comparative study between the two efforts for Marriage Equality comparative study aside the case studys in your book are absolutely fascinating, totally absorbing and quite revelatory of the life circumstances in slave men and women in or out of marriage. And one of the things i was most impressed with in these interwoven stories was the line between intimacy and the untouchable and the question you raise in the subtitle is one of the perils of Marriage Equality. The question of whether it is marriage the does all the work assigned to it in a comparative sense to the Marriage Equality for gays i think it will probably be addressed more thoroughly, i am going to narrow my reflections to a different set of observations and that is because for those who have read anything i have written, i right constantly, i am here because my great great grandmother was married off by the wife of a slave owner, she chose the light skinned women among the house servants should marry for the saving ultimately of her own marriage. As catherine note in some of these stories, what i want to note here is marriage among africanamericans in the effective since the institution of marriage among whites. As catherine notes in several histories a significant number of slave marriages were overseen by the boners, master , maste,r dimension of that history came through the ministrations of the wives of the owners and slaveholders and that prompting of the union of slaves to some degree operates like any other marriage. It makes public and exclusivity of intimacy. And eliminat