Presentation, a brief presentation of the book and its main issues, history by Katherine Franke and Katherine Franke is a professor of law. The director of the center for gender and sexuality law, which is a wonderful institution that we are happy to collaborate with and she is the author of wedlocked the preils of Marriage Equality, nyu press 2015 just recently out. Catherine has been working on marriage, gender justice, transgender justice, issues of gender and grace in the law. She is a legal theorist, academic, activist public intellectual and an amazing human being. I am happy to be celebrating her that afternoon. Our speakers will go in this order with first Patricia Williams who is the james dorr professor of lot condit. She is the author the blonde goddess. You no doubt know her through her monthly column for the nation magazine entitled diary of a mad law professor in which you can subscribe to add ww w mad law professor. Our second speaker will be mignon moore is associate professor. Her recent examines the intersection of race, gender and Sexual Orientation and her recently her first book is invisible families, gay identity relationships and motherhood among black women. Published in 2011, by the university of California Press and was the winner of that 2013 outstanding book award by the American Sociological Association section on sex and a gender. Shes working on a second book project entitled shadow of sexuality. Social history and social support among africanamerican lgbt elders pick art hurt third speaker is the director of law. Kendall thomas is the coeditor of article race theory. Founded the movement and also coeditor of whats left of theory with judith butler. His most recent writing and Research Focused on the long culture of Death Penalty politics, rachel democracy in brazil and lawn politics of liberalism after the obama presidency. Creek please help me welcome Katherine Franke. [applause]. Thank you so much. Im going to move this. So we can all see one another. I teach a room like and i can manipulate these things. Along with my students. Here is the book. Very exciting. [applause]. Thank you all for coming. Its wonderful to have you come out and honor this book and honor thinking about marriage in a competent way. I know so many of you do that in your own work in your own politics and own lives, so i appreciate having company because the perspectives i have on Marriage Equality are not always the most popular within the Gay Community, so you are community right now. Thank you. Thank you to iris for cosponsoring this event along with my own center. When i was in college at barnard college, i went to college across the way here, sodomy was a crime. That was in new york state and many other states, but i moved here from illinois, to a state that criminalized who i was or at least things i did. Twice while i was a student at barnard i was assaulted by police. They hurled homophobic of the fact that me. Another time i was beaten by some guys over here in Riverside Park and police stood by and watched. So, for people of my generation or certainly for me the idea that a lot later we would turn to state regulation as a way to be freer and more equal people, struck me as a strange move. It still strikes me as a strange move. That not many years after our intimate lies were criminalized by the state and we were prosecuted for it, not publicly and privately and thats what i take it to be as private prosecution. That we would invite the state into our intimate relationships and ask the state to regulate them. Thats always struck me as an odd political objective and i thought i would write a book about it and thats what wedlocked is, but i also thought that game gay people are samesex couples are not alone in that experience of having the states regulate their lives in the form of marriage shortly after or in part of the Civil Rights Movement or a movement about the emancipation. So, i turned to what africanamericans went through or actually they werent 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 to marriage now. As a form of liberty and equality. It turns out there is quite a bit we can learn and that is what this book does is it each chapter offers parables for todays movement. Not to quit homophobia and racism as the same thing, not to say that experience of violence and torture and enslavement that black people have suffered in this country is the same thing as what gay people have suffered in various forms of homophobia, but to create with edwards i. E. Describes as a justification between two movements so as we formulate our goals and articulate our values and pursue our political projects today we do so mindful of other movements that we are just opposed with and who can teach us those movements can teach us something about the possibilities and perils of certain political and legal claims. That is what the book aims to do is bring these two movements together, these two moments together to see what lies there and it turns out Marriage Equality does indeed have a racial history. It also has a racial presence and that is one of the takehome points of this book. Its not only be careful what you wish for, but the distinction, the differences between homophobia and racism, the difference between Marriage Equality today and Marriage Equality in the 19th century for newly freed people point out something about the racial endowment that todays Marriage Equality movement has enjoyed. And the ways in which marriage has been an enormously successful method by which to rebrand homosexuality as i say in wedlocked to take the sex out of sexuality. And to redeem the people in particularly certain gay couples who are able to be respectable and seemed entitled, makeup possible claim to entitlement to the blessings of marriage. In doing so, they contrast themselves to those who are deserving of exile from the institution of marriage, who were deserving of social judgment and social stigma and almost always people of color in this country and if so this just position helps us understand, i think, how unfortunately some of what we have one in the Marriage Equality movement have been a kind of zero some politics or zerosum rights working people and some samesex couples have won a right to marry at the expense of others. Both implicitly and explicitly that has been made in the marriage aquatic cases, so let me just say a little bit about what a couple of the chapters doing the careful what you wish or. Marriage and rights in particular can become a form of discipline particularly a form of discipline when many sectors of the Society Still hate you. That it was certainly for newly freed people at the end of the war. Its not that the abolition of slavery abolished racism. Racism took new form. Persisted in old and familiar forms and being able to marry for the first time inaugurated in a way a new regulatory relationship and a new disciplinary relationship for black people with the state. So, when black people coming out of enslavement who lived together as husband and wife were automatically married by operation of law unwittingly in many cases and in their relationships broke up, in any population that will be the case. People took 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 render them subject to the convict leasing system that was developed after the end of the civil war because there was this body of workers that were available to do the agricultural work that enslave people at them before. The convict leasing system with more deadly for black men than was agricultural work while enslaved. So, marriage rights particularly the laws of marriage lots of divorce and the laws of monogamy around marriage ended 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 effects of slavery in the crushing reality of slavery. Part of this was a civilizing mission. What i think we see today as well, of course there is a enormous backlash against there was an enormous backlash against plaque electing that the war and there is a backlash against samesex marriage rights now mostly done undertaken in the name of religion, but not always and to the extent that we have had smooth sailing today on the rights of samesex couples to be married, it has been local in many contexts and in many parts of the country marriage rights are not something people feel they can exercise because they dont feel free to come out. They know they will be retaliation against them. Date experience or metabolize that fear and tends against the backdrop of this message from both people in the Gay Community and out of the Gay Community who say being married will civilize you, will tame those wild sort of lascivious urges of gay men who dont know how to sign up for one among one another and commitment monogamous. We have heard the same thing about africanamericans at the end of, that they somehow had savage sexuality that needed to be disciplined into the institution of marriage so that the civilizing aspect of marriage, the values it carries has its own portfolio. Sometimes overwhelm the values of the communities that seek to exercise these rights in the book tries to answer that as well or to address this. One other place where i think there is a similarity or at least a particularly compelling lesson to learn from the historical connection is about how he right to marry can collapse into a compulsion to marry. Not on the level there are some people who go around america in every state with this diagnostic problem of over marrying. Not that kind of compulsion, i mean. But, the state will compel you to marry. So, the 19th century we saw even before the end of the civil war in order for fleeing slaves, slaves with whom were leaving the plantation to the safety of northern troops who set up refugee camps, around the military operation that they were conducting in the south, a minister was placed at the gates of many of these they called him contraband camps, but refugee camps and you could not gain entry into these cancer that marrying. That was seen as the most pressing problem. That these folks were coming in and complicated familys. Of course, people had lost their spouses and their children and their owners had sold them away in these families were reassembling a comely to the safety of this refugee camps and the northern soldiers and missionaries running them said we cannot let you in in those debauched families. We will marry you at the gate. So, the right to marry turned into a compulsion to marry in many contexts and we see that today as well, not just generally, but here, university. As soon as in new york state we gained the right for samesex couples to marry the university abolish this domestic partner benefits. Said you have a year to marry her partner and if you dont they will be kicked out the health and. Shocking, that a Secular University would get in the business of promoting and enforcing marriage and thanks to the organizing of a bunch of us here at the university, we got them to reverse that policy. But, not for different couples in the president had promised they would actually keep domestic partner benefits for same and different sex couples because in new york city are Partnership Law recognize samesex and different sex, but the only reinstated for samesex couples, so now they discriminate against gay people. Samesex couples are paid more in the sense you can get benefits for your partner whether or not you marry them, but if you are heterosexual or have a different sex partner you have you marry. So, these are some of the difficult questions that i think have come up in history around marriage and around 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 we have lost queer families as kind of the subject of gay rights. In the same way we fought them, 10, 15 years ago. Many of us who were early advocates working on issues of lgbt or queer family rights saw marriage as actually a problem. It was a sexist institution written to legally comfort ties to preserve property and usually male property and creating viable life outside marriage was our political project. Something happened. Something happened and the movement got overtaken by marriage politics, so one last thing i want to offer him and i would love to hear from my colleagues. I feel kind of valley we are racially segregated appear. I may integrate the tables. I have never talked publicly about this, but when i was in college here in barnard, i was sort of coming awakening as many undergraduates students due to being a lesbian and i was reading as a lot of us they. She was a poet and novelist who is very well known in the 70s and 80s and she wrote a journal called the journal of solitude. It was very moving and importance for me and many of my friends. As i was coming out i thought, im going to be lonely when im old. Old to me at that point. She wrote about being old and alone. I worried the only way to not be alone when you are old is to be married and i really didnt want to be heterosexual and i really 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 to read the whole letter. Typed like oldfashioned coming out typing. Remember that . She said what you want is love as a sideline and solitude as the main current. I dont see this as possible. For level of how commitment pretty cheap. This is where marriage comes in. I reach you with terribly afraid of being caught and people who marry simple because they want marriage do often find themselves caught. It looks to me as though you have never loved a man enough 20 marry him. Which was true. [laughter] its as simple as that. When you do and hope you will, there wont be any argument and then wouldnt see when 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, lets me just quickly from Justice Kennedy and that the burger felt decision. It is a decision from the Supreme Court recognizing a constitutional right for samesex couples to marry and one of the things he says is this marriage response to the universal year that a lonely person might call out only to find it knowing their. It offers hoping companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other. Really . There is no life other than just dark loneliness if youre unmarried . This is the price of unfortunately when the right to marry is that life outside of marriage, whether you choose it or you find yourself there for coveted reasons is a grim lonely dark life. Thats not a queer value. In my mind, and i think we can look to the Africanamerican Community to see enormous resilience, creativity and flourishing in life outside of marriage. So, thank you so much. [applause]. Scenic it is so wonderful to be part of this conversation. Thank you so much for inviting me and congratulations, kathryn. Wherever you are. This book is really the most interesting throughout of this history imaginable and comparative study between the two efforts for Marriage Equality comparative study aside, the case studies in your book are absolutely fascinating, totally absorbing of the life circumstances of enslaved men and women in a row to marriage. One of the things i was most impressed with in these interwoven stories was the valuable line between tbilisi and untouchable. The question you raised of a subtitle is one of the perils of Marriage Equality. The question of whether it is marriage that does all the work in a comparative sense to the Marriage Equality for gays. I think will probably be addressed more thoroughly than i buy mignon moore and kendall. My observations, for those of you that have read anything that i have written i write costs only about my line item here because my great great grandmother was married off by the wife of a slave owner who chose the light skinned it will hit marry for the saving, i think, ultimately of her own marriage. So, as catherine notes in some of the stories, i think that what i want to note here is that marriage among African Americans really did a fact and, i mean, affect in the affective sense the institution of marriage among whites. As catherine notes in several history of significant number of slave marriages were overseen, shall we say by owners, by the masters. In another dimension of the history is the degree to which much of that permission to marry kim about as much through the mail owner property, but through the civilizing, uplifting and ever so self interested ministration of the wives of the slaveholders. That prompting of the union of slaves to some degree operates like any other marriage, it makes public and exclusivity of intimacy. To some degree it eliminates the dangerousness as well as the perversions of sexuality, but marriage among africanamericans both antebellum police until 1967 is a double edge think. Purifying, respectively making, but also underscoring the dangerous untouchability of blacks sexual bodies. Those first africanamerican marriages were a ritual after all performed against the backdrop of the breeding farms that kathryn talks about in the. And the mysteriously light skinned House Service and un