The End of Straight Supremacy
Realizing Gay Liberation

This book presents a cohesive theory of gay life under straight domination.

Shannon Gilreath (Author)

9781107004597, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 19 September 2011

320 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.52 kg

'This book makes brilliant, provocative, eloquent and unabashedly Radical and Feminist arguments concerning Gay liberation, equality, marriage, pornography, and transsexualism.  Shannon Gilreath takes his place as a flaming truth-teller in the magnificent company of those who, like Andrea Dworkin, brook no compromise with the oppressive system that Gilreath calls 'Heteroarchy,' those who, like Mary Daly, name and decry a system that aims to destroy lives, memory and the very being of the female/Gay Self, and those who, like Audre Lorde, know that the erotic is a form of power and that Radical liberated Gay sexuality is inseparable from liberated creativity and culture. Gilreath's arguments are powerfully moving, daring, urgent and essential.' Jane Caputi, Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Florida Atlantic University, Author of The Age of Sex Crime & Goddesses and Monsters

Rooted in the politics and theories of early gay liberation and radical feminism, Shannon Gilreath's The End of Straight Supremacy presents a cohesive theory of gay life under straight domination. Beginning with a critique of formal equality law, centering on the 'like-straight' demands of liberal equality theory as highlighted in Lawrence v. Texas, Gilreath moves to criticize the gay movement itself, challenging the assimilation politics behind the movement's blithe acceptance of discrimination in the guise of free speech and pornography in the name of sexual liberation, as well as same-sex marriage and transsexuality as tools of straight hegemony. Ultimately, Gilreath rejects both the liberal demand for gay erasure in exchange for meager legal progress and the gay establishment agenda. In The End of Straight Supremacy, Gilreath calls gays and their allies to the difficult task of rethinking what liberation and equality really mean.

1. The metaethics of gay liberation
Part I. Equality and Making Meaning: 2. Law/morality: thoughts on morality, equality, and caste
3. Law/power: the appropriation of gay identity in Lawrence v. Texas - and the substantive alternative
Part II. Equality, Sexuality, and Expression: 4. Speech/hate propaganda: a comment on Harper v. Poway Unified School District
5. Pornography/death: the problem of gay pornography in a straight supremacist system
Part III. Millennial Equality: A Primer on Gay Liberation in the Twenty-First Century: 6. Gay/straight: the binary ontology of the gay marriage debate
7. Knowledge/power: reversing the heteroarchal reversals of religion, marriage, and caste
8. Trans/sex: transsexualism, patriarchal ontology, and postmodern praxis
9. Epilogue: flaming, but not burning.

Subject Areas: Law [L], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB], Gay & Lesbian studies [JFSK]