PowerPoint Slides, Inaugural Professorial lecture, 10 May 2016

1. The Militant Homosexual: Historic Reflections and
Future Directions in the Regulation of Sex(uality)
Professor Chris Ashford
School of Law, Faculty of Business and Law
@lawandsexuality

4. 2005
2008, Chicago Pride

5.  "Bert and Ernie are best friends. Even though they are identified as male
characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most
Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual
orientation."

6.  ‘Moment of Joy’ by Jack Hunter
 United States v Windsor (2013)
 A new domesticity

8. 3 May 2016, TMZ

9.  “I warn her [Margot James MP], I
fear the playing field is not being
levelled I believe the pendulum is
swinging so far the other way, and
there are plenty in the aggressive
homosexual community who see
this as but a stepping stone to
something even further.”

10.  I sought to distinguish between honourable people like Margot as
against a number of people in the gay rights community for whom
this bill is but a stepping stone towards further change. For example,
Chris Ashford […]said recently:
 “There remain numerous sexual freedoms to campaign on – yes
sexual – that’s what gay rights is about, not merely a civil rights
campaign – and there are battles still to be won. Battles relating to
pornography, the continued criminalisation of consensual sexual
acts, re-constructing our ideas of relationships in relation to sex,
monogamy and the illusion that only ‘couples’ might want to enter
into a state-sanctioned partnership, are just a handful which spring
to mind.
 “The marriage bill should be welcomed, but it is not the end of the
journey, or the final piece in a jigsaw. It is just another step – albeit a
significant one- on a never-ending journey” (emphasis added).
 [...]
 Perhaps a better way of describing this tendency would be
militant but I hope I have made the point that we can expect
demands for more change which would seriously destabilise our
society.

11.  Sexual Offences Act 1967
 Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980
 Local Government Act 1988
 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994
 Sexual offences (Amendment) Act 2000
 Adoption and Children Act 2002

12.  Sexual Offences Act 2003
 Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003
 Civil Partnership Act 2004
 Equality Act 2006
 Equality Act 2010
 Protection of Freedoms Act 2012
 Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013

13. • Stonewall/Ben Summerskill:
‘the last piece in the
legislative jigsaw’
• What is that picture that’s
been created?
• Who decided what it should
look like?

14. Auchmuty (2007: 117): ‘But once we become
insiders, we not only lose some of the culture’s
special qualities and strengths, we also open
ourselves up to surveillance and control, and we
may be forced to ‘conform to survive’’.

15.  Sexual Offences Act 1967
 Public Sex – Ashford (2006, 2007,
2012a, 2012b)
 Cottaging, Cruising, Dogging
 Communities and Local
Government HoC Committee
(2008), Government (2009)
 Law Commission (2015)
 Katharine Parker – PhD work

16.  Let’s not talk about sex?
 To define or not to define?
 Who to define?
 Alexander Maine – PhD work

17.  Sex Work
 Ashford (2008, 2009)
 Bareback Sex and Pornography
 Ashford (2010, 2015)
 Law Commission (2015)

18.  Heteronormativity – the institutions, structures and understanding of orientation that make
heterosexuality seem coherent and privileged
 Cook(2014)
 Cobb (2010)
 Ashford (2009, 2011)
 ’Queer theory challenges heterosexuality’s normative status, rejecting the binary labels that
describe gender, sex and sexuality. As such, it has criticised the liberal rights seeking agenda
that has come to dominate the lesbian, gay and bisexual political programme…’ (2009)
 ’[the homonormative] shifts a legal discourse that constructed gay men in the 1970s and
1980s as evocative of disease and promiscuity and prior to 1967 as the victims of blackmail,
men hiding in the legal shadows. This negative discourse is replaced by an assimilationist
legal discourse in which the homosexual is constructed as ‘one of us’ (2011)

19. –Derek Jarman (2000) Smiling in Slow Motion, 218
“…the sort of opaque intellectualism that
tries to define something new and doesn’t
quite grasp what it might be…”

20. Rubin (1984) ‘Sex
Hierarchy: The
Charmed Circle v
The Outer Limits’

21.  The 'Aggressive Homosexual 'Community
 The 'Militant' Homosexual
 Duggan (2003) The Twilight of Equality
 Altman (2013) The End of the Homosexual?
 Leckey (2015) After Equality
 Signorile (2015) It’s Not over (beyond ‘tolerance’)
 Harding (2011: 186) ‘Resistance, in all its forms, is
necessary, everyday and often mundane’
 Altman & Symons (2016) Queer Wars – international law,
rights based

23.  Relationship recognition
 Post-equality rights framework
 Sex - multi-partner/pornography/safe-unsafe dichotomy
disruption/drugs/private v public sex
 Moves beyond the binary constraints of Rubin
 Queer spaces
 Age and the consent agenda
 Technology and identity
 Pornography

24.  Chris.ashford@northumbria.ac.uk
 @lawandsexuality
 Law and Society Research Group
 Gender, Sexuality and Law (GSL) https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-
us/academic-departments/northumbria-law-school/research/the-gender-
sexuality-and-law-research-interest-group/