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2014 Jotwell: J. Things We Like [1] (2014)

handle is hein.journals/jotwell2014 and id is 1 raw text is: Gay Rights in the Workplace http://legalhist.jotwell.com/gay-rights-in-the-workplace/ Katherine Turk, Our Militancy is in Our Openness: Gay Emloyment Rights Activism in California and the Question of Sexual Orientation in Sex Equality Law, 31 Law & Hist. Rev. 423 (2013). Joanna Grisinger Katherine Turk's recent article, 'Our Militancy is in Our Openness': Gay Employment Rights Activism in California and the Question of Sexual Orientation in Sex Equality Law, offers a deeply researched history of gay rights activism in California-the epicenter of the gay employment rights movement (P. 426)-that engages important questions about the benefits and limits of different legal strategies. In this detailed local history of the gay employment rights movement, Turk discusses the work of a number of advocacy organizations in the state-including the ACLU of Southern California, the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, the Metropolitan Community Church, the Society for International Rights, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, the Committee on Rights within the Gay Community, and the National Gay Rights Association-through which activists pressed for equal rights in the workplace. Although this movement was dominated by gay men, Turk makes clear that it is not a story of a fractured movement. Instead, activists throughout the gay community understood the prosaic importance of employment rights, and the employment nondiscrimination litigation at the center of her narrative embodied some of the most universal and consistent claims at the heart of the modern gay rights movement. (P. 428.) Activists called for a new model of workplace rights, as they sought legal protections that combined the equality arguments used by women and people of color with gay liberationist arguments that embraced sexual orientation. In doing so, they contended that a worker's gender and sexual orientation were irrelevant to his or her ability to perform a job, but that the freedom to signal those identities was an essential element of workplace equality. (P. 426.) Thus, the gay employment rights movement rejected equality arguments based in sexual privacy, which assumed that people could-or should-leave their sexual identity behind at the office door. (P. 435.) Instead, activists argued, gay and lesbian workers should be able to participate in the workplace in the same way their heterosexual colleagues did-as workers with professional skills and rich personal lives. However, as Turk demonstrates, gay employment rights arguments were met with a cool reception. Complicating the traditional rights-affirming narrative of Title VII of the she demonstrates that the statutory and judicial landscape of the 1970s was not open to employment discrimination claims based on sexual orientation. The limitations of Title VII, which activists tried-and failed-to use to their own benefit, are particularly apparent in the story of the litigation involving Pacific Telephone & Telegraph (PT&T), one of California's largest employers. Although plaintiffs offered evidence that PT&T was actively hostile to gay and lesbian workers, judges refused to accept arguments that sexual orientation deserved inclusion under Title VII's ban on sex discrimination. As a result, courts effectively severed sex from gender

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