Libby Adler offers a comprehensive critique of the mainstream LGBT legal agenda in the United States, showing how LGBT equal rights discourse drives legal advocates toward a narrow array of reform objectives that do little to help the lives of the most marginalized members of the LGBT community. "Adler invites us to shift priorities, focusing on the poorest and most marginalized sectors of our communities while at the same time resisting and challenging the prototypical frames of gay identity—the picket-fenced same-sex headed household. . . . [An] important contribution toward a more emancipatory queer agenda. . . . [A] timely reminder that the legacy of Stonewall is still unfolding." -- Scott Skinner-Thompson ― Slate " Gay Priori will stimulate its readers’ imaginations. It will challenge its readers, even when they close Adler’s pages, to look outside their field of vision and ask themselves what ideas of sexual justice and other kinds they rule out as unimaginable." -- Robert Leckey ― Sexualities “Libby Adler takes a smart, provocative, and fascinating approach to the question of law reform on LGBTQ rights. Proposing to upend the civil rights horizon formulated by the official representatives of the LGBTQ community, Adler makes a rigorous and radical critique of the conventional wisdom about what it means to 'win' gay rights. We desperately need these kinds of sustained and argued challenges to the mainstream gay rights agenda.” -- Katherine Franke, author of ― Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality Libby Adler is Professor of Law and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University and coeditor of  the fourth edition of  Mary Joe Frug's Women and the Law . Gay Priori A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform By Libby Adler Duke University Press Copyright © 2018 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-7149-6 Contents Acknowledgments, Introduction, PART I. LGBT Equal Rights Discourse, 1. The Indeterminacy Trap, 2. The LGBT Rights-Bearing Subject, 3. Reformist Desire, PART II. A Step Off the Well-Lit Path, 4. Bringing Legal Realism to Political Economy, 5. Making the Distributive Turn, Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1 THE INDETERMINACY TRAP The Unexceptional Case In 1993, a decade before Massachusetts became the first jurisdiction in the United States to treat same-sex marriage as a constitutional right, Christine Huff, a faculty member at the Chapel Hill–Chauncy Hall boarding school in Waltham, sued her employer under state law for discrimination based on sexual orientation. After Huff's successful year as a teacher, coach, and "dorm parent," the headmaster of the school expressed his wish to renew her contract. Huff had been living on campus, and the renewal of her contract would have meant the continuation of that arrangement. In the course of her contract renewal discussions, Huff asked her headmaster whether she could be permitted to live in a dorm with her same-sex life partner. According to Chapel Hill–Chauncy Hall policy, married teachers were permitted to live in dormitories with their spouses, but unmarried teachers who lived on campus were required to live alone. The headmaster refused Huff's request, thereby placing her in a cruel dilemma: scale back on her employment responsibilities or continue to live separately from her partner. Huff left her position and filed a lawsuit. Under Massachusetts law, employment discrimination claims begin in front of an administrative agency called the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD). The governor of the commonwealth at the time was William F. Weld, a socially liberal, fiscally conservative Republican who had received support from a gay organization known as the Log Cabin Republicans. Unsurprisingly, Log Cabin members could be found throughout state government in important positions during the Weld administration. One such person was Michael T. Duffy, whom Governor Weld appointed to the chairmanship of MCAD. As an out gay official at the helm of a state agency, and one who would later campaign for statewide office seeking the support of the gay community, Duffy found himself in a tight spot when Huff's case landed on his desk. The Massachusetts statute that protects against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation had been in place for just a few years at the time. Under the law, an aggrieved person could make out a claim even if the discrimination was not intentional or explicit but was the result of disparate impact, or discrimination that results from a neutral policy that has the effect of disproportionately disadvantaging members of a protected class. That was Huff's principal claim: that gays and lesbians as a group were harmed by the school's attaching on-campus living to certain employment opportunities while permitting only married couples to reside on campus at a time that only heterosexual couple