S ince the beginning of the modern homophile movement, gay people have made education of themselves and heterosexuals central to their political project. That dedication to education can be seen in the first lesbian periodical, The Ladder (October 1956-December 1966, which included in its frontispiece a series of statements of purpose, including Education of the variant, with particular emphasis on the psychological, physiological and sociological aspects, to enable her to understand herself and make her adjustment to society in all its social, civic and economic implications-this to be accomplished by establishing and maintaining as complete a library as possible of both fiction and non-fiction literature on the sex deviant theme; by sponsoring public discussions on pertinent subjects to be conducted by leading members of the legal, psychiatric, religious and other professions.For all its talk of adjustment, the authors in The Ladder also were deeply interested in creating what lesbians could be, questioning social norms, and debating critical features of gender and sexuality oppression. As much as it is now current practice to distinguish between the beginnings of the lesbian and gay movement as essentialist and our newer approaches as social constructionist (a parallel gesture also is made in writings about research in education on sexuality), this is often an oversimplification. Far from celebrating essential differences among genders and sexualities, early radical lesbian feminist writing underscored the provisional and political definition of sexual minority status. In the words of the Radicalesbians (1973), "lesbianism is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion" (p. 240). Shifting ideas about sexuality from psychological identity to political statement, they began a move that was further complicated by attention to the intersections of identity. As the Black lesbian antiracist feminist group the Combahee River Collective (1984) put it, although their particular goal was "the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major

In this essay, Cris Mayo describes a tension between recognizing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (lgbt) people by law and giving (or denying) them certain legal rights on the basis of identity, on the one hand, and enabling queer people, not always fully recognizable as inhabiting particular identity categories, to live their potentials, on the other. Laws and rights regulate particular kinds of people, and while lgbt people have pursued civil rights energetically for the last sixty years or so, their queerness continues to complicate their attempts to gain legitimacy. Beyond civil rights claims, queer liberationist claims push the limits of the understanding of identity, sexual practices, and political life, because they prompt us to consider not just abstract possibilities and freedoms but the freedoms and possibilities of people barely recognizable. Mayo shows how these queer claims are often hard to frame in terms of liberal theory and actual law.

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This article addresses complications to how different disciplines define, study, and theorize sexuality, gender, gender identity, and other intersecting categories of subjectivity, like age, race, class, ethnicity, and so on. Categories that seem to get stabilized in empirical work are destabilized in theoretical and narrative research. These differences in key definitions and even refusal to make definitions mark how different disciplines approach research on gender identities and expression and sexualities. The contingency, relationality, and space-related aspects of gender and sexual identity, so key to humanities-based work and qualitative research, may not be amenable to measurement by some research methods. In trying to sort out methodological quandaries in quantitative work, complex subjectivities become a problem to work around, not focus on. What subjectivities mean to those who are developing them or grappling with their limitations may not get the same attention as more measurable things. This article advocates for thinking more capaciously about what counts as research, pushing for recognition of the work queer communities and theorists have been doing for generations and for the work that gender and sexual minority youth continue do now. Complexity, instability, and relationality have been queer practices for a long time, stimulating and responding to generative perversities.