The California Supreme Court’s decision to protect Mono Lake provides a paragon example of how the public trust doctrine can serve as an environmental guardian – as well as a story full of intrigue, suspense, and high stakes. One unusual aspect of the story is that two of the most important characters are neither people nor cities, nor even geological formations on the land – they are laws. In the Mono Lake case, advocates invoked the public trust doctrine to protect public law interests in the environmental values of the waterway, defending them against private law claims to the water within it. To understand how these public and private interests came into conflict at Mono Lake – and why they continue to harbor conflict across all arid lands – it is important to understand the legal doctrines that govern different aspects of water governance. For this reason, the book begins with the law – tracing the history of the public trust doctrine from its ancient Roman and English roots to its reception in the United States, and the conflict posed by independently developing doctrines of private water allocation law, especially the prior appropriations doctrine of the American West.

This chapter examines life writing texts created by out gay Black men. These texts – written and cinematic – seek to archive Black gay existence in historical and social contexts that are often threatening. More than just records of life, they question assumed knowledge and the certainty we have about the ideologies that order our lives. For these artists, autobiography, a form of ostensible transparency or showing, is about making transparent destructive ideologies. The chapter is structured around four key themes (sex and sociality, injury and identity, the feminine within, and the power of opacity), each of which identifies a recurring strategy in Black gay art making as well as a narrative mechanism for questioning normativity and revealing the constraints placed on Black gay men’s lives. The discussion centers on the following artists: Samuel Delany, RuPaul, Saeed Jones, and Marlon Riggs.

American gay religious autobiography is positioned at the site of contest between the Puritan tradition that holds that sexual urges are sinful and must be suppressed if one is to achieve godliness and the American celebration of individual liberty that involves a rebellion against tyrannical social forces. In a radical reversal of the model provided by Augustine’s Confessions, gay religious life writers invariably discover that organized religious institutions hinder one’s spiritual development and that the genuinely spiritual life begins when one accepts the need to be true to one’s sexual self.

The autobiographical act of coming out was one of the central gestures of US gay liberation. In the late 1960s and 1970s coming out was part of a new defiant way of living homosexuality and promised to transform the social world by showing how gay people were everywhere. Yet, in the period since this time, coming out has tended to be viewed much more suspiciously. For queer theory, coming out is associated with a naïve belief in subjective coherence, stable identity, and liberal personhood, all constructed or produced on the basis of suppressing both social and psychic difference. This chapter challenges this established perspective by foregrounding the wide variety of autobiographical writings in which gay men came out in this period. Far from a step into straightforward coherence, finding identity in these texts is often a fractured and fraught undertaking. The chapter covers a wide range of material, from single-author autobiographies published by mainstream presses to numerous anthologies published by grassroots initiatives. The sheer variety of texts addressed further challenges the singular narrative about coming out that has become established within queer scholarship.

This chapter argues that contemporary memoirs by gay men about transactional sex challenge assumptions that commercial and noncommercial sex divide into separate spheres, and that sex can be cleanly differentiated from other, mundane practices. While these memoirs contain many unambiguous depictions of transactional sex, they also depict moments where transactional arrangements yield intimacies that are far more difficult to categorize. In addition, they raise questions regarding where the “sex” in the sex trade both ends and begins.

This chapter explores the impacts of the Mono Lake case beyond Mono Lake. Its embrace of public trust principles quickly rippled through the California legal system, and then others. The case was cited in state and federal courts. The influence of the decision was felt in legislative, administrative, and even constitutional matters. It drew praise from many scholars but also criticism by property rights advocates, those worried about the constitutional separation of powers, and even environmentalists concerned about the intrusion of property concepts into stewardship. The chapter explores the journey of the Mono Lake doctrine through California and beyond, with special focus on the contrasting paths taken in two neighboring states, Nevada and Idaho. In California, a case protecting the Scott River extended the Mono Lake doctrine to cover even groundwater tributaries of navigable trust resources. Idaho, fearful of the burdens of environmental protection prioritized in California, rejected the majority view of the doctrine as a quasi-constitutional constraint. Nevada, already bound by a quasi-constitutional trust, sought a different approach to preserve appropriative water rights.

Some forty years after the aqueduct first began tapping the Owens Valley, L.A. leaders realized that the city needed still more water. They also realized that there was a wealth of unappropriated water in the next watershed up, just 200 miles further north – the Mono Lake Basin. This chapter explores the extension of the aqueduct to the Mono Basin in 1940 and the acceleration of Mono exports after the second barrel was built in 1970. It begins by introducing the extraordinary features of the Mono Lake ecosystem itself – the trillions of brine shrimp, clouds of alkali flies, and millions of migratory birds that depend on a hypersaline sea – suspended in a high-desert basin marked by dormant volcanism, geothermal activity, and limestone tufa towers rising from calcium laden springs entering Mono’s carbonate-rich waters. It also reviews the human communities of the Basin, including the indigenous Kutzadika’a Paiute and the European settlement that followed the California Gold Rush. Finally, it explores the human and environmental consequences that followed Los Angeles’s acquisition of rights to take water from the Basin, setting the stage for the legal controversy that would follow.

Given the paradoxical media environment for gay athletes and the struggle they face in shaping their own stories, the sports autobiography offers a rich and understudied site to trace the evolution of gay athlete stories in the media. This chapter analyzes five of the most prominent gay athlete autobiographies to date, told over a three-decade time period from 1977 to 2007, to reveal the discourses athletes use to construct their identities surrounding sport, sexuality, athleticism, and identity. The project offers a comparative analysis of the major themes that emerged in gay athlete autobiographies and how these stories were shaped over time and across different cultural and sporting contexts.

This book explores the development of one of our oldest legal principles – the public trust doctrine – which holds that some natural resources are so important to everyone that they cannot belong to anyone, and so the government must protect them for the benefit of all the people. Framing the core public trust principle as a partnership of sovereign obligations and environmental rights, it examines how trust principles fill an important gap in environmental law – and perhaps even constitutional law. The book highlights the epic tale of the fall and rise of Mono Lake – the strange and beautiful Dead Sea of California – and how groundbreaking litigation protecting it became an inflection point in the development of the trust as a tool of environmental law. It explores how the common law doctrine became tasked with protecting environmental interests, and how public trust principles have been instantiated in wider legal frameworks to protect an even broader array of natural resources, including climate stability. The Introduction traces how the doctrine buttresses inherent weaknesses in the foundations of U.S. environmental law, providing needed support for environmental governance.

As environmental devastation in the Mono Basin gathered speed, local resistance gathered force. Scientists who studied the unique geologic and biological resources in the area raised the alarm of impending ecologic collapse. Residents feared for their health and their livelihoods, as water exports eroded the lake at the center of their public lands tourism economy. Gradually, a coalition of locals, students, scientists, birders, fishers, hunters, lawyers, politicians, and government agency staff coalesced around the idea that something had to be done. This chapter explores how that unlikely coalition joined together to mobilize political support for the lake’s preservation, reviewing the origins of the Mono Lake advocacy movement and the strategic legal and political choices they made in laying foundation for the eventual litigation.Volunteers launched a state-wide campaign to “Save Mono Lake,” raising awareness while cultivating relationships with the Angelenos who relied on exported Mono Basin water. The campaign eventually drew inspiration from a good idea, published by a legal scholar and championed by a student who read it in college: the common law public trust doctrine.

American gay military life writing emerged as a discrete literary genre in the last decades of the twentieth century. These memoirs include tales by older men who served in World War II and accounts by younger soldiers who navigated the challenges of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. In this chapter, I compare these two cohorts of writers to examine their experiences of institutional life and male bonding in the American forces. Their stories, and their purpose for writing, reveal how the forces shaped sexual and political subjectivities. Gay men from the 1940s used their narratives to document the service of “fairies” and butch men attracted to one another, straight soldiers and commanders who accepted gay personnel despite official policies, and the infinite opportunities for sex and friendship. Servicemen of recent decades tell a different story of protest. Their gay life was lonelier than their ancestors, and their memoirs function as conversion narratives. In “coming out,” they craft a respectable masculine self to demand the right to serve openly. Soldiers in both eras recall experiences of prejudice and resistance in an organization hostile and conducive to sex and love between men.