The journey toward legal marriage for gays and lesbians may seem at odds with what looks like a flight from marriage by heterosexuals. But in fact, they are part of the same project: a dismantling of the institution as it once existed--as a rigidly patrolled means by which one sex could exert legal, economic, and sexual power over another--and a reimagining of it as a flexible union to be entered, ideally, on equal terms.