This sociology lesson teaches much about why and how the LesBiGay commodified identity functions in the realms of law and politics. America's commercial culture moves far too fast for America's legal and political systems to control it.¹²⁶ The commodified LesBiGay identity plays like an endless movie as the backdrop for legal and political decisionmaking. When judges look up from their opinions and orders, when legislators look up from their committee reports and floor resolutions, and when administrative agency officials look up from their rules and regulations, whether they are friend or foe to LesBiGays they are going to see isolated frames of that movie. How, then, could LesBiGay academics or activists expect to do anything less? How could they hope to influence the political or legal processes affecting LesBiGay interests without focusing on their commodified identity in those same frames? In short, LesBiGays must negotiate their law and politics through that projected image.¹²⁷

The commodification of LesBiGay identity and the commercialized culture that forms it and is transformed by it are insufficiently reflected in the work of contemporary LesBiGay legal scholars. Those scholars need not revile or revel in advanced capitalism; they need not condemn or cherish the commercial coding of popular culture; they need not expel or embrace the commodified LesBiGay identity. But to be effective in law and politics, they need to acknowledge and to account for it.

Centuries after Aristotle's call to consciousness, another eminent political philosopher, the Renaissance Florentine Niccolo Macchiavelli, expressed his love of country by calling for a realpolitik. He considered it "more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it."¹²⁸ As Machiavelli's pragmatism instructs today's LesBiGay scholars, it may be more fitting to face the "realities" of capitalism's commodification of LesBiGay identity than to ignore them. And only when conscious of these stark "realities" can they be newly awakened to action. Indeed, the fate of LesBiGays in America may be in need of this Machiavellian brand of love.