FLAGRANT CONDUCT: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas
The death last November of John Geddes focused attention anew on Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that finally decriminalized gay sex (as well as sex beyond coitus for heterosexuals).
In the wake of out-gay Armed Forces servicemembers, gay parents, gay spouses, out-gay heads of nations, out-gay beauty pageant contestants, it’s had to believe that, up until 2003, having intimate relations with someone of the same sex, or a husband and wife going down on each other, was illegal in much of the United States.
That year, lawyers for the State of Texas, aided by amici curiae from an alphabet soup of anti-gay organizations, attempted to argue that what two consenting adults did in the bedroom somehow affected the larger polity. That they lost seems so natural now. But less than two decades before the court had ruled that only sex for procreation was legally sanctioned.
As often happens in such historic cases, the litigants were not pillars of the community. For every Dredd Scott, there are plenty of Ku Klax Klanners wanting to march past the homes of Holocaust victims. The rather sleazy, distinctly downmarket love triangle that became Lawrence v. Texas once again proved that the true application of justice comes not when it’s applied to the well-heeled, the well-bred or the well-educated; rather.
The case began when a neighbor, jealous that his sometime bedmate was shanking another guy, called police outside of Houston in 1998. The police probably didn’t want to break in on two guys making whoopee, but the law was the law.
The case could have been settled, as had so many before it, with a quiet guilty plea and a fine. But gay activists sensed victory. Led locally by a firecracker named Annise Parker, now mayor of Houston, they persuaded the two men to fight the charges.
By the time Geddes died, he and Lawrence had grown from semi-employable semi-grifters to the dual Rosa Parks of the gay-rights movement. Shakespeare, as usual, said it best: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them."
Fortunately for them -- and for us -- Dale Carpenter, a civil liberties professor in Minnesota, decided that this case was worth a book-length treatment. I don’t know Carpenter’s sexuality and, quite honestly, I don’t care.
What I do know is that he did a great job of unearthing every tidbit about this sometimes tragic, often funny, case. He travels easily from ramshackle bayou apartment complexes to the chambers of Supreme Court judges. All along the way, he keeps his eye firmly on the prize.
The amazing gains we’ve seen in the past nine years wouldn’t have been possible without three drunk men tussling in a rundown Houston suburb. To them, and to Carpenter, we owe our profound thanks.
by Dale Carpenter
Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas
$30 hardcover
W.W. Norton, publisher
