Extreme Makeover The story behind the story of Lawrence v. Texas.

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/03/12/120312crbo_books_lithwick


Tyron Garner and John Lawrence had a secret to keep: they weren’t guilty as charged.

In 2003, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Lawrence v. Texas, ruling, by a six-to-three margin, that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional. Even those of us who followed the case had a rather gauzy notion of what had triggered the litigation. On the night of September 17, 1998, someone made a phone call to the police, warning that a black man was “going crazy with a gun” in an apartment just outside Houston. A clutch of sheriff’s deputies stormed the apartment, and found no gun, but they arrested John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner for having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom. And, in an unlikely series of legal twists, the arrests of Lawrence and Garner became a vehicle for challenging old anti-sodomy laws that were used solely to shame and stigmatize gay couples. Lawrence and Garner were arrested for simply doing what loving couples do.

The story told in Lawrence v. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. By the time the tale poured from Justice Anthony Kennedy’s pen, in his decisive majority opinion, it was even about the physical dimension of love: “When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring.” The opinion used the word “relationship” eleven times.

That is the story that Dale Carpenter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, seeks to untell in his important new book, “Flagrant Conduct” (Norton), a chronicle that peels the Lawrence case back through layers of carefully choreographed litigation and tactical appeals, back to the human protagonists we never really got to know, and back again through centuries of laws criminalizing “unnatural” sexual activity. What if, Carpenter asks, this weren’t a story about love, or even sex? What if, in the end, Lawrence v. Texas was less a whodunnit than a who didn’t? And, if there was no sex, let alone an intimate relationship, in John Lawrence’s apartment that night, how did the case come to be about both?

Start with the two men charged with sodomy. When Lawrence, who was born in 1943 to devout white Southern Baptists, was enlisting in the Navy, he quizzed a buddy about the forms he was filling out. “What’s a homosexual?” he wondered. Neither knew the word. Both were gay. After leaving the Navy, Lawrence moved to Houston, worked as a medical technician, and totted up a slew of drunk-driving violations, including a conviction for murder by automobile, in 1967. In the late seventies, he moved into a run-down complex in East Houston populated by underemployed youngsters and strippers who liked to party. Lawrence largely kept his sexual orientation a secret at work, and was anything but a gay-rights activist. Right to the end of the litigation bearing his name, Lawrence’s principal beef was that overzealous policemen had invaded his home without a warrant.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/03/12/120312crbo_books_lithwick#ixzz1oST8rvtV

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1. I love this story - gives me goose bumps. Thanks for sharing, xchrom!

[William769]

2. Thanks.

The back story is just as important.

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3. The very last paragraph to this is sad, IMO.

>>At a press conference after the decision was announced, Lawrence read a brief prepared statement and Garner said nothing. Some advocates hoped that Garner might have a career as a gay-rights spokesman. After he gave a drunken speech at a black-tie dinner in the plaintiffs’ honor, that idea was scratched. The case is called Lawrence v. Texas. John Lawrence died last November. Almost no one took note. Garner died five years earlier, at the age of thirty-nine. When Lambda Legal proved unable to raise funds for a proper memorial or burial, Harris County cremated him and sent his ashes home to his family in a plastic bag. There was no funeral. <<

What can one say. They were flawed people whose successful act of bravery improved the lives of really everyone in America. Doesn't mean you have to like them, but personally, I'm grateful for what they did.

[xchrom]

4. yeah -- that made me feel really bad.

and i noted -- i didn't hear word one they had tried to raise money for his funeral.

how hard did they try?

[closeupready]

5. It's certainly possible they wanted to disappear after the ruling.

I'm sure they both got their share of hate mail and calls and such from Neanderthals and dittoheads. That would seem to be the most likely sequence of events, given how they both seemed to be reluctant initially.

[xchrom]

6. i don't know if we will ever know all that happened to them in the wake of the ruling. nt

[mitchtv]

7. Thanks for that

a truly good story that will go down in history. People will study this, I hope someone has been collecting some more of their lives. Can't wait for the movie

[HillWilliam]

8. Read it all

Rec'd.

[beyurslf]

9. I am glad we know this story now. They were brave men, however flawed.

And a testament to this site, I recall hearing that Lawrence died last year. It may no have been widely noted, but it was noted here.