Court case with two gay men having sex arrested
Lawrence largely kept his sexual orientation a secret at work, and was anything but a gay-rights activist. In the late seventies, he moved into a run-down complex in East Houston populated by underemployed youngsters and strippers who liked to party. 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. 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. Start with the two men charged with sodomy.
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? What if, Carpenter asks, this weren’t a story about love, or even sex? What if, in the end, Lawrence v. 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. 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. Texas was a story of sexual privacy, personal dignity, intimate relationships, and shifting notions of family in America. Tyron Garner and John Lawrence had a secret to keep: they weren’t guilty as charged.