Michael Hardwick’s arrest. (All photographs from “The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Intercourse and the Supreme Court docket within the Age of AIDS” by Martin Padgett, revealed by W. W. Norton & Firm, copyright 2025)
Michael Hardwick by no means envisioned himself as an activist or a public determine, however, by destiny, he turned one. Though he’s recognized broadly as being on the epicenter of one of the crucial substantial homosexual rights circumstances of all time, few know a lot concerning the man outdoors of the courtroom case. Creator Martin Padgett wished to treatment that.
Padgett’s new biography, The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Intercourse and the Supreme Court docket within the Age of AIDS, explores the story of the 1986 Supreme Court docket case of Bowers v. Hardwick and the way it affected the previous Atlantan earlier than and after.
In 1982, a police officer got here to Hardwick’s Atlanta house with a warrant for a unique matter, discovered him having intercourse with one other man and arrested him (in addition to Dwight Sawyer) for sodomy. Hardwick challenged the case and Georgia’s sodomy regulation to the Supreme Court docket, which finally sided with the state in a controversial 5-4 ruling. The regulation stood for 17 years till Lawrence v. Texas did away with state sodomy legal guidelines.
The regulation had taken impact in Georgia in 1905 however advanced over time. “Successfully, it solely utilized to single individuals and queer individuals — after which girls had been added into the combo,” stated Padgett.
Padgett was curious to study extra about Hardwick and realized nobody had put collectively a historical past of him. That motivated the author to dig deeper into Hardwick’s psyche.
“What introduced Michael to the purpose of desirous to be an activist? What did he really feel he was in a position to try this different individuals weren’t in a position to do?” Padgett stated. “Michael realized with the ACLU attorneys and plenty of individuals in the neighborhood that placing his title and face on the case would [add] worth to it. Folks may see themselves on this case and see what the results can be in the event you had been determined towards.”
The writer’s first actual interview was with Jim Bass, a bartender with Hardwick at Backstreet. From there, he obtained the views of Kathy Wilde, Hardwick’s legal professional, and Gil Robison, who based the Atlanta Homosexual Heart in 1976 and was the primary overtly homosexual political candidate within the state.
Finally, the writer was in a position to make contact with Hardwick’s household and persuade them that somebody wanted to inform the story whereas individuals who knew the topic had been nonetheless round. Padgett completed his analysis in 2024.
On the time, the Supreme Court docket determination outraged the LGBTQ group. “The group was already within the grips of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and all of the frustration individuals felt over the federal government not likely taking it significantly and addressing it shortly sufficient,” stated Padgett. “Members of the Reagan administration had been overtly laughing at the concept AIDS was a nationwide downside.”
Actor Rock Hudson and, later, Ryan White — the Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion and was banned from college — had turn out to be the general public faces of HIV/AIDS. In accordance with Padgett, a authorized concept surfaced that the anti-sodomy legal guidelines wanted a star too — and Hardwick turned that star.
“When his case was argued earlier than the courtroom, there was some hope they might win. There was this divide between how the regulation checked out straight privateness and queer privateness, and, when Michael misplaced, there have been rapid protests in San Francisco, New York and Atlanta,” Padgett stated. “These protests didn’t die down all through the summer time and [they] impressed individuals to prepare what was the March on Washington in 1987. It was fury over the HIV/AIDS epidemic and now this authorized facet of queer life simply being dismissed by a number of of the justices who wrote some actually horrible and hateful issues about queer individuals.”
Hardwick was raised in Florida and got here out as homosexual throughout the Anita Bryant decade. Throughout that point, he needed to watch as Byrant waged struggle towards the LGBQT group. He later moved to Atlanta in 1980 and began bartending later that yr.
The case, nonetheless, ceaselessly modified his life and the general public’s consciousness of him. Hardwick felt very susceptible — he apprehensive about individuals taking a shot at him and was uncomfortable that strangers had entry to his deal with, the place he labored and who he had intercourse with. The layers of privateness had disappeared. He stated typically that he didn’t wish to be a star made out of this case — he simply wished it to not occur to anybody else. Hardwick in the end moved again to Florida in 1985 and died of AIDS in 1991.
Padgett himself moved to Atlanta in 1997 and lived right here till 2021 earlier than relocating to Pensacola Seashore. That very same yr, he revealed the critically acclaimed A Night time on the Candy Gum Head, centering round Invoice Smith, a homosexual rights activist, and John Greenwell, aka Rachel Wells, who labored at Atlanta’s Candy Gum Head, often known as the “Showplace of the South.”
Intercourse and the Supreme Court docket is very topical now, Padgett feels, citing frequent assaults on the LGBTQ group and the current United States v. Skrmetti case, which upheld a Tennessee regulation that bans gender-affirming medical care.
“It’s fairly clear that the conservatives on the Supreme Court docket will welcome some kind of problem to similar intercourse marriage, to privateness legal guidelines. Clarence Thomas has all however known as on individuals to deliver him circumstances that may overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, which might re-institute this period of sexual surveillance. For queer individuals on the market immediately, as in [Skrmetti], it’s going to take individuals standing as much as protest for his or her rights, [which] are purported to be innate within the Structure. The lesson that Michael’s life has all the time imparted and is coming again to actuality now’s that queer individuals all the time have to guard their rights — and be seen about doing it.”
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Jim Farmer is the recipient of the 2022 Nationwide Arts and Leisure Journalism Award for Greatest Theatre Function and a nominee for On-line Journalist of the Yr. A member of 5 nationwide critics’ organizations, he covers theater and movie for ArtsATL. A graduate of the College of Georgia, he has written concerning the arts for 30-plus years. Jim is the pageant director of Out on Movie, Atlanta’s LGBTQ movie pageant, and lives in Avondale Estates along with his husband, Craig.