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No one could have predicted that the night of September 17, 1998, would be anything but routine in Houston, Texas. Even the call to police that a black man was "going crazy with a gun" was hardly unusual in this urban setting. Nobody could have imagined that the arrest of two men for a minor criminal offense would reverberate in American constitutional law, exposing a deep malignity in our judicial system and challenging the traditional conception of what makes a family. Indeed, when Harris County sheriff’s deputies entered the second-floor apartment, there was no gun. Instead, they reported that they had walked in on John Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom.
So begins Dale Carpenter’s "gripping and brilliantly researched" Flagrant Conduct, a work nine years in the making that transforms our understanding of what we thought we knew about Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark Supreme Court decision of 2003 that invalidated America’s sodomy laws. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Carpenter has taken on the "gargantuan" task of extracting the truth about the case, analyzing the claims of virtually every person involved.
Carpenter first introduces us to the interracial defendants themselves, who were hardly prepared "for the strike of lightning" that would upend their lives, and then to the Harris County arresting officers, including a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he had "looked eye to eye" in the faces of the men as they allegedly fornicated. Carpenter skillfully navigates Houston’s complex gay world of the late 1990s, where a group of activists and court officers, some of them closeted themselves, refused to bury what initially seemed to be a minor arrest.
The author charts not only the careful legal strategy that Lambda Legal attorneys adopted to make the case compatible to a conservative Supreme Court but also the miscalculations of the Houston prosecutors who assumed that the nation’s extant sodomy laws would be upheld. Masterfully reenacting the arguments that riveted spectators and Justices alike in 2003, Flagrant Conduct then reaches a point where legal history becomes literature, animating a Supreme Court decision as few writers have done.
In situating Lawrence v. Texas within the larger framework of America’s four-century persecution of gay men and lesbians, Flagrant Conduct compellingly demonstrates that gay history is an integral part of our national civil rights story.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Gays, Homosexuality, Trials, litigation, Texas, Criminal provisions, Law and legislation, Trials (Sodomy), Legal status, laws, NEW LIST 20120331, Trials, Trials, united states, Homosexuality, law and legislation, Gays, legal status, laws, etc., Law, texas, Sodomy, LGBTQ history, LGBTQ law & legal, Lambda Literary Awards, Lambda Literary Award WinnerPeople
John Geddes LawrencePlaces
United States, TexasShowing 3 featured editions. View all 3 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence V. TexasThe Story of Lawrence V. Texas
2013, Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W., W.W. Norton
in English
0393345122 9780393345124
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2
Flagrant conduct: the story of Lawrence v. Texas : how a bedroom arrest decriminalized gay Americans
2012, W. W. Norton & Company
in English
- 1st ed.
0393062082 9780393062083
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3
Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence V. Texas
2012, Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.
in English
0393081966 9780393081961
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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- Created November 23, 2011
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December 22, 2022 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
December 12, 2022 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
December 4, 2022 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
July 23, 2021 | Edited by Jenner | Add subjects, description |
November 23, 2011 | Created by LC Bot | Imported from Library of Congress MARC record |