Michael Hardwick’s arrest. (All images from “The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Intercourse and the Supreme Courtroom 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 grew to become one. Though he’s recognized extensively as being on the epicenter of some of the substantial homosexual rights instances of all time, few know a lot concerning the man exterior of the court docket case. Writer Martin Padgett wished to treatment that.
Padgett’s new biography, The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Intercourse and the Supreme Courtroom within the Age of AIDS, explores the story of the 1986 Supreme Courtroom 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 dwelling 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 Courtroom, which ultimately 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 developed over time. “Successfully, it solely utilized to single individuals and queer individuals — after which ladies have been added into the combination,” mentioned Padgett.
Padgett was curious to be taught 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 eager to be an activist? What did he really feel he was ready to try this different individuals weren’t in a position to do?” Padgett mentioned. “Michael realized with the ACLU attorneys and plenty of individuals locally that placing his identify and face on the case would [add] worth to it. Individuals might see themselves on this case and see what the results could be in case you have been determined in opposition to.”
The creator’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 lawyer, and Gil Robison, who based the Atlanta Homosexual Heart in 1976 and was the primary brazenly homosexual political candidate within the state.
Ultimately, the creator 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 have been nonetheless round. Padgett completed his analysis in 2024.
On the time, the Supreme Courtroom resolution 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 severely and addressing it shortly sufficient,” mentioned Padgett. “Members of the Reagan administration have been brazenly laughing at the concept that 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 response to Padgett, a authorized principle surfaced that the anti-sodomy legal guidelines wanted a star too — and Hardwick grew to become that star.
“When his case was argued earlier than the court docket, 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 quick protests in San Francisco, New York and Atlanta,” Padgett mentioned. “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 through the Anita Bryant decade. Throughout that point, he needed to watch as Byrant waged warfare in opposition to the LGBQT group. He later moved to Atlanta in 1980 and began bartending later that yr.
The case, nonetheless, without end modified his life and the general public’s consciousness of him. Hardwick felt very weak — he fearful about individuals taking a shot at him and was uncomfortable that strangers had entry to his tackle, the place he labored and who he had intercourse with. The layers of privateness had disappeared. He mentioned usually that he didn’t need 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 Seaside. 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 Courtroom is particularly topical now, Padgett feels, citing frequent assaults on the LGBTQ group and the latest 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 Courtroom will welcome some kind of problem to identical intercourse marriage, to privateness legal guidelines. Clarence Thomas has all however known as on individuals to carry him instances that will overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, which might re-institute this period of sexual surveillance. For queer individuals on the market immediately, as in [Skrmetti], it would take individuals standing as much as protest for his or her rights, [which] are imagined to be innate within the Structure. The lesson that Michael’s life has at all times imparted and is coming again to actuality now could be that queer individuals at all times 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 Characteristic and a nominee for On-line Journalist of the 12 months. 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 competition director of Out on Movie, Atlanta’s LGBTQ movie competition, and lives in Avondale Estates along with his husband, Craig.
