Before Lawrence: Texas Sodomy Laws and the Making of a Queer Social Movement

In its landmark 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the United State Supreme Court invalidated the Texas homosexual conduct law, which since 1973 had prohibited “deviate sexual intercourse” between members of the same sex, as well as similar statutes in a dozen other states. This final victory did not, however, materialize out of thin air when police officers arrested John Lawrence and Tyron Garner in 1998. While the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence marked a pivotal moment in the struggle for equality, the case should be viewed as the culmination of a social and legal revolution that had been building for nearly three decades rather than a sudden or unexpected development. This paper will chronicle a variety of legal challenges to the Texas homosexual conduct law before Lawrence v. Texas. Although in some respects it is possible to trace legal challenges to Texas sodomy laws to the mid-nineteenth century, it was during the late 1960s that advocates for gay and lesbian equality started questioning the constitutionality of these laws and achieving partial victories in both state and federal courts. Partly because of the significance of the Lawrence decision itself, the legal challenges to various iterations of the Texas sodomy law between the late 1960s and the late 1990s are critical for understanding the deep historical roots of the recent gains of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. By providing a necessary blueprint for the personal sacrifice, adaptable legal strategy, and robust organizational support required to launch a successful legal challenge to the Texas sodomy law, the pre-Lawrence cases documented in this paper made possible the Supreme Court victory in 2003 and were therefore equally important to achieving the subsequent gains in the struggle for gay and lesbian equality.