Dispatch from the Field: Joe's Recommending "Flagrant Conduct"

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.

Joe says:

"On the night of September 17, 1998, two men in Houston were arrested and charged with a little-used statute. They were found, by police, inside their home allegedly having sex, which was a crime under Texas law. Their case eventually made it to the United States Supreme Court, where, in June of 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the two men, thus striking down, nationwide, laws against gay sex. It was a landmark ruling, and one that may prove important when a gay marriage case finally makes it to the Supreme Court. The ruling pitted gay activists against Christian conservatives, right versus left, and had an affect over the entire nation. The Court ruled that no longer could a state criminalize something for one set of individuals while allowing another set to do the same thing. 
 
Flagrant Conduct follows the case in its entirety. First, Dale Carpenter sets the scene by detailing a brief history of gay rights in not only Houston, but Texas and the nation, along with backgrounds on the men accused in the case, the arresting police officers, the legal teams fighting it out in court... all the way up to the nine justices themselves. And then, the reader gets to follow the case as it winds its way to the Supreme Court, culminating in the page-turning oral arguments in front of the justices themselves, to the emotional reading of the Court's decision.

This is in no way a dry courtroom drama of a book. Instead, Carpenter tells a lively, important, and deeply human story of the fight to end the criminalization of homosexuality in the United States. Detailed, highly researched, and deeply personal, "Flagrant Conduct" belongs, tag-eared and highlighted, on the book shelves of every scholar of history, American justice, and fighters for gay rights. 

While the book ends in triumph for gay Americans, it serves also as a cautionary tale of how little it can take to cause misery for so many, and how much of a fight it takes to overcome. As a younger generation takes for granted that every American has full access to the law, this is an important reminder that this is not quite true, and until very recently, it was not true at all. I highly recommend this fascinating and engaging book."