Category Archives: LGBTQ

Judging Sex: From Bowers v. Hardwick to Lawrence v. Texas

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Tyron Garner, left, and John Lawrence, right, react to the decision in Lawrence v. Texas.

Tyron Garner, left, and John Lawrence, right, react to the decision in Lawrence v. Texas. Image: Metro Weekly

This week, two related Supreme Court cases both mark anniversaries.

Twenty-seven years ago (and yes, I totally had to get out my calculator for that one), on June 30, 1986, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick. In it, the court concluded, “The Constitution does not confer a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy.” That is, even though previous courts had established and upheld a constitutional right to privacy when it came to some matters of sexual health — such as in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade — states were free to enact laws that made it illegal for people to engage in “homosexual sodomy” — basically, outlawing same-sex couples from having oral or anal sex.

June 26 is the 10th anniversary of Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down sodomy laws nationwide.

On its way to the Supreme Court, the relevant appeals court held that laws that discriminated against same-sex couples’ consensual sexual activities violated an individual’s “fundamental rights because his homosexual activity is a private and intimate association that is beyond the reach of state regulation by reason of the Ninth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” However, other courts of appeals had issued rulings in conflict with that sentiment. When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Bowers, it explicitly rejected that same-sex sexual activity fell under the same constitutional right to privacy:

No connection between family, marriage, or procreation, on the one hand, and homosexual activity, on the other, has been demonstrated, either by the Court of Appeals or by respondent. Moreover, any claim that these cases nevertheless stand for the proposition that any kind of private sexual conduct between consenting adults is constitutionally insulated from state proscription is unsupportable.

However, another date in June — the 26th, to be specific — marks the 10th anniversary of a different case involving gay rights: Lawrence v. Texas. That ruling reversed and overturned the court’s decision in Bowers.

So in those 17 years between Bowers and Lawrence, what changed? Continue reading →

LGBTQ Legislation in Arizona

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Phoenix Gay Pride Parade, 2010. Photo: Fritz Liess via Flickr

Phoenix Gay Pride Parade, 2010. Photo: Fritz Liess via Flickr

I’m certain everyone read yesterday’s post on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (that’s today) and thought, “I’m so glad I live in Arizona, where the state legislature and judiciary would never further oppress an already marginalized group of people!”

Right?

Right?

Of course, the reality is that even recent Arizona lawmakers have established a trend of creating legislation that further harms women, people of color, and poor people. Sadly, we can add gay people and trans* people to that list as well.

Adoption Law — While the state’s current adoption statute allows unmarried people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, to petition to adopt, only a “husband and wife” may jointly adopt children. It does not provide for joint adoption by people in other domestic partnerships. In fact, if other factors are equal, current law gives explicit placement preference to “a married man and woman.” Moreover, additional legislation has been introduced at least twice — once in 2006 and once in 2010 — to attempt to require adoption agencies to give “primary consideration” to married couples seeking to adopt.

Speaking of Marriage — Queer folk can’t do that here. If they do get married in a place where the local legislation allows it, the state of Arizona won’t recognize the marriage.

Birth Certificates — The statute does allow for an amended birth certificate if the person applying for such has had “a sex change operation” (sex reassignment surgery) and a note from their doctor saying as much. Certainly this is preferable to not having the option. However, it ignores some of the realities of sex reassignment surgery — that it can actually be a number of surgeries, that it comes with risks (e.g., general anesthetic) that can make it unworkable for some people, that it’s expensive and generally not covered by insurance, that providers are few and far between. Continue reading →

International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia

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prideIDAHO.

That’s tomorrow — May 17.

The International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.

Homophobia and transphobia — or rather, anti-gay and anti-trans thoughts, words, and actions — are deeply rooted in many cultures, including inside the United States. In reality, they need far more than one day of discussion and recognition. One day is not enough.

When I started thinking about this post, I thought of all the ways such sentiments show up in everyday life. It’s so much that I couldn’t possibly write everything. Then I thought some more — this was when Arizona SB1432, the “show your papers to pee” bill, was topping my newsfeeds — and it occurred to me how very much of this discrimination has been coded into law, is being encoded into law even now.

Even then, I had to narrow my search parameters — to the United States, to the relatively recent past. Otherwise, it’s just too much.

And even then, a lot of the bias remains in what’s not covered — people and situations for which the law does not provide. For groups of people who are still discriminated against, harassed, threatened, assaulted, killed by individual citizens or private organizations — this lack of necessary legislation still causes active harm.

This first set examines a number of laws — some national, some state — and Supreme Court rulings from the recent past.

1960 — Is as good a place to start as any. This is because in 1960, every state in the United States maintained laws against sodomy. Illinois was the first state to repeal its statute in 1961; Arizona followed suit 40 years later.

1967 — In Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the United States Supreme Court held that gay folk were included under those “afflicted with psychopathic personality.” They could thus be refused admission — or deported — simply for being gay. This remained in effect until immigration law was reformed in 1990. Continue reading →

Book Club: Outlaw Marriages

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Sally Ride, the famous astronaut who passed away in July from pancreatic cancer, left an unexpected gift to America’s youth. In her obituary, it was revealed that Ride, the first American woman to travel into outer space, had been in a committed, same-sex relationship for 27 years with her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy. Having quietly come out, she now serves as an important, high-profile role model for LGBTQ youth.

Although it became public knowledge too recently to be included, Ride’s story mirrors those found in a recently published collective biography by Rodger Streitmatter. Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of Fifteen Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples (Beacon Press, 2012) visits the topic of same-sex marriage in the United States, covering 140 years of history in 15 marriages, from 1865 to 2005.

Marriage practices have taken many forms across time and across cultures.

Streitmatter, a professor of journalism at American University in Washington, D.C., profiles the marriages of luminaries ranging from poet Walt Whitman to screen star Greta Garbo, bringing his subjects to life in stories that can be fascinating, poignant, and even humorous. The 15 marriages he chronicles were “outlaw marriages,” because “each pair of men and each pair of women defied the social order by creating sub-rosa same-sex marriages long before such relationships were legally sanctioned.” Continue reading →

Book Club: Flagrant Conduct

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Although books have shaped much of my political thinking, until recently I never did much reading about LGBTQ equality. My own reasoning made me an ally, so I wasn’t as well versed as I could have been. That’s why I never knew the full importance and the unlikely history of the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas — the landmark case that put sodomy laws on trial — until I picked up Dale Carpenter’s recently published history of the case, Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas (W. W. Norton, 2012).

Sodomy laws gave police leverage to harass members of the LGBTQ community.

Flagrant Conduct tells the story of two men who were arrested for what they didn’t even know was a crime. They could have paid fines to put the incident behind them quietly, but activists and legal counsel convinced them to take their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Although they were strangers to activism, the two men agreed to use their case to defeat an unfair law. Five years later, the two men and their attorneys won a high-stakes victory in a conservative Supreme Court.

The arrest of John Lawrence and Tyron Garner in Houston on September 17, 1998 — 14 years ago today — was the event that led to Lawrence v. Texas. That night, deputies responded to a 911 call reporting that a man was “going crazy with a gun” in Lawrence’s apartment. The deputies who arrived never encountered a man with a gun, but they arrested Lawrence and Garner for engaging in, as the offense report put it, “deviate sexual intercourse[,] namely anal sex.” The two men were charged with violating the state’s “Homosexual Conduct” law, Section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code. The law, which criminalized same-sex sexual intimacy, was put in place when Texas revised its sex laws in 1973, giving more sexual freedoms to heterosexuals but fewer to gays and lesbians. Continue reading →

Becoming a Woman

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Vagina. It is a fairly innocuous word, don’t you think? But in today’s America, it has become more than a correct clinical term for female genitalia; it has become a naughty word. Suddenly, in a presidential election year notable for its lack of substance and abundance of acrimony, the vagina has taken center stage. The rules, however, for its inclusion seem to be muddy. Countless state legislatures have passed increasingly draconian laws that relate directly to the vagina. Ironically, the majority of people who have been most vocal in anti-vagina activities do not have one. In Michigan, at least, it has even become a word whose use can get you banned from speaking on the legislative floor. Love, lust, empowerment: These are all words that describe feelings different people have about vaginas. But what about envy?

The closer I am to getting a vagina, the more I understand that I don’t actually need one to be the woman I am.

A few days ago, I received a private Facebook message from a dear friend. It began, “I got to see my vagina today. For the very first time, my vagina. I know you know how significant that is and I only wish the same for you and soon. It will change your life.”

My friend, Natasha, sent this from her hospital room in Montreal, where she is recuperating from the most significant surgery anyone like us can ever undergo: gender affirmation surgery. We are transgender, which, for those few of you who might not know, is the phenomenon where the gender identity that is programmed into the brain of a fetus does not coincide with the physical sex into which that fetus develops. To make a million long stories short, it is unarguably one of the most painful conditions imaginable, largely because the person suffering from it has to fight tooth and nail to make people understand that it’s real. Continue reading →

Book Club: A Queer History of the United States

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Beacon Press, the nonprofit publishing company of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has a long history of publishing books that have informed and inspired civil rights and social justice movements, from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son to Tucson author Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land. In that tradition, Beacon has launched a new book series called ReVisioning American History. The first in that series is Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States, which was released in hardcover in May 2011 and will be released in trade paperback on May 15, 2012.

Bronski frames LGBTQ history as one that is woven into the fabric of U.S. history — not separate from or additional to it.

Bronski explains in the introduction to his book that he is interested in providing something more than a history of “who might have been ‘gay’ in the past or had sexual relations with their own sex.” In fact, his mention of individuals is often pared down to the sheerest character sketches and profiles. Far from a collective biography of LGBTQ Americans, Bronski’s interest in individuals is often limited to a person’s role as agents in a process of evolving gender expectations, agents who sometimes shape those expectations and other times act independently of them. He explains that he doesn’t want to reduce history to “names, dates, political actions, political ideas, laws passed and repealed.” Instead, borrowing the words of Shulamith Firestone, he wants to present history “as process, a natural flux of action and reaction.” Continue reading →

Support Comprehensive Sex Ed to Support Queer Youth

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Since today is National Coming Out Day, I want to shine the spotlight on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and queer (LGBTQ) youth. In the past few weeks, the headlines have been filled with stories about LGBTQ teen suicides, and bullying in our schools.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, LGBTQ youth are four times as likely to commit suicide as their heterosexual peers, mainly as a result of the negative attitudes about LGBTQ people that are so pervasive in our culture.

Arizona is not immune to the negative climate for queer youth in our schools.  One of the challenges is that Arizona schools do not offer comprehensive sex education.  Rather, they focus on abstinence-only-until-marriage curriculum.  Abstinence-only is a huge waste of money, and it’s harmful for all teens.  But let’s look at the particular problems that abstinence-only education creates for LGBTQ youth.

Arizona does not recognize the right of same-sex couples to get married. When LGBTQ youth hear that they should remain abstinent until marriage, they may interpret that message as not being applicable to their lives. As a result, they may have unprotected sex, since teens are not getting information about how to prevent sexually transmitted infections. Is it any wonder that 1 in 4 teens in the state of Arizona has a sexually transmitted infection?

Moreover, abstinence-only curriculum contributes to negative attitudes about LGBTQ people, because it assumes that heterosexuality is the norm. When LGBTQ teens are repeatedly told that they are abnormal, they may experience depression and other mental health effects. Is it any wonder that LGBTQ youth have such alarming suicide rates?

Planned Parenthood supports comprehensive sex education for all of Arizona’s youth. We also support candidates who will support our mission of promoting and protecting every person’s freedom and right to enjoy sexual health and well-being, to make reproductive choices, and build healthy, strong families.

Please lend your support to LGBTQ youth by voting for candidates who support comprehenisve sex education in our schools. Sex ed classes may be one of the few places that LGBTQ teens hear positive messages about themselves in the schools. And we owe it to our youth to send them a positive message. For a list of PPAA-endorsed candidates, check out our 2010 voter guide.