Daniel Hurewitz: "Sexuality Scholarship as a Foundation for Change: Lawrence v. Texas and the Impact of the Historians' Brief", 2004
[Space added to facilitate reading on this website]
On the last Thursday in June 2003, the United
States Supreme Court struck down a Texas state law criminalizing homosexual sex, determining that the 30-year-old
law violated the U.S. Constitution. The decision, Lawrence
v. Texas, which affirmed the right of John Lawrence and
Tyron Garner to have sex at home, was a watershed moment. The next day, newspapers across the country shouted
headlines like "Gay Rights Affirmed in Historic Ruling"
and "Decision Represents an Enormous Turn in the Law."1
Indeed, while it is not uncommon for the nation's highest
court to strike down state laws and reverse the decisions of
lower courts, in this case the court also overturned its own
decision from 17 years earlier. In so doing, the court declared all anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional and, according
to some observers, articulated one of the most significant
human rights decisions in the country in nearly 50 years.2
Clearly, the implications of such a decision are wide-spread and multi-faceted. One set of implications, though,
derives from the fact that the arguments presented to the
Supreme Court-and reiterated by the justices in their decision-rested heavily on the scholarship of historians of sex-
uality. The historians' interpretation of the past, and particularly of the changing meaning of sodomy and sodomy laws,
proved crucial to convincing the justices to go against their
own precedent. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion read like a final paper from a course in the history of sexuality. Within it, he not only offered the accepted academic
narrative of the history of sexual identities, but he also cited
several sexuality scholars directly.3
The decision demonstrated the powerful way that scholars can aid advocates
working at the frontlines of human rights battles. At the
same time, though, the decision also raised questions about
the implications of putting history to work in this way.
Because jurists draw on history for different purposes than
academics, the ramifications of their use of scholarship war-
rant greater consideration. Toward that end, this commentary attempts, first, to lay out how and why the history of
sexuality managed to play such a key role in shaping the
Court's decision, and secondly, to highlight the larger, more
problematic implications of using scholarship for advocacy.4
Importantly, these questions about applied scholarship
have equal relevance for the health fields. Like these historians, many U.S. health professionals had long been opposed
to sodomy laws. In fact, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986
case that the court overturned, both the American
Psychological Association and the American Public Health
Association had tried to bring their expertise to bear on the
decision. They explained to the court the harmful effect of
sodomy laws, detailing how criminalizing homosexual ac-
tivity created a social stigma that was detrimental to mental
health and interfered with the research and educational
campaigns designed to combat AIDS.5
This effort to bring
scholarly work to bear on policy decisions is familiar terrain
to public-health workers. In 1986, however, those health arguments were not enough to sway the Court. Thus for
health professionals, the Lawrence decision not only transformed how homosexual behavior can now be addressed
from a health perspective, it also offered a demonstration of
the strengths and weakness of applying academic work in
the legal arena. What follows should therefore be read as a
case-study investigation into the broader repercussions of
applying sexuality scholarship in advocacy situations.
In part, the excitement of Lawrence lay in the fact that
it overturned the Supreme Court's own precedent in Bowers
v. Hardwick, marking both the success of gay-rights ac-
tivism and the possibility for future victories. That 1986
precedent was established after a Georgia man, Michael
Hardwick, challenged the state law that criminalized oral
and anal sex. At that time, the Supreme Court declared it-
self "quite unwilling" to "announce. . . a fundamental right
to engage in homosexual sodomy."6
In Bowers, the justices framed their decision in the lan-
guage of tradition and history, arguing that history revealed
a long-standing condemnation and criminalization of
homosexual activity. On behalf of the majority, Justice
Byron White cited earlier cases indicating that the
Constitution protects only those rights that are "implicit in
the concept of ordered liberty" and "deeply rooted in the
Nation's history and tradition."7
Using either of these formulas, White wrote, any claim that homosexual sodomy
should be protected "is, at best, facetious." Instead, he
traced the presence of sodomy laws back to the original U.S.
colonies and asserted that "[p]roscriptions against such acts
have ancient roots." In a supporting opinion, Chief Justice
Warren Burger traced them even further, to Roman law and
"Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards."8
Using history as their tool, then, the justices insisted
that homosexual sex had, essentially, always been a crime
and thus could, justifiably, always be treated as one if a state
so wished. The Bowers decision, while infuriating to many,
was thus a stark reminder of the power that historical arguments could hold in shaping legal arguments in the U.S. In
this country, because judicial rulings rely heavily on prior
legal interpretations and because of the Court's emphasis on
rights that are "deeply rooted in the nation's history and tradition, " a battle over historical interpretation can constitute
a key argument at the heart of a case.
Much changed in the 17 years between the Supreme
Court's considerations of Bowers and Lawrence, including
several of the justices on the Court. The most significant
change was the dramatic increase in the visibility of gay
men and women in American public life, fueled in part by
overdue attention to the AIDS epidemic. In the same period,
sexuality studies and gay scholarship increased greatly as
well. The amount and quality of research into the questions
the Justices considered in Bowers-particularly how much
and what kind of opprobrium homosexuality received in the
past-had multiplied exponentially. Indeed, by 2003
scholars had produced a fairly extensive array of research
contextualizing early sodomy laws and explaining their use
in regulating many forms of non-procreative sex. If the justices again wanted to rest an opinion on the "ancient roots"
of sexuality laws, there now existed a bounty of sources to
clarify those roots.
To be certain, sexuality scholarship was already a dynamic field when Bowers was decided in 1986.9
In fact, in
the 1980s historians of Western sexuality were debating a
host of questions that were closely linked to Justices Burger
and White's claims about the "ancient roots" of contemporary laws that targeted gay men. One key debate centered on
whether people had always viewed sexual activities as the
defining basis of a personal identity, or whether the notion
of possessing a "sexual identity" was relatively new.10
Michel Foucault and others insisted that the idea of a
homosexual identity only began to emerge in the late 19th
century. Prior to that, Foucault claimed, same-sex activity
was viewed as a sin, but the people who engaged in same-
sex acts were not viewed as essentially different from their
peers: sexual behavior was not understood to be the founda-
tion for a personal identity.11
However, John Boswell argued
that people who engaged in homosexual activities were seen
as having a separate identity much earlier, at least as far
back as the twelfth century.12
And when Burger and White
essentially charged that men convicted of sodomy under the
most ancient laws were fundamentally the same as 2Oth-century gay men, they were, in a sense, offering the most
extreme argument: that people who engaged in same-sex
activity had always been viewed as different and always
treated with scorn. Therefore, though hardly rigorous in
their assertions, the justices' claims could be viewed as fitting into the wider scholarly debates of the 1980s.
That intellectual climate had changed definitively by
2003. Not only was there much more sexuality scholarship
in existence, but the majority of historians had come to
share Foucault's position that sexual identities were socially
constructed and that a 20th-century homosexual was not
comparable to an 18th-century person convicted of sodomy.
When the Lawrence case came before the Court, a group of
10 historians filed a brief in support of Lawrence and Garner
in order to preclude the Court from again asserting that centuries of tradition upheld laws against homosexuals. They
set out to make explicit that the targets of early sodomy
laws were not equivalent to contemporary homosexuals.
The historians' brief was drafted initially by University
of Chicago historian George Chauncey--in consultation
with the plaintiffs' attorneys-and then circulated among
the other historians who edited it as they saw fit.13
The brief
ultimately made two basic arguments. First, it maintained
that sodomy laws in their earlier form did not target homosexual acts exclusively. `"Sodomy,"' the historians wrote,
"was not the equivalent of 'homosexual conduct.14
Rather,
sodomy laws covered a variety of homosexual, heterosexual,
and bestial sex acts that did not lead to reproduction. Thus
the long-standing presence of sodomy laws did not mean
that there was a social category called "homosexuals" that
had also long been recognized as a particular class or group.
The laws were both broader than that, in criminalizing a
host of sexual activities, and narrower than that, in recognizing an identity in none of them. The Texas law against
homosexuals, therefore, lacked "a significant historical
pedigree" because "the history of antigay discrimination is
short, not millennial."15
Secondly, the historians detailed that short history, contending that U.S. sex laws had only recently been used by
states to target homosexual activity. The period from the
1930s to the 1960s, they explained, saw an unprecedented
wave of state and non-state discrimination. Police closed
bars where homosexuals gathered; Hollywood producers
censored homosexuality out of films; and the federal government began driving homosexual men and women out of
the civil service. "Discrimination on the basis of homosexual status," the brief insisted, "was a powerful but unprecedented development of the twentieth century.16
In
fact, the Texas law in question in Lawrence, written onto
the books in 1973, was a product of that development.17
The impact of the historians' analysis was plainly evi-
dent when the lawyers presented their oral arguments to the
Court in March 2003.18
Again and again, the justices chal-
lenged them with claims about history. Early on, Chief
Justice William Rehnquist interrupted the attorney for
Lawrence and Garner to assert, "certainly, the kind of conduct we're talking about here has been banned for a long
time." Justice Antonin Scalia insisted that "if you have a
200-year tradition of a certain type of law ... the presumption is that the State can within the bounds of the
Constitution . . . pass that law." When the attorney for
Texas later explained that homosexual activity was only
specifically criminalized in that state in 1973, Justice
Stephen Breyer suggested, "the issue here doesn't have
much of a longstanding tradition specific to this statute,
does it? "19
History stood clearly at the center of the debate.
That the majority of the justices embraced the histo-
rians' contentions in the Lawrence decision must be recognized as a success for the gay-rights movement and for historians of sexuality, who demonstrated the profound impact
that their scholarship could have. Without question, that
success merits eager celebration and congratulation. But the
case, and particularly its application of history, also raises at
least two broad questions for scholars and advocates.
The first question involves the importance of scholar-
ship used in judicial proceedings. Because scholars regularly
frame and make arguments which other scholars then chal-
lenge, the scholarly consensus of one decade may be sub-
stantially reshaped a decade or two later. But what are the
implications when a historical argument that has been embraced by the courts to codify laws is challenged by other
historians' work ten or twenty years later? Is the Supreme
Court's justification for its ruling also then open for challenge? Or is there a less drastic way for jurists, like historians and health professionals, to acknowledge and incorporate new ideas and new theories into their reading of the
law?
The argument the historians presented to the Supreme
Court is certainly the consensus of the present moment, but
even now it is not without its detractors. Indeed, one such
detractor wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times
within days of the decision, praising the ruling but insisting
that it rested on a historical account which was a false "evasion" that "slighted the past," and that "laws that penalize
homosexuality are, indeed, deeply rooted in our shared traditions."20
Because Kennedy relied so heavily on the argument articulated in the historians' brief, having that history
challenged on the editorial page of the Times seems extremely troubling. More than academic arguments are at
stake: history has provided a foundation for declaring sexual
rights and freedoms.
Yet there are reasonable arguments and good scholarship with which to critique the Court's historical reasoning
in Lawrence. Certainly one could contend, as Justice Scalia
did in his dissent, that while homosexual acts were among
many non-reproductive sex acts included under a wider umbrella of sodomy, same-sex acts were still quite plainly
criminalized. Similarly, while Justice Kennedy clearly understood the difference between the era of early sodomy
laws and our own time, his emphasis on the letter of the law
seemed to diminish a longer history of homosexual discrimination. In stressing that "it was not until the 1970's
that any State singled out same-sex relations for criminal
prosecution," Kennedy seemed to lessen the importance of
the laws that harmed homosexuals much earlier in the century.21
But should a historian dare to quibble with Kennedy
or the brief-writing historians themselves? The political
stakes are now quite high.
Historical arguments are, by definition, interpretations,
and eventually any analytic consensus will be replaced by
another. Certainly, with the facts of this case before them,
conservative ideologues and scholars will have every reason
to try to hasten that replacement, developing a new interpretation of the historical record in order to justify a different judicial decision in the future. Advocates of gay rights
must now hope, therefore, that such a new interpretation
somehow does not arise, or that when it does, other historians find a way to defend the crucial historical arguments
that new cases will require. In such a context, historical
work-and to a degree, contemporary work-on homosexual activity, identity, and discrimination takes on an enhanced political significance. To engage these issues as a
scholar is now explicitly to comment on the foundations of
law and public policy: the future of gay rights and the protection of sexual health may well continue to be bound up
with shifting scholarly debates and interpretations. Such a
prospect, while intimidating to some scholars and inspiring
to others, demands a heightened level of self-consciousness
while mapping the research agendas of scholars of sexuality.
The second question that the Lawrence decision raises
is how gay-rights advocates should use history when the
U.S. courts rely on history in competing ways. One goal of
gay-rights advocates has been to obtain a special protected
status within the court system, marking gays and lesbians
as a group likely to be subject to discrimination and there-
fore in need of heightened protection by the courts.22
In general, U.S. courts try to respect the reasoning of legislators
and not tamper with the laws they write. If laws focus on
certain protected groups, however, namely racial groups and
women, the courts pay much closer attention and require
legislators to justify the laws much more cogently. Granting
gays and lesbians a similar protected status would be a boon
to gay-rights advocates in challenging state codes that prohibit gay adoptions, for instance, or gay marriages. But one
requirement for obtaining that kind of protection is "a history of discrimination."23
Herein lies the complication: in
the context of protected-status discussions, a long-standing
history of discrimination can provide the foundation for judicial intervention; at other times, as Bowers made clear,
that same history can be viewed as a tradition that warrants
no judicial interference. A history of mistreatment could be
used both ways.
In Lawrence, the plaintiffs convinced the justices that
there was not a long-standing history of discrimination
against homosexuals as a specific group of people in order to
provide the grounds for overturning Bowers. But doubtless
attorneys in other cases will want to press the argument that
homosexuals have long been discriminated against as a
group. Will they be constrained by the historical narrative relied on in Lawrence? Certainly they could find historians,
like the New York Times writer, who would push the case for
long-standing discrimination. But what will it mean for different advocates to be offering varying historical narratives?
Likely, attorneys and judges will embrace the historical
argument that best serves their purposes. To a degree, that is
what Justice Sandra Day O'Connor did in the Lawrence case
when she joined the vote of the majority, but on grounds dif-
ferent from Kennedy. She rejected the challenge to Bowers'
history, affirming that sodomy laws did fall within the tradi-
tional purview of states regulating sexuality. But she also
embraced a reading of the Texas code, she said, as "directed
toward gay persons as a class," and therefore evidence of the
kind of discrimination that "runs contrary to the values of
the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause. "24
In
essence, O'Connor chose among the historical material,
using the interpretations that best fit her argument.
That she used the historians' analysis selectively, but
nevertheless supported the challenge to the Texas law, was
the best possible outcome. But it seems equally possible
that hostile attorneys could use the historians' work calculatingly to challenge gay rights efforts. The narrative of a
"short, not millennial" history of discrimination, for instance, may well be used to undercut a suspect-class
claim.25
Thus while last year's legal-historical argument allowed for a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court, in another
courtroom or in the hands of another attorney that same argument might set the stage for tomorrow's defeat. There is
little controlling how historical arguments will be used. But
putting even well-intentioned, competing historical arguments to work in the legal arena may pave the way for con-
flicting judicial opinions.
How should these concerns be viewed by scholars
whose research about sexuality, or other topics, might have
advocacy implications? Certainly these cautions are not intended to discourage historians or other scholars from
bringing their work into the advocacy arena. In fact, the
courts may well be the most exciting place for scholarship
to be used. It is clear that Lawrence has marked an enomous shift in sexual rights and sexual health in the U.S.
But the implications for doing this work are quite dramatic, both for scholars and advocates. While academic de-
bates continue unresolved for years, Supreme Court cases
result in decisions that control American lives for a genera-
tion or two. They are powerful; and as academic work becomes increasingly intertwined with those outcomes, it
will be hard to de-politicize the scholarship. At the same
time, as advocates increasingly bring scholarship into their
work, it will be difficult to prevent the disagreements
among scholars from translating into potentially competing
advocacy agendas.
Fundamentally, the experience of the historians in the
Lawrence case exemplifies more broadly how scholarship
and advocacy can affect each other. As the scholarship becomes freighted with political meaning, the advocacy arguments become tied to scholarly debates. In a sense, the
fights within the two seemingly distinct arenas merge into
one. For public health workers, particularly those who have
worked on HIV/AIDS, this overlap of politics and scholar-
ship is not new. Indeed, it is a demonstration of the familiar
complications involved in work at the borders of the
academy and public policy.
These, though, are simply the complications: the chal-
lenge is to do work that acknowledges the risks and still
aims for the greatest impact.
Acknowledgments
This commentary began as a paper at the Columbia University conference, "Sexual Rights: What Can We Show and Tell?" in June 2003. The author wishes to acknowledge the support of a fellowship with Columbia University's Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the helpful insights and comments of Carole Vance, Alice Miller, Michael Ravitch, Phalen Hurewitz, and two anonymous readers.
References
1. C. Lochhead, "Gay Rights Affirmed in Historic Ruling," San Francisco Chronicle, 6/27/03; J. Biskupic, "Decision Represents an Enormous Turn in the Law," USA Today, 6/27/03.
2. R. Perlstein, "What Gay Studies Taught the Court," Washington Post, 7/13/03.
3. One of the cited sexuality historians, John D'Emilio, later wrote that "it was a dizzying, heady moment for me when I saw the citation and quote from Intimate Matters .... 'Oh my god,' 1 thought, 'History really does matter."' J. D'Emilio, "The Day the Supreme Court Quoted My Book," History News Network, 7/14/03. Available at: http://hnn.us/ articles/l 563.html. 214 Vol. 7 No. 2
4. The implications of historians' participation in U.S. courtroom battles has received interesting discussion after historical work on the cases Webster v. Reproductive Health and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears, Roebuck Company. See the various "Roundtable" essays in Public Historian 12/3 (1990); A. Kessler-Harris, "Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears, Roebuck Company: A Personal Account," Radical History Review 35 (1986): pp. 57-79; R. Milkman, "Women's History and the Sears Case," Feminist Studies 12/2 (1986).
5. See W. Eskridge, "Hardwick and Historiography," University of Illinois Law Review (1999): pp. 631, 680; D. Ogden and M. Ewing, "Brief of Amici Curiae American Psychological Association and American Public Health Association," Bowers v. Hardwick, 1985 U.S. Briefs 140. Both groups made similar arguments in briefs for the Lawrence case. See "Brief of the American Public Health Association, et al." and "Brief of Amici Curiae American Psychological Association, et al." 2002 U.S. Briefs 102.
6. Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), p. 191. The Georgia law in fact prohibited oral and anal sex, whether homosexual or heterosexual, and a heterosexual couple had initially joined Hardwick's challenge. The Supreme Court determined, however, that the only issue they would con- sider was that of homosexual activity. See W. Eskridge (see note 6) and N. Hunter, "Life After Hardwick," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 27 (1992): pp. 531-554.
7. Bowers v. Hardwick (see note 6), pp. 191-192, citing Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 325 (1937), and Moore v. East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 503 (1977).
8. Bowers v. Hardwick (see note 6), pp. 192-193, 196.
9. Among the key works, see J.N. Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.SA., A Documentary (International Publisher: New York, 1976); J. Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the l9th Century to the Present (New York: Quartet, 1977); M. Foucault, History of Sexuality (New York: Knopf, 1978); J. Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980); J. D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983).
10. See E. Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Con troversy (New York: Routledge, 1992).
11. This historical distinction between behavior and identity is similar to the difference health researchers and educators see between contempo- rary gay men and MSMs (or "men who have sex with men"). While the latter do not necessarily view their sexual activities as defining who they are as people, gay men explicitly see their sex lives as a core element of their personal identity. Foucault's argument, in a sense, was that prior to the 19th century a Western man who had sex with another man would not have had any special identity: he would have simply been a man who had sinned. M. Foucault (see note 9), p. 43. See also J. D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3-16.
12. J. N. Katz (see note 9) and J. Boswell (See note 9).
13. Interestingly, Chauncey's own book, Gay New York, made a powerful argument similar to that of the brief, namely that the social opprobrium attached to homosexual behavior in the second half of the 20th century was hardly so rampant in the first half. G. Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890- 1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
14. G. Chauncey, N. Cott, J. D'Emilio, et al., "Brief of Professors of History," Lawrence v. Texas, 2002 U.S. Briefs 102, p. 2.
15. Chauncey et al. (see note 14), pp. 7, 10, 29.
16. Chauncey et al. (see note 14), pp. 13-20, 20.
17. Chauncey et al. (see note 14), p. 29.
18. Importantly, significant historical arguments were also present in the amicus briefs of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Cato Institute.
19. Oral Argument, Lawrence v. Texas, 02-102, pp. 2-3, 37, 39-40. Scalia, who has publicly mocked the Court's decision, did so specifically on its reading of history. The ruling, he said to a group of some 800 conserva- tive activists, "held to be a constitutional right what had been a criminal offense at the time of the founding and for nearly 200 years thereafter." A. Gearan, "Scalia Ridicules Court's Gay Sex Ruling," Associated Press Online, 10/23/03.
20. A. Goodheart, "The Ghosts of Jamestown," New York Times, 7/3/03.
21. Lawrence v. Texas, 123 S. Ct. 2472 (2003), p. 2479.
22. Advocates came closest to achieving this in Romer v. Evans 517 U.S. 620 (1996) when the Supreme Court struck down a Colorado state con- stitutional amendment banning any legal protection based on sexual ori- entation. In that case, however, the Court ruled the law discriminatory at the most basic level and did not deem gays and lesbians as meriting spe- cial judicial protection. See E. Gerstman, The Constitutional Underclass: Gays, Lesbians, and the Failure of Class-Based Equal Protection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and W. Eskridge (see note 5).
23. This language is from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in High Tech Gays v. Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office, 895 F.2d 563, 573 (9th Cir. 1990), as cited in E. Gerstman (see note 22), p. 28.
24. Lawrence v. Texas (see note 21), pp. 2486-2488.
25. Chauncey et al. (see note 14), p. 29.
216 Vol. 7 No. 2
At the time this was first published in HEALTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS Daniel Hurewitz, PhD, was Assistant Professor of History at Tulane University.
Copyright 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and Daniel Hurewitz.
The President and Fellows of Harvard College
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to
Health and Human Rights. www.jstor.org ®
