Review by Booklist Review
In the mid-1980s, with the gay rights movement in full swing, the ACLU was seeking a test case to challenge anti-sodomy laws. They found it in Bowers v. Hardwick, a case featuring an Atlanta bartender, Michael Hardwick, who was charged with sodomy for sexual activity inside his own home. Hardwick's case ended up before the Supreme Court, which upheld Georgia's sodomy law in a decision that would not be overturned until Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. Although the case is famous, its central character remained largely unknown. In this book, Padgett brings Hardwick to vivid life, drawing on extensive interviews with his family and friends to paint a portrait of a kind-hearted artist who never intended to become an activist. A well-known party boy in his youth, Hardwick would become more introverted in his later life, creating large-scale artworks and spending time with his family and friends until he died of complications from AIDS in 1991. This book is a carefully researched, generous biography of a little-known gay rights figure.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
An everyman finds himself at the center of an epic civil rights case in this bittersweet biography. Journalist Padgett (A Night at the Sweet Gum Head) recaps the life of Michael Hardwick, a gay Atlanta bartender arrested in 1982 for violating Georgia's sodomy law. Although the district attorney declined to prosecute, the ACLU convinced Hardwick to sue to have the law overturned, but the Supreme Court upheld it. Padgett fashions the case into a crackerjack legal drama highlighting society's opposing attitudes: Chief Justice Warren Burger grotesquely likened gay men to Jack the Ripper, while dissenting justice Harry Blackmun situated sexual activity as a matter of "individual liberty." Hardwick emerges as a charismatic, hard-partying figure in the fizzy gay scenes of Atlanta and Miami--not political at first, but then growing into his role as gay spokesman. Later chapters sound a plangent note with Hardwick coming into his own as an artist--his seven-foot phallus sculpture adorned a nightclub--and growing quieter and more reflective as the AIDS epidemic raged and eventually claimed him in 1991. Padgett combines incisive legal analysis with vivid evocations of the AIDS-era gay experience ("Some would... party themselves into ash. Others sat at favorite cafés and sunned and contemplated.... They had come to Miami Beach to die"). It's a captivating account of one man's awakening to injustice. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Thoroughgoing history of a signal injustice committed against gay Americans by the American judiciary. Many readers will never have heard of Michael Hardwick, but his is a story that all should know. In 1982, an Atlanta police officer intending to serve a warrant on an out gay bartender for drinking in public found the man in flagrante with another man, which "violated Georgia's centuries-old sodomy law and carried a potential twenty-year prison sentence." Arrested, Hardwick spent the next four years fighting for his freedom, until, in 1986, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Georgia indeed "had the right to patrol its citizens' sex lives." Pressing his fight, Hardwick, who died of complications from AIDS in 1991, was far from alone. As historian and journalist Padgett notes, police in cities such as Miami "surveilled gay hot spots in the hopes of catching queer people in the act," complete with hidden cameras. Against precedents such as a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that asserted the right to privacy of interracial couples and another that barred states from interfering with the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people, the Reagan-era Supreme Court accepted the prosecution's argument that "sodomy had never been included in the 'zone of privacy' normally accorded inside the home." Despite a brilliant defense mounted by the noted constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe, in a 5-4 ruling, the court effectively declared gay people to be second-class citizens with limited civil rights. Fortunately for Hardwick, the statute of limitations ran out, but he was dead well before theBowers v. Hardwick decision was overturned in a 6-3 ruling (opposed by William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas). Padgett closes this detailed account of the Hardwick case by noting that the rights of gay Americans are again imperiled by a strongly conservative court. A lucid, rightfully indignant study that demands a renewed commitment to equality for all. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
