The Invention of Bad Gay Sex: Texas and the Creation of a Criminal Underclass of Gay People
Abstract
Many observers of the gay movement in America have celebrated the dramatic expansion of lesbian and gay rights that activists have achieved since the 1970s. The progress narrative of gay rights is not exactly wrong, but it is incomplete. At the same time as many gays and lesbians have gained ever-greater access to the rights and obligations of full citizenship, new sex offender laws have constructed a criminal underclass of gay people whose sexual behavior the state still considers to be deviant. This essay examines one of the factors underlying the making of that underclass: the invention of "consenting adults in private," a new legal distinction between "good" and "bad" gay sex that the U.S. Supreme Court enshrined in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision. By tracing the history of the consenting adults in private idea in the gay movement's 30-year battle against Texas's so-called "homosexual conduct" law, the essay shows that the struggle for equal citizenship is far from over for the most stigmatized sexual minorities.
References
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Canaday, Margot. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Carpenter, Dale. “The Unknown Past of Lawrence v. Texas.” Michigan Law Review 102, no. 7 (June 2004): 1464–1527.
Chauncey, George. “‘What Gay Studies Taught the Court’: The Historians’ Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 3 (2004): 509–38.
———. Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate over Gay Equality. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Coleman, Thomas F. “Procedure and Strategy In Gay Rights Litigation.” New York University Review of Law and Social Change 8 (1978–79): 317–23.
Corber, Robert J. In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America. Duke University Press Books, 1996.
Eskridge, Jr., William N. Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861–2003. New York: Viking, 2008.
———. The Case for Same-Sex Marriage: From Sexual Liberty to Civilized Commitment. New York: The Free Press, 1996.
Faderman, Lillian. The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.
Fischel, Joseph. “Transcendent Homosexuals and Dangerous Sex Offenders: Sexual Harm and Freedom in the Judicial Imaginary.” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 17, no. 277 (2010): 277–311.
Freedman, Estelle B. “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960.” The Journal of American History 74, no. 1 (June 1987): 83–106.
Gottschalk, Marie. Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Halley, Janet E. “Misreading Sodomy: A Critique of the Classification of ‘Homosexuals’ in Federal Equal Protection Law.” In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 351–77. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Home Office and Scottish Home Department. “Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution.” London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, September 1957.
Jenkins, Philip. Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Johnson, David K. The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Jones, W. Cecil. “Doe v. Commonwealth’s Attorney: Closing the Door to a Fundamental Right of Sexual Privacy.” Denver Law Journal 53 (1976): 553–76.
Kinsey, Alfred C., Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1948.
Klarman, Michael J. From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Lave, Tamara Rice. “Only Yesterday: The Rise and Fall of Twentieth Century Sexual Psychopath Laws.” Louisiana Law Review 69, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 549–92.
Lepore, Jill. “To Have and to Hold: Reproduction, Marriage, and the Constitution.” The New Yorker, May 25, 2015. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/to-have-and-to-hold.
Miller, Neil. Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoid Heart of the 1950s. Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2002.
National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “Registered Sex Offenders in the United States and Its Territories per 100,000 Population,” 2015. http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/Sex_Offenders_Map.pdf.
Nussbaum, Martha C. From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Regina Kunzel. “Sex Panic, Psychiatry, and the Expansion of the Carceral State.” In The War on Sex, edited by David M. Halperin and Trevor Hoppe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming.
Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 3–44. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Schwartz, Louis B. “Morals Offenses and the Model Penal Code.” Columbia Law Review 63, no. 4 (April 1963): 669–86.
Stewart-Winter, Timothy. “Raids, Rights, and Rainbow Coalitions: Sexuality and Race in Chicago Politics, 1950–2000.” Ph.D., The University of Chicago, 2009.
United States Sentencing Commission. “Report to the Congress: Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System,” 2011. http://www.ussc.gov/news/congressional-testimony-and-reports/mandatory-minimum-penalties/report-congress-mandatory-minimum-penalties-federal-criminal-justice-system.
Von Beitel, Randy. “The Criminalization of Private Homosexual Acts: A Jurisprudential Case Study of a Decision by the Texas Bar Penal Code Revision Committee.” Human Rights 6, no. 1 (Fall 1976): 23–74.
Yung, Corey Rayburn. “The Emerging Criminal War on Sex Offenders.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 45 (2010): 435–81.
