ABSTRACT
“‘Home’ is one of the most beautiful words in the English language. It usually connotes family, husband and wife, and children—although, of course, single persons, widows and widowers, and others also have genuine homes.”1 Those words were dictated by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and recorded in a memorandum to one of his clerks in March 1986, in the days leading up to oral arguments for Bowers v. Hardwick, a landmark case for the LGBTQ rights movement. The case originated when a police officer arrested Michael Hardwick for engaging in oral sex with another man in his apartment—a sexual act prohibited by a Georgia state sodomy law. Hardwick’s counsel framed the arrest as a violation of domestic privacy—“whether the state of Georgia may send its police into private bedrooms to arrest adults for engaging in consensual, noncommercial sexual acts, with no justification beyond the assertion that those acts are immoral.”2 But Powell’s musings on the nature of home hinted at larger questions underlying the case: did gay men have “genuine homes,” deserving of state recognition and protection? Or was their sexual conduct unconnected, even antithetical, to normative conventions of domesticity, intimacy, and family? Powell ultimately sided with four other justices to uphold state sodomy laws—a ruling which would not be overturned until Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.
