W. W. Norton & Company
March 2012
On Sale: March 12, 2012
374 pages ISBN: 0393062082 EAN: 9780393062083 Kindle: B005LW5J7Q Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
"A real-life detective story that reveals the drama
behind the scenes of a great Supreme Court victory for human
rights." —Linda Greenhouse
No one could have
predicted that the night of September 17, 1998, would be
anything but routine in Houston, Texas. Even the call to
police that a black man was "going crazy with a gun" was
hardly unusual in this urban setting. Nobody could have
imagined that the arrest of two men for a minor criminal
offense would reverberate in American constitutional law,
exposing a deep malignity in our judicial system and
challenging the traditional conception of what makes a
family. Indeed, when Harris County sheriff’s deputies
entered the second-floor apartment, there was no gun.
Instead, they reported that they had walked in on John
Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex in Lawrence’s
bedroom.
So begins Dale Carpenter’s "gripping and
brilliantly researched" Flagrant Conduct, a work
nine years in the making that transforms our understanding
of what we thought we knew about Lawrence v. Texas,
the landmark Supreme Court decision of 2003 that invalidated
America’s sodomy laws. Drawing on dozens of interviews,
Carpenter has taken on the "gargantuan" task of extracting
the truth about the case, analyzing the claims of virtually
every person involved.
Carpenter first introduces us
to the interracial defendants themselves, who were hardly
prepared "for the strike of lightning" that would upend
their lives, and then to the Harris County arresting
officers, including a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he had
"looked eye to eye" in the faces of the men as they
allegedly fornicated. Carpenter skillfully navigates
Houston’s complex gay world of the late 1990s, where a group
of activists and court officers, some of them closeted
themselves, refused to bury what initially seemed to be a
minor arrest.
The author charts not only the careful
legal strategy that Lambda Legal attorneys adopted to make
the case compatible to a conservative Supreme Court but also
the miscalculations of the Houston prosecutors who assumed
that the nation’s extant sodomy laws would be upheld.
Masterfully reenacting the arguments that riveted spectators
and Justices alike in 2003, Flagrant Conduct then
reaches a point where legal history becomes literature,
animating a Supreme Court decision as few writers have
done.
In situating Lawrence v. Texas within
the larger framework of America’s four-century persecution
of gay men and lesbians, Flagrant Conduct
compellingly demonstrates that gay history is an integral
part of our national civil rights story.
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