The Atlanta Zoning Review Board (ZRB) on November 5 approved the destruction of the site of the historic 1982 arrest of Michael Hardwick. Hardwick was arrested for violating Georgia’s anti-gay sodomy law; he challenged the law all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled against him in the 1986 decision of Bowers v. Hardwick.
Although the site’s demolition has been approved, the Atlanta City Council unanimously approved a resolution on November 2nd asking the City of Atlanta’s Urban Design Commission (UDC) to consider designating the site as historically significant. If the UDC had pursued the designation, the commission would have had between 120 and 180 days to decide; during that time, the site would’ve been protected from demolition, Rough Draft Atlanta reported.
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Over 90 LGBTQ+ advocates and community members signed an open letter to the ZRB on November 3 asking it not to allow the site’s destruction since it has been nominated for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. However, the ZRB decided that since the UCD had not decided to pursue a historic place designation for the site, the property’s new owners (Paul and Penny Gutierrez) could proceed with demolition.
The Gutierrezes’ lawyer Stephen Rothman, said that Hardwick’s house had been renovated in 2016 to include a second story and an enclosed front porch, making it no longer resemble the original structure where Hardwick was arrested. Rothman also said the house hasblack mold, deferred maintenance, and poorly constructed renovations that make it cheaper to demolish rather than to rehabilitate.
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“To say you’ve got to preserve the house because of an event that occurred in a different kind of structure is as silly as saying, ‘We’ve discovered at the Walmart on Howell Mill there was a Civil War skirmish, so you’ve got to save the Walmart,” he said. “It’s the historical event and the thing that’s there now [has] no relationship.”
The Gutierrezes have said they’re open to having a historic plaque installed at the site of their newly constructed home.
How Hardwick’s arrest impacted LGBTQ+ civil rights history
On August 3, 1982, Keith Torick, a police officer with an invalid warrant for public intoxication, entered Hardwick’s home and bedroom. Torick saw Hardwick having consensual oral sex with another man. When Hardwick yelled at Torick for entering his home, the officer arrested Hardwick for violating Georgia’s anti-gay sodomy law. Torick later admitted that he “would never have made the case if [Hardwick] hadn’t had an attitude problem.”
With the legal assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Hardwick challenged his arrest all the way to the US Supreme Court. However, in 1986, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, ruling by a 5-4 vote that the US Constitution confers no “fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy.”
The dissenting justices in the case noted the law’s overreach into private adult consensual behavior and its obsessive targeting of homosexuals. Bowers remained bitter about the case’s outcome until his death by AIDS-related complications in 1991, his lawyer said. Many courts and state governments pointed to the Bowers decision to justify other anti-LGBTQ+ laws and policies.
“When people hear my name, they think of a radical c**ksucker. People don’t know anything else about me,” Hardwick said, according to The Advocate.
Georgia’s Supreme Court eventually struck down the state’s anti-sodomy statute in 1998. Five years later, in 2003, the US Supreme Court overruled Bowers in its decision in Lawrence v. Texas ruling.
At that time, the court’s justices said that the Bowers decision considered the personal liberty issue too narrowly and thatintimate consensual sexual conduct is one of the liberties protected under the Due Process Clause of the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
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