Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas: How a Bedroom Arrest Decriminalized Gay Americans by Dale Carpenter (review)

As Dale Carpenter's probing account of Lawrence v. Texas makes plain, this landmark case is more queer (i.e., strange or weird) than anyone might have thought before reading this fascinating, well-written book. Quite unexpectedly, the eyepopping details that Carpenter shares with us in Flagrant Conduct add up to a most queer tale in the Queering of U.S. law and society.

Flagrant Conduct begins the night of September 17, 1998, when Texas police raided the Houston apartment where Lawrence lived, and ends on June 26, 2003, when Justice Anthony Kennedy announced the U.S. Supreme Court's historic ruling in that case, striking down sodomy laws across the land. Carpenter carefully traces the intricate, multi-layered story each step of the way, but what makes the must-read tale that Carpenter unfolds especially compelling is how the improbable facts of this case produced multiple micro-rebellions and dramatic institutional repudiations against this firmly entrenched tradition of stigma.

The first set of surprising choices arises the very night of the arrests, when Lawrence tells the police they have "no right to be here" (75) and then continues to "run his mouth" (77) at the police station, after Officer Joseph Quinn decided to arrest him, in his own home, and forcibly take him to jail that very night—apparently an unprecedented police act under the 143-year history of the Texas sodomy statute. The juxtaposition of Lawrence's and Quinn's improbable choices put the legal case into motion, but the crucial momentum came when myriad actors within the legal system pushed it along, ensuring its journey to the Supreme Court. The rap sheets against Lawrence and Garner were received by a closeted gay justice-of-the-peace court clerk, who decided to fax the unprecedented charges to his closeted gay boyfriend at the sheriff's office, who in turn decided to share this sensational development with a local gay activist and bartender, who then decided to get attorneys involved. This set of improbable acts thus led to the retention of attorneys, who in turn orchestrated the development of the case with the dutiful yet unlikely participation of the court system itself. First, the justice of the peace agreed to a defense request that the fines imposed on Lawrence and Garner be increased in order to allow an appeal. Then, a closeted lesbian prosecutor agreed to a no-contest plea with a fine that similarly was designed to meet the bare threshold for appellate jurisdiction. Finally, a county criminal judge approved the strategic deal with a wink and a nod, thus setting the stage for the story to culminate as it did. It took each and every choice along this chain of acts to permit the most improbable events—a fair hearing and ultimate victory at the Supreme Court itself.

Without Carpenter's exhaustive research, we could not know or appreciate the richness of the "impossible" turns of events making this momentous outcome possible. It was indeed queer that so many disparately placed individuals would act with (sometimes) unwitting synchronicity: as Carpenter explains, in the "normal" course of events, this long chain of "coincidences" would never come to pass. But, as Carpenter demonstrates, these weird, strange, improbable events became a tale of Queer self-empowerment when Lawrence and Garner each rebelled against the forces of structural and internalized homophobia, even though neither had ever before expressed any sense of Queer activism.

With Flagrant Conduct, Dale Carpenter provides a service to us all in capturing while still fresh the hidden insights behind this key chapter in the legal history of sexual minority equality in the United States. Appealing to both researches and lay readers with a "just-the-facts" approach, he tells us a good, focused story. In the most salutary of ways, he shows us through this recent historical prism...