When the Law Reached Into Our Bedrooms

In 1986, I was a freshman in college.

Like many young adults, I was trying to figure out who I was, who I might become, and what kind of future I hoped to build. College is supposed to be a season of discovery. For many LGBTQ+ people, however, self-discovery has often arrived with an unwelcome companion: fear.

That same year, the United States Supreme Court decided Bowers v. Hardwick.

At the time, I could not have explained constitutional law or substantive due process. I did not know how courts analyzed liberty interests or privacy rights. But I understood something far more personal.

I understood fear.

I can still picture myself as a freshman trying to make sense of adulthood while carrying a secret that already felt heavier than it should have. I remember learning that in parts of my own country, intimacy between men could be treated as criminal conduct. I remember sitting quietly afterward, tears gathering in my eyes, trying to understand how something as personal as love or desire had become a matter for police officers, prosecutors, and judges.

I was not asking for special treatment.

I was asking for the same thing every young person wants: the freedom to build a life without fear.

When I learned that the highest court in the nation had ruled states could criminalize intimacy between men, the message felt unmistakable.

People like you are different.

People like you are suspect.

People like you may be punished.

No young person should have to learn that lesson from their government.

Yet many of us did.

For younger LGBTQ+ Americans, this history can feel distant. Marriage equality exists nationwide. Pride celebrations occur openly in communities large and small. LGBTQ+ people serve in public office, appear in popular culture, and raise families in ways that earlier generations could scarcely imagine.

These gains deserve celebration.

They should never be mistaken for inevitability.

As recently as 2003, consensual sex between men remained illegal in parts of the United States.

That is not ancient history.

That is living memory.

The Long Shadow of Criminalization

The criminalization of same-sex intimacy did not begin in 1986.

Sodomy laws existed in America for centuries, many tracing their roots to English common law. Although these statutes often applied broadly to certain sexual acts regardless of gender, enforcement disproportionately targeted gay men and lesbians.

For much of American history, same-sex intimacy was not merely socially condemned.

It was criminalized.

The penalties varied by state and era. Some states imposed prison sentences. Others used these laws as justification for employment discrimination, custody disputes, denial of security clearances, and public shaming.

Police raids on gay bars became common. Entrapment operations targeted gay men in public spaces. Arrests appeared in newspapers, destroying careers and reputations long before any criminal sentence had been served.

For LGBTQ+ Americans, the harm extended far beyond the courtroom.

One did not need to be arrested.

One merely needed to know that arrest was possible.

Laws shape culture even when they are rarely enforced. A law does not need to send someone to prison to alter behavior. It can silence conversations, keep relationships hidden, discourage people from seeking help, and teach entire generations that they are somehow less deserving of dignity.

Fear often does the rest.

For many gay Americans of my generation, criminalization was not simply a legal reality.

It became psychological architecture.

It shaped how we viewed ourselves and how we believed society viewed us.

Iowa’s Complicated Place in LGBTQ+ History

As an Iowan, I have long recognized that my state occupies a complicated place in LGBTQ+ history.

Iowa has often stood at the forefront of civil rights. Long before many states, Iowa rejected slavery, expanded rights for women, and became one of the earliest states in the nation to recognize marriage equality following Varnum v. Brien in 2009.

Yet history is rarely linear.

States, like people, contain contradictions.

When I was a freshman in 1986, Iowa still maintained laws criminalizing certain sexual acts. Those statutes were broader than same-sex conduct alone and could apply regardless of gender. Yet gay men understood the social reality all too well.

We knew who society believed those laws were really about.

Ironically, many sodomy laws reached heterosexual couples as well, reminding us that when governments claim authority over private intimacy, their reach seldom remains confined to a single community.

The lesson extends beyond LGBTQ+ rights.

Privacy rights protect everyone.

The power granted to governments in one era often reaches farther than its architects originally intended.

1986: When the Supreme Court Turned Its Back

The timing of Bowers v. Hardwick could hardly have been worse.

By 1986, HIV/AIDS was devastating gay communities across the nation. Thousands were dying. Families rejected loved ones. Hospitals sometimes refused treatment. Funeral homes declined services. Political leaders remained painfully silent while grief spread through communities already pushed to the margins.

Fear was everywhere.

Compassion was often harder to find.

The case began when police entered Michael Hardwick’s Atlanta apartment while attempting to execute a warrant. Inside, an officer reported observing Hardwick with another man engaged in conduct prohibited under Georgia law.

What should have raised serious questions about privacy instead became a constitutional referendum on whether gay Americans possessed protected liberty interests at all.

The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 against Hardwick.

Justice Byron White framed the issue narrowly, asking whether the Constitution protected a “fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.”

The Court answered no.

Chief Justice Warren Burger went further, invoking historical condemnations rooted in what he described as Judeo-Christian moral traditions.

The legal consequences were enormous.

If same-sex intimacy could be criminalized, broader discrimination became easier to justify. Employers argued that illegal conduct did not deserve protection. Judges used sexual orientation against parents in custody disputes. Politicians portrayed LGBTQ+ Americans as criminals rather than citizens.

The ruling gave prejudice legal cover.

Many queer Americans who lived through that era still describe Bowers as a wound.

Not simply a bad decision.

A wound.

Because the Court had not merely rejected a legal claim.

It rejected the humanity behind it.

AIDS, Fear, and Survival

The cruelty of Bowers becomes even clearer when viewed against the AIDS crisis.

By the mid-1980s, HIV/AIDS had already claimed thousands of lives. Entire communities lived with constant grief. Friends became caregivers. Lovers became nurses. Chosen families stood beside hospital beds when biological families would not.

Public policy frequently reflected indifference.

President Ronald Reagan did not publicly address AIDS for years after the epidemic emerged, a delay widely criticized by activists and historians. Organizations such as ACT UP transformed grief into action and forced the nation to confront a crisis it had too often ignored.

Against this backdrop, Bowers delivered a devastating message:

Your relationships are illegal.

Your grief is invisible.

Your lives are disposable.

Imagine caring for a dying partner while living in a state where your relationship itself could be treated as criminal conduct. Imagine attending funerals month after month while the highest court in the country declared your intimacy unworthy of constitutional protection.

That was not ancient history.

That was the 1980s.

Many Americans alive today lived through it.

Many never survived it.

Lawrence v. Texas and the Long Overdue Correction

History sometimes moves slowly.

Then, seemingly all at once, it changes direction.

In 1998, police entered the Houston apartment of John Lawrence after responding to a false report of a weapons disturbance. The report later proved to be a hoax. Lawrence and Tyron Garner were arrested under Texas’s same-sex sodomy law.

Their case eventually reached the Supreme Court.

Seventeen years after Bowers, the Court confronted its earlier mistake.

This time, the result was different.

Writing for the majority in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote words that still resonate today:

“Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.”

Supreme Courts rarely speak this directly about their own failures.

Kennedy did not merely narrow Bowers.

He dismantled it.

The Court held that adults possess liberty interests protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and that government may not intrude into the private, consensual relationships of adults without sufficient justification.

In effect, the Court recognized what LGBTQ+ Americans had long argued:

Private intimacy is part of human dignity.

At the time Lawrence was decided, thirteen states still maintained sodomy laws on the books, though not all applied exclusively to same-sex couples.

Overnight, those laws became unenforceable.

Millions of Americans ceased being legal criminals.

The Constitution had not changed.

Human understanding had.

From Criminals to Newlyweds in Twelve Years

Many Americans first think of marriage equality when discussing LGBTQ+ rights.

Marriage mattered.

It still matters.

But marriage was never the beginning of the story.

Before marriage came something far more fundamental:

The right not to be arrested for existing.

The timeline remains astonishingly short.

Lawrence v. Texas was decided in 2003.

Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2004.

Obergefell v. Hodges extended marriage equality nationwide in 2015.

Twelve years.

That is all that separated nationwide decriminalization from nationwide marriage equality.

Less time than it takes for a child to move from kindergarten to high school graduation.

For younger readers, these events may feel like settled history.

For many LGBTQ+ Americans, they remain memory.

The people who fought those battles are still here.

Many who suffered under those laws are not.

Rights Are Never Self-Executing

One lesson emerges repeatedly from American history: rights rarely arrive because those in power voluntarily surrender authority.

Rights are demanded.

Rights are defended.

Rights are expanded when ordinary people refuse to disappear.

History does not move in a straight line.

Progress exists.

Backlash exists too.

The constitutional question at the heart of Lawrence was always larger than sexuality. The question was whether adults possess the liberty to make intimate decisions free from government intrusion.

That principle protects everyone.

The same constitutional framework that protects unpopular groups today may protect someone else tomorrow.

Rights mean little if they belong only to those whom society already approves of.

American history contains many examples of majorities getting liberty wrong.

The criminalization of same-sex intimacy stands among them.

Forty Years Later

Forty years later, I still find myself emotional when I think about all of this.

There remains something almost surreal about realizing that only within my lifetime did it become legal in every state for two men to share intimacy in the privacy of their own home without fear of criminal prosecution.

I sometimes think back to that freshman in college.

He was frightened.

He was uncertain.

He did not know what the future held.

He could not have imagined the victories that lay ahead, nor the losses that would come first.

Sometimes I still ask the same question I asked all those years ago:

How was that ever acceptable in America?

Forty years ago, millions of gay Americans lived under laws that labeled them criminals for loving another adult in private.

Twenty-three years ago, the Supreme Court finally acknowledged that those laws violated constitutional liberty.

Many who fought those battles remain with us.

Many who suffered under those laws never lived long enough to see them fall.

They deserved better from their country.

All of them did.

The story of Bowers and Lawrence reminds us that freedom can be denied, delayed, and restored—but never safely taken for granted.

The distance between criminalization and constitutional protection turned out to be only a generation.

That should comfort us less than it warns us.

No young person coming of age in America should ever again have to wonder whether being themselves makes them a criminal.

References

Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). HIV and AIDS historical timeline.

Chauncey, G. (2004). Why marriage? The history shaping today’s debate over gay equality. Basic Books.

Eskridge, W. N. (2008). Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861–2003. Viking.

Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).

Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).

Varnum v. Brien, 763 N.W.2d 862 (Iowa 2009).