Marc Stein: Gay Rights and the Supreme Court: The Early Years
[Marc Stein’s latest book, Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe, has just been published by the University of North Carolina Press. The author is an associate professor of history, women’s studies, and sexuality studies at York University in Toronto.]
As the new U.S. Supreme Court term begins and as the California same-sex marriage case continues to make its way through the courts, it’s a good moment to consider the early years of the gay and lesbian movement’s efforts to achieve legal reform through appeals to the Supreme Court. In an August 2005 New Yorker article on the nomination of John G. Roberts to a position on the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin, who is often a perceptive and astute commentator on legal matters, wrote that “systematic legal efforts on behalf of gays began only in the nineteen-seventies, and the Justices didn’t address the issue in a substantive way until the eighties.” Toobin’s view is all too common and it reflects the weak state of popular knowledge about the history of sexuality in the United States. In fact, these efforts began in the 1950s and 1960s, and while the Supreme Court refused to consider gay and lesbian rights appeals from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, in an earlier period the justices decided several significant cases with important implications for gay and lesbian rights.
As those who have studied U.S. gay and lesbian history know, “homophile” activists began challenging discriminatory policies and practices in the courts in the 1950s. Influenced by the successes of the civil rights movement, most notably in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), gay advocates soon began to pin their hopes on the Supreme Court. In 1957, for example, a Brooklyn, New York, man suggested in a letter to the editor of the California-based gay magazine ONE that activists should support taking a gay rights case “all the way up to the Supreme Court.” In his view, “the benefits of this action would be inestimable,” in part because “for the first time in U.S. history the American citizen would know just where he stands on the subject of individual sexual rights.” Implicitly placing his faith in the Supreme Court, he wrote that in adopting this course of action homosexuals would “no longer be at the mercy of hysterical state legislatures and the whims of the local constabulary.” Three years later, after a series of gay bar raids in New York, a ONE columnist asked, “Will the tavern owners have the guts to fight for their rights (all the way to the high courts if need be) and for the rights of their customers?” A few months later, the same columnist noted, “There are two approaches to law reform: through legislative bodies or thru the courts. Appeal to the courts to test the legitimacy of an unfair law may be the faster and sounder way.”...
Read entire article at UNC Press Blog
As the new U.S. Supreme Court term begins and as the California same-sex marriage case continues to make its way through the courts, it’s a good moment to consider the early years of the gay and lesbian movement’s efforts to achieve legal reform through appeals to the Supreme Court. In an August 2005 New Yorker article on the nomination of John G. Roberts to a position on the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin, who is often a perceptive and astute commentator on legal matters, wrote that “systematic legal efforts on behalf of gays began only in the nineteen-seventies, and the Justices didn’t address the issue in a substantive way until the eighties.” Toobin’s view is all too common and it reflects the weak state of popular knowledge about the history of sexuality in the United States. In fact, these efforts began in the 1950s and 1960s, and while the Supreme Court refused to consider gay and lesbian rights appeals from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, in an earlier period the justices decided several significant cases with important implications for gay and lesbian rights.
As those who have studied U.S. gay and lesbian history know, “homophile” activists began challenging discriminatory policies and practices in the courts in the 1950s. Influenced by the successes of the civil rights movement, most notably in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), gay advocates soon began to pin their hopes on the Supreme Court. In 1957, for example, a Brooklyn, New York, man suggested in a letter to the editor of the California-based gay magazine ONE that activists should support taking a gay rights case “all the way up to the Supreme Court.” In his view, “the benefits of this action would be inestimable,” in part because “for the first time in U.S. history the American citizen would know just where he stands on the subject of individual sexual rights.” Implicitly placing his faith in the Supreme Court, he wrote that in adopting this course of action homosexuals would “no longer be at the mercy of hysterical state legislatures and the whims of the local constabulary.” Three years later, after a series of gay bar raids in New York, a ONE columnist asked, “Will the tavern owners have the guts to fight for their rights (all the way to the high courts if need be) and for the rights of their customers?” A few months later, the same columnist noted, “There are two approaches to law reform: through legislative bodies or thru the courts. Appeal to the courts to test the legitimacy of an unfair law may be the faster and sounder way.”...