W
hat
did two gay men arrested in Texas in 1998 for sodomy have to do
with a United Nations weapons inspector who engages in sadomasochistic
sex? A lot, it turns out. John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner
have appealed their sodomy convictions to the U.S. Supreme Court,
which recently agreed to hear the case. Harvey John “Jack”
McGeorge, hired to join the UN weapons-inspection team currently
at work in Iraq, is a leader of the National Coalition for Sexual
Freedom, which advocates in favor of sexual freedom for adults who
practice sadomaso- chistic sex. We know about McGeorge because the
Washington Post
published news of his sex life on the
front page of its
Thanks- giving Day issue. Both cases have become cause célèbres
for the American liberal press, which is now pushing for an absolute
right to sexual privacy.
As
attractive as that idea is— most people don’t want anyone
poking around in their bedrooms— it is wrong and dangerous.
In the Age of Ashcroft, Americans don’t need a right to be
private about their sexual practices. Rather, they need to know
that if they are public with this information, they will not be
punished. The right to sexual privacy is a conservative notion that
will ultimately destroy sexual freedom for everyone, not just homosexual
sodomites and heterosexual sadomasochists.
On
the face of it, the Texas case
Lawrence and Garner v. Texas
is outrageous. On September 17, 1998, sheriff’s deputies in
Houston, Texas arrested Lawrence and Garner in the former’s
apartment and charged them with violating the state’s sodomy
statute. The police had entered Lawrence’s home because a homophobic
neighbor, trying to get the two openly gay men in trouble, had called
the police claiming that a man with a gun was in the apartment.
(The neighbor was later arrested and prosecuted for filing a false
police report.) Once in the apartment, the police discovered the
two—now very startled—men engaged in either oral or anal
sex (no one will say which) and they did what any good Texas police
officers would do: they arrested them. Both men were jailed overnight
and eventually convicted of a Class C misdemeanor and fined $200
each (the court could have fined them up to $500).
Rather
than suffer Texas justice in silence, Lawrence and Garner, with
the help of the New York– based gay legal group Lambda Legal
Defense and Education Fund, asked the court to quash the charges
against them. The court refused and Lambda appealed. On June 8,
2000, a Texas appellate court overturned Lawrence’s and Garner’s
convictions. A year later, a higher intermediate court reinstated
them. A year after that, on April 18, 2002, the Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals refused to hear the case, stating that “preserving
public morality” justified the law. Complicating matters was
an earlier ruling by the Texas Supreme Court finding that the Court
of Criminal Appeals had jurisdiction over any challenge to the sodomy
law, which for all intents and purposes meant that Lawrence and
Garner were barred from challenging the constitutionality of their
convictions in Texas. So they appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The
Texas law, while odious, isn’t all that unique. Originally
written in 1860 to prohibit “sodomy”— defined as
oral or anal sex—by any couple, it was rewritten in 1974 (at
the height of the sexual revolution) to apply only to homosexual
couples. At that time, 33 states had similar laws, some of which
restricted the private, consensual sexual conduct of homosexuals
only. Under pressure from gay rights activists, a few states began
repealing their sodomy laws. By 1986, it looked as if the rest of
them would be stricken from the books when Lambda appealed
Bowers
v
. Hardwick
to the Supreme Court.
Bowers
dealt with the 1982 case of Michael Hardwick, whom police found
engaging in oral sex with another man when they entered his apartment
to arrest him on an outstanding warrant for a ticket he had received
for public drunkenness. They arrested Hardwick, an openly gay man
who worked as a bartender in a gay bar, and charged him with violating
Georgia’s sodomy law. With help from Lambda, he appealed his
case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-4 ruling that stunned long-time
court observers as well as the gay community, the court upheld portions
of Georgia’s sodomy law. Chief Justice Warren Burger’s
concurring opinion noted, “to hold that the act of homosexual
sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast
aside millennia of moral teaching” and “in constitutional
terms there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual
sodomy.” The most legally important aspect of the Supreme Court’s
ruling was that it applied only to sexual activity between two people
of the same sex, even though Georgia’s sodomy law applied to
heterosexual activity as well.
Not
only was
Bowers v. Hard- wick
lousy law, but also it was
a case study in judicial and legal hypocrisy. Justice Lewis Powell
(considered a liberal) cast the deciding vote against granting homosexuals
the constitutional right to privacy. He later admitted to the
National
Law Journal
in October 1990, three years after his retirement,
that he “probably made a mistake” in Bowers. “That
case was not a major case,” he said, “and one of the reasons
I voted the way I did was the case was a frivolous case” that
was brought before the court “just to see what the court would
do.” While getting points for honesty, Powell exposed the liberal
stance toward gay issues: screw you and go to hell.
But
Powell looks principled when his actions are contrasted with those
of Michael J. Bowers, the Georgia attorney general who appealed
the case (after lower state courts had sided with Hardwick) to the
Supreme Court. Two years ago, Bowers admitted that for nearly a
decade in the 1980s— which encompassed the time he persecuted
Michael Hardwick for giving a blow job to another man—he was
involved in an adulterous relationship. At that time, adultery was
a crime under Georgia state law in the same classification as sodomy
and carried the same penalties. If the police had been peering into
Bowers’s bedroom— or, more likely, his hotel room—
Bowers could have been the one charged with a crime. Instead, he
was prosecuting it (they say that homosexuals have no shame). These
facts alone constitute a cultural imperative strong enough to overturn
Bowers v. Hardwick
.
The
leering moralistic impulse that drove the Bowers case and is driving
Lawrence and Garner also seems to be driving the publicity surrounding
McGeorge, the S/M weapons inspector, as he’s come to be called.
The
Washington Post
story, ostensibly about the shoddy hiring
practices of the United Nations, made much of McGeorge’s history
in Washington, DC’s S/M community, where McGeorge was a founder
of the S/M support and advocacy group, Black Rose. To be sure, the
Post
did come up with some disturbing details about how the
UN chooses its inspectors: no background checks are conducted and
some inspectors are chosen on the grounds that they won’t offend
Saddam Hussein. Ewen Buchanan, a spokesperson for United Nations
Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, told the paper
that the organization didn’t have the “capability”
to conduct background checks on its applicants. “How would
you check?” he asked. Checking the background of everyone who
applies for a job ferreting out weapons of mass destruction might
be difficult, but throwing up your hands in futility about such
checks does seem, well, a little cavalier. Still, while the
Post
’
s
questions about McGeorge’s qualifications may have been on
the mark, its focus on his involvement with S/M support and play
groups was not.
The
lead sentence—“The United Nations launched perhaps its
most important weapons inspections ever yesterday with a team that
includes a 53-year-old Virginia man with no specialized scientific
degree and a leadership role in sadomasochistic sex clubs”—made
clear that
Post
editors believed there was a connection between
McGeorge’s public career and his private sex life, even though
such a link was never demonstrated.
When
McGeorge offered to resign from the assignment to protect the UN
from further smears by the press, Hans Blix, head of the weapons-inspections
team, said he would not accept the resignation and that McGeorge’s
private life was no one’s business.
But
the whip and shackles were out of the bag, and soon Mc George’s
sex life was more prominent in the news. The
New York Post
headlined a story on McGeorge “Saddamasochist,” and the
Daily News
announced “Blix Sticks With His S&M Weapons
Prober In Uproar.”
Slate
ran a sophomoric piece that,
while generally supportive of McGeorge and his right to privacy,
actually compared the torturous acts of Hussein with those of sadists
engaging in consensual sex. The British press responded by attacking
American puritanism: “UN Team Faces Smear Campaign” claimed
the
Guardian
on November 29, the day after the
Post
story appeared.
Post
ombudsperson Michael Getler agreed.
In a column about the Thanksgiving Day article, Getler wrote: “It
seemed thin and rushed concerning the main premise—that the
overall quality of the inspection team is suspect, which is a politically
potent message at this time—and yielded to the titillation
factor in featuring McGeorge so prominently. There are 100 inspectors,
and McGeorge is the only one this story focused on.” He added,
“the dominant focus on McGeorge, and the questionable relevance
of his sexual activities, seemed to me to distort what this story
was about.”
The
stories of Jack McGeorge, John Geddes Lawrence, Tyron Garner, and
Michael Hardwick seem to have the same moral: Americans should have
an inviolable right to sexual privacy. But that would be the wrong
lesson to draw. McGeorge’s sex life—and his involvement
with groups such as National Coalition for Sexual Freedom—was
not particularly private. A quick Internet search yields details
of McGeorge’s involvement with sadomasochism. Visit www. ncsfreedom.org
for a sense of McGeorge’s sexual interests and repertoire.
Go to www.br.org to learn about his advocacy on behalf of sexual
minorities in the Washington, DC, area. Visit www. psgcabo.com/jack.html
for his professional résumé. There’s nothing much
private here.
McGeorge
has stated that he is not embarrassed by his sexual activities—which
are probably not much different from what was hinted at in Madonna’s
music videos of the mid-1990s—and that he has no desire to
hide them. To call for a right to sexual privacy in McGeorge’s
case is disingenuous. The problem wasn’t that he is involved
in a sexual subculture that many Americans feel is foreign to them
(even though they may, indeed, practice similar activities in their
own bedrooms), but that the
Post
used this information to
try to discredit McGeorge in his professional life.
The
lesson couldn’t be more obvious. We don’t need a right
to sexual privacy, we need a right to be safe when we’re public
about our sexuality. The same lesson can be applied to the Texas
sodomy case, which involved two out gay men—Lawrence and Garner—who
were persecuted by both a homophobic neighbor and the police for
their public identity. The police should have left the premises
once they realized that the real criminal was the man calling in
a false crime report.
A
right to be public with our sexuality is the only thing that will
protect the lesbian couple who want to hold hands while walking
down the street. A right to be public with our sexuality is the
only thing that will protect a transgender teen. A right to be public
with our sexuality is the only thing that will prevent more embarrassments
like 2000’s infamous “Paddleboro” case, in which
two people were arrested at an S/M sex party in Attleboro, Massachusetts
after police raided the premises. They seized partygoers’ Palm
Pilots, which contained personal contact information. One of the
arrestees was charged with “possession of an item of self-abuse”—the
sort of thing that you apparently know when you see it—and
another was charged with “possession of a dangerous weapon,”
which turned out to be a large kitchen spoon. The bust was great
fodder for puerile newspaper columnists, but it’s this sort
of case in which names appear in newspapers and people lose their
jobs and livelihoods.
We
live in a sex-obsessed culture. But we remain deeply puritanical.
How else do you explain why 13 states still have sodomy laws? Or
the Bush administration’s highly successful attempt to replace,
at least in part, sensible sex-education programs in 42 states with
inane abstinence-only programs? The remedy to this problem isn’t
the right to sexual privacy. It’s to give those like McGeorge,
who choose to be public, and those like Lawrence and Garner, who
were going about their business like any other couple, the right
to be who they are without fear of public ridicule, fines, or jail
time.
Michael
Bronski’s writings on politics and culture have appeared in
the
Boston Globe, Utne Reader,
the
Los Angeles Times,
and the
Advocate
.
