Dishonorable Passions : Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003

W. Eskridge

The American colonies and the early states prohibited sodomy as the "crime against nature", but rarely punished such conduct if it took place behind closed doors. By the twentieth century, America's emerging regulatory state targeted "degenerates" and (later) "homosexuals". The witch hunts of the McCarthy era caught very few Communists but ruined the lives of thousands of homosexuals. The nation"s sexual revolution of the 1960s fueled a social movement of people seeking repeal of sodomy laws, but it was not until the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that private sex between consenting adults was decriminalized. With dramatic stories of both the hunted (Walt Whitman and Margaret Mead) and the hunters (Earl Warren and J. Edgar Hoover), Dishonorable Passions reveals how American sodomy laws affected the lives of both homosexual and heterosexual Americans.