The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Sex and the Supreme Court in the Age of AIDS

An everyman finds himself at the center of an epic civil rights case in this bittersweet biography. Journalist Padgett (A Night at the Sweet Gum Head) recaps the life of Michael Hardwick, a gay Atlanta bartender arrested in 1982 for violating Georgia’s sodomy law. Although the district attorney declined to prosecute, the ACLU convinced Hardwick to sue to have the law overturned, but the Supreme Court upheld it. Padgett fashions the case into a crackerjack legal drama highlighting society’s opposing attitudes: Chief Justice Warren Burger grotesquely likened gay men to Jack the Ripper, while dissenting justice Harry Blackmun situated sexual activity as a matter of “individual liberty.” Hardwick emerges as a charismatic, hard-partying figure in the fizzy gay scenes of Atlanta and Miami—not political at first, but then growing into his role as gay spokesman. Later chapters sound a plangent note with Hardwick coming into his own as an artist—his seven-foot phallus sculpture adorned a nightclub—and growing quieter and more reflective as the AIDS epidemic raged and eventually claimed him in 1991. Padgett combines incisive legal analysis with vivid evocations of the AIDS-era gay experience (“Some would... party themselves into ash. Others sat at favorite cafés and sunned and contemplated.... They had come to Miami Beach to die”). It’s a captivating account of one man’s awakening to injustice. (June)