The Atlanta City Council voted unanimously Monday, Nov. 2, to start the process of making the Michael Hardwick house a city landmark. Hardwick was arrested for sodomy in his bedroom at 811 Ponce de Leon Place, in Virginia-Highland, in 1982. His fight against Georgia’s law became Bowers v. Hardwick. The owners want to knock the house down and build a new one with a pool, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Councilmember Kelsea Bond’s measure calls on the Urban Design Commission’s director to put the house up for landmark status. Alex Wan and Matt Westmoreland co-sponsored it. “Let’s all pause and have a conversation about what this site means to the community,” Bond said of the resolution, according to the AJC.
A second unanimous vote sent it straight to Mayor Andre Dickens’ office, Rough Draft Atlanta reported. The city hasn’t approved a demolition, according to the AJC, which couldn’t reach the homeowner.
How a 1982 Bedroom Arrest Reached the Supreme Court
The city’s 2023 LGBTQ+ Historic Context Statement already lists the arrest. “An Atlanta police officer arrested Michael Hardwick, a gay Atlantan, in the bedroom of his Virginia-Highland home,” its timeline says.
That officer, Keith Torick, had once ticketed Hardwick for drinking in public, the New Georgia Encyclopedia says. Hardwick had already settled that when Torick showed up early on Aug. 3, 1982, with a warrant over a missed court date. Torick came into the bedroom unannounced and caught Hardwick having sex with another man. Both men faced felony sodomy charges, the AJC reported. Prosecutors never took the case to a grand jury, the Supreme Court’s opinion says, but Hardwick sued Georgia Attorney General Michael Bowers anyway.
The justices ruled 5-4 against Hardwick on June 30, 1986. Justice Byron White, writing for the majority, called the claim that a right to gay sex was rooted in the nation’s history and tradition “at best, facetious.” Justice Harry Blackmun’s four-justice dissent said the case was really about “the right to be let alone,” a phrase he took from Justice Louis Brandeis.
When Did Bowers v. Hardwick Get Overturned?
Hardwick didn’t live to see it. He moved back to Florida in 1985, ArtsATL reported, and died of AIDS complications near Gainesville on June 13, 1991, according to the encyclopedia.
Georgia’s Supreme Court struck first, in Powell v. State on Nov. 23, 1998. Chief Justice Robert Benham wrote that the state’s sodomy law violated the Georgia Constitution’s right of privacy when applied to “private, unforced, non-commercial acts of sexual intimacy between persons legally able to consent.”
Bowers held on nationally until June 26, 2003. That day, in Lawrence v. Texas, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.”
“It’s hard to talk about the right to privacy in the last century without talking about that case,” said Fred O. Smith Jr., according to the AJC. Smith is a Stanford Law School professor who lives in Atlanta. (The court’s still at it. On Tuesday, the justices heard a Colorado preschool case over same-sex parents.)
Who’s Fighting to Save the Michael Hardwick House?
Smith is working with Charlie Paine, who co-founded Historic Atlanta and used to run it. The two gathered signatures from more than 100 constitutional law scholars backing a historic designation, the AJC reported, including the lawyers who argued Hardwick’s case and Lawrence before the justices.
“It’s clearly a home that has exceptional significance to the city and the history of the United States,” Paine said Friday, according to the AJC. He also said, “Of all the LGBTQ historic places and spaces in the city, this is one that had national implications.”
(Queer history versus developers isn’t just an Atlanta fight. Los Angeles has a proposal for apartments on the old Woody’s and MJ’s gay bar site in Silver Lake.)
Westmoreland credited Smith and Paine with alerting the council, Rough Draft reported. “This legislation is designed to signify City Council’s hope that we protect it,” he said, according to the AJC.
Thursday’s Zoning Hearing on 811 Ponce de Leon Place
The owners’ plans go before the Board of Zoning Adjustment at noon Thursday, Nov. 5, at City Hall. The AJC says the board will weigh a variance for the new construction. Neighborhood Planning Unit F put off its own vote last month, and Rough Draft reported that the council vote’s effect on Thursday’s decision isn’t clear.
Bond’s resolution starts a separate Atlanta landmark designation review by the city’s Office of Design and the Urban Design Commission, and the house would stay standing while it runs, Rough Draft reported. “Hopefully, this is the start of a conversation about protecting a site that had a big impact on the LGBTQ+ community,” Bond said, according to Rough Draft.
