The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick

The little-known story of the man who sparked a groundswell of gay activism after a wrongly decided Supreme Court decision.

Michael Hardwick had no idea that when a police officer stood at his bedroom door on August 3, 1982, he would become a face of the gay rights movement. Arrested for sodomy, Hardwick sued for his right to privacy all the way to the Supreme Court, even as the HIV/AIDS epidemic began its toll. When he lost, his era-defining case inspired a half-million people to protest, and the ruling became one of the most reviled of its time.

Today, Bowers v. Hardwick reverberates again, as the rights of privacy underpinning legal abortion, contraception, and same-sex relationships come under fire. But the individual Michael Hardwick has faded from memory—his story has been relegated to legal arcana, with only a pale rendering of his life outside of the Supreme Court case. In The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick, Martin Padgett assembles the complete kaleidoscope of Hardwick’s life—as a child of Stonewall, as an artist, and as one of many thousands claimed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Blending biography and history, Padgett traces how Hardwick became a political symbol, first by chance, then by his own choice, even when it made him an object of derision and scrutiny.

From the then-unopened archives of legal scholar Laurence Tribe—who argued Hardwick’s case alongside the ACLU—to hours of new interviews with Hardwick’s surviving family and friends, Padgett emerges with a story of someone who stood up for equality despite the infamy he knew would attach to him. He reveals how Hardwick forced America to come to grips with queer people—and to acknowledge its moral failures toward some of its most marginalized citizens.

In The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick, Martin Padgett reveals the halting shifts in American sexual politics over the last half-century, posing urgent questions about the deliberations of the Supreme Court, and returning to Hardwick the humanity stolen from him decades ago.