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― Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

Lawrence v Texas, for those who don’t know, was the Supreme Court ruling that made gay sex/sodomy/being gay legal. It was in 2003.

People generally assume that it has “Texas” in the name because Texas was, like, uniquely homophobic. This is the opposite of the case.

There were at the time FOURTEEN states with active anti-sodomy laws; Texas was one of the 14. So why was Texas the one that’s named in the ruling? It’s not because Texas was more aggressive about enforcing their law - it’s because Texan activists were well-organized, willing to sacrifice their futures, and successful.

Texan activists had tried to get a case up to the Supreme Court so that the law could be overturned for a long time.

They actually successfully overturned it once previously! A schoolteacher - the president of the Dallas Gay Alliance - deliberately got himself arrested and sacrificed his profession to try to get the law overturned, and succeeded. In NINETEEN EIGHTY-TWO. His actions were deliberately planned and managed by the DGA as well as the first state-wide LGBTQ organization, the Texas Human Rights Foundation. (If anyone happens to know that Dallas used to celebrate Pride not-in-June, this is why - it was honoring that overturn.) Unfortunately, that overturn was… re-turned.

However, Lambda Legal in alliance with a wide variety of other activist organizations were successful in 2003. The case Lawrence v Texas was based on occurred in 1998, and activists worked for the next 5 years to get it to the Supreme Court.

This involved very deliberate action at every step - even way back at the beginning, the original fine was too low to get the case to an appeals court, and they petitioned the judge to raise the fine so they could appeal.