Martin Padgett

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

When a police officer stood at his bedroom door on August 3, 1982, Michael Hardwick had no idea that he would become an avatar of the gay rights movement. Arrested for sodomy, Hardwick sued for his right to privacy all the way to the Supreme Court, as the HIV/AIDS epidemic spiraled. When he lost, his era-defining case inspired a half-million people to protest against the Court. Today Bowers v. Hardwick continues to reverberate as the rights of privacy underpinning abortion, contraception, and same-sex relationships come under fire.

In this fiercely empathetic blend of biography and history, Martin Padgett tells the story of Hardwick's life—as a child of Stonewall, as an artist, and as one of thousands claimed by the epidemic. The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick reveals the halting shifts of American sexual politics, poses urgent questions about the Supreme Court, and returns to Hardwick some of the humanity stolen from him.