‘The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick’ chronicles a landmark gay rights case

Michael Hardwick never envisioned himself as an activist or a public figure, but, by fate, he became one. Although he’s known widely as being at the epicenter of one of the most substantial gay rights cases of all time, few know much about the man outside of the court case. Author Martin Padgett wanted to remedy that.

Padgett’s new biography, The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Sex and the Supreme Court in the Age of AIDS, explores the story of the 1986 Supreme Court case of Bowers v. Hardwick and how it affected the former Atlantan before and after. 

In 1982, a police officer came to Hardwick’s Atlanta home with a warrant for a different matter, found him having sex with another man and arrested him (as well as Dwight Sawyer) for sodomy. Hardwick challenged the case and Georgia’s sodomy law to the Supreme Court, which eventually sided with the state in a controversial 5-4 ruling. The law stood for 17 years until Lawrence v. Texas did away with state sodomy laws.

The law had taken effect in Georgia in 1905 but evolved over time. “Effectively, it only applied to single people and queer people — and then women were added into the mix,” said Padgett. 

Padgett was curious to learn more about Hardwick and realized no one had put together a history of him. That motivated the writer to dig deeper into Hardwick’s psyche. 

“What brought Michael to the point of wanting to be an activist? What did he feel he was able to do that other people weren’t able to do?” Padgett said. “Michael realized with the ACLU attorneys and lots of people in the community that putting his name and face on the case would [add] value to it. People could see themselves in this case and see what the consequences would be if you were decided against.”

The author’s first real interview was with Jim Bass, a bartender with Hardwick at Backstreet. From there, he obtained the perspectives of Kathy Wilde, Hardwick’s attorney, and Gil Robison, who founded the Atlanta Gay Center in 1976 and was the first openly gay political candidate in the state. 

Eventually, the author was able to make contact with Hardwick’s family and convince them that someone needed to tell the story while people who knew the subject were still around. Padgett finished his research in 2024.

At the time, the Supreme Court decision outraged the LGBTQ community. “The community was already in the grips of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and all the frustration people felt over the government not really taking it seriously and addressing it quickly enough,” said Padgett. “Members of the Reagan administration were openly laughing at the idea that AIDS was a national problem.”

Actor Rock Hudson and, later, Ryan White — the Indiana teenager who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion and was banned from school — had become the public faces of HIV/AIDS. According to Padgett, a legal theory surfaced that the anti-sodomy laws needed a star too — and Hardwick became that star. 

“When his case was argued before the court, there was some hope they would win. There was this divide between how the law looked at straight privacy and queer privacy, and, when Michael lost, there were immediate protests in San Francisco, New York and Atlanta,” Padgett said. “Those protests did not die down throughout the summer and [they] inspired people to organize what was the March on Washington in 1987. It was fury over the HIV/AIDS epidemic and now this legal aspect of queer life just being dismissed by several of the justices who wrote some really terrible and hateful things about queer people.”

Hardwick was raised in Florida and came out as gay during the Anita Bryant decade. During that time, he had to watch as Byrant waged war against the LGBQT community. He later moved to Atlanta in 1980 and started bartending later that year. 

The case, however,  forever changed his life and the public’s awareness of him. Hardwick felt very vulnerable — he worried about people taking a shot at him and was uncomfortable that strangers had access to his address, where he worked and who he had sex with. The layers of privacy had disappeared. He said often that he didn’t want to be a star made out of this case — he just wanted it not to happen to anyone else. Hardwick ultimately moved back to Florida in 1985 and died of AIDS in 1991. 

Padgett himself moved to Atlanta in 1997 and lived here until 2021 before relocating to Pensacola Beach. That same year, he published the critically acclaimed A Night at the Sweet Gum Head, centering around Bill Smith, a gay rights activist, and John Greenwell, aka Rachel Wells, who worked at Atlanta’s Sweet Gum Head, known as the “Showplace of the South.”  

Sex and the Supreme Court  is especially topical now, Padgett feels, citing frequent attacks on the LGBTQ community and the recent United States v. Skrmetti case, which upheld a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming medical care. 

“It’s pretty clear that the conservatives on the Supreme Court will welcome some sort of challenge to same sex marriage, to privacy laws. Clarence Thomas has all but called on people to bring him cases that would overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, which would re-institute this era of sexual surveillance. For queer people out there today, as in [Skrmetti], it will take people standing up to protest for their rights, [which] are supposed to be innate in the Constitution. The lesson that Michael’s life has always imparted and is coming back to reality now is that queer people always have to protect their rights — and be visible about doing it.”

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Jim Farmer is the recipient of the 2022 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Theatre Feature and a nominee for Online Journalist of the Year. A member of five national critics’ organizations, he covers theater and film for ArtsATL. A graduate of the University of Georgia, he has written about the arts for 30-plus years. Jim is the festival director of Out on Film, Atlanta’s LGBTQ film festival, and lives in Avondale Estates with his husband, Craig.