From the Closet to the Courtroom: Five LGBT Rights Lawsuits that Have Changed Our Nation
by Carlos A. Ball
Beacon Press. 296 pages, $27.95
JAMIE NABOZNY, a Wisconsin teen who endured years of bullying, demanded restitution from the school officials who had done nothing to protect him. Miguel Braschi, grieving after the death of his partner, insisted that New York’s top court recognize their relationship as a family. Angela Romero wanted a safe workplace; Ninia Baehr and Genora Dancel wanted to get married; Tyron Garner and John Lawrence just wanted to be left alone. In From the Closet to the Courtroom, Carlos Ball personalizes the history of the GLBT legal rights movement of the last thirty years by providing a lively narrative account of five extraordinary court cases and the ordinary people behind them.
Almost none of the men and women that Ball profiles considered themselves “political” until the experience of injustice led them to a lawyer. Accidental activists soon encountered professional organizers; by the mid-1990’s, groups such as Lambda Legal, the ACLU, and the National Freedom to Marry Coalition had hired full-time lawyers and developed complex litigation strategies. The legal advocates are clearly Carlos Ball’s heroes, and for the most part they come off quite well, even as they faced off against an increasingly organized and well-funded opposition. Colorado for Family Values took the lead on Amendment 2, a 1992 provision that excluded GLBT people from protecting their rights in local or state law; Hawaii’s Future Today helped amend that state’s constitution to forbid recognition of same-sex marriages. From the Closet to the Courtroom deftly interweaves personal histories with accessible explanations of legal terminology. In 2001, Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price’s Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court offered a masterful account based on years of archival research and oral history interviews, and it remains the better book. From the Closet to the Courtroom is breezier and easier, written not to intervene in technical legal controversies over LGBT equality but to explain those debates in such a way that more Americans might get involved in them. There is much to debate—more perhaps than Ball suggests in his consistently chipper book. From the Closet to the Courtroom argues that these five cases, whether they ended in victory or defeat, “required our nation to take seriously the claims of LGBT people to equal citizenship.” Of course, he’s right: while vulnerable and invisible citizens might be ignored by vote-chasing legislators, the legal system offers a “mechanism … to make a public demand for equal treatment.” But courts are more complicated than Carlos Ball suggests. Burdened by procedure and precedent, they operate narrowly, fussing scholastically over whether Jamie Nabozny was discriminated against because he was gay or because he was a boy. A temporary advance can be a long-term setback: recognition of domestic partnerships protected rent control and hospital visitation rights in the 1980’s, but some critics argue they encoded into law a second-class form of citizenship and the presumption that same-sex relationships could be protected without marriage. Ball generally leaves such knotty questions to the side, and also dispenses too easily with the question of backlash—whether minority activism in unelected courtrooms can provoke hostile majoritarian responses in legislatures. Victories don’t stay won. Rights do not just expand. For all its richness as an account of American law, From the Closet to the Courtroom could also do more to explain American history. The hysteria surrounding the initial AIDS crisis generated discrimination suits, but it also prompted improvisations in the structure of intimacy that took the canons of property and family law years to catch up with. And the explosion of same-sex parenting remade the political landscape one birth certificate at a time. Other social movements coincided with and built on these efforts: feminism, disability rights, patient advocacy, and elder activism all contributed new definitions of privacy, love, family, and equality. GLBT legal advocacy was crucial to those struggles, and vice versa, in a more complicated dynamic than recognized by this book’s steady march toward freedom. Carlos Ball knows all this, even if he addresses it too quickly. “Judicial civil rights victories,” he writes, “are frequently the beginning of the process rather than the end.” At a time of political upheaval and legal retrenchment, in a year when Americans might see the Defense of Marriage Act and Roe v. Wade overturned at the same time, Carlos Ball’s careful account is valuable not only for its legal lessons but for its human stories. What lingers after reading From the Closet to the Courtroom is the reminder that these cases entered the courts because angry citizens resisted discrimination at work, on the school bus, and in the bedroom. Their activism—their insistence on citizenship and dignity—is the real engine of change in Ball’s story. And in everyone else’s too. Christopher Capozzola is an associate professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
________________________________________________________
