Atlanta approves demolition of home where a gay man’s arrest changed LGBTQ+ history

The Atlanta home where a gay man’s arrest led to one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most consequential anti-LGBTQ+ rulings has been approved for demolition, despite efforts to preserve the piece of Georgia history.

Atlanta zoning officials approved a request on November 5 to demolish the house at 811 Ponce de Leon Place NE, where Michael Hardwick was arrested in 1982 for having sex with another man.

His challenge to that arrest became Bowers v. Hardwick, the landmark 1986 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to uphold Georgia’s sodomy law as applied to consensual sex between men. The law criminalized oral and anal sex regardless of the participants’ sex.

The Supreme Court overruled that decision in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws criminalizing private, consensual sexual intimacy between adults of the same sex. Now, the house where Hardwick’s case began faces an uncertain future.

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In 1982, an Atlanta police officer went to Hardwick’s home with an invalid warrant and found him having oral sex with another man. Hardwick was arrested for sodomy, a felony that could have landed him in prison for up to 20 years.

“They kept moving me from cell to cell and announcing that I was in for cock sucking,” Hardwick told The Advocate in 1990. “I was already in shock and was having to physically defend myself from these prison brutes. I was like an animal — just thinking about survival.”

Though the local prosecutor declined to pursue the charge, the American Civil Liberties Union and other lawyers helped Hardwick challenge Georgia’s sodomy law.

“When people hear my name, they think of a radical cocksucker. People don’t know anything else about me,” Hardwick said.

Recalling his decision to challenge the law, he told the magazine, “I knew then I couldn’t walk away.”

Following the ruling, Hardwick moved out of Georgia and died in 1991. The house later changed hands and underwent renovations around 2016, according to RoughDraft Atlanta.

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Those renovations became central to the demolition argument made by Stephen Rothman, the lawyer representing current owners Paul and Penny Gutierrez.

Rothman said the renovations were poorly constructed and cited black mold and deferred maintenance in arguing that restoring the house would cost more than replacing it. He also argued that the alterations had left the building substantially different from the home where Hardwick was arrested.

“To say you’ve got to preserve the house because of an event that occurred in a different kind of structure is as silly as saying, ‘We’ve discovered at the Walmart on Howell Mill there was a Civil War skirmish, so you’ve got to save the Walmart,’” Rothman said. “It’s the historical event and the thing that’s there now [has] no relationship.”

Advocates seeking to save the house pointed to its inclusion in Atlanta’s 2023 LGBTQ+ Historic Context Statement, which documents places associated with the city’s LGBTQ+ history. Inclusion in the report, however, does not itself establish landmark protection.

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The Atlanta City Council also approved a resolution on November 2 requesting that the city begin considering the property for landmark designation. That resolution did not itself designate the house a landmark, and zoning officials proceeded with their vote three days later.

The Gutierrezes, who plan to build a new house with a pool, have said they are open to installing a historical marker on the property to recognize its role in LGBTQ+ history.