Martin Padgett

Coursing with a pumped-up beat, gay Atlanta was the South's mecca--a beacon for gays and lesbians growing up in its homophobic towns and cities. There, the Sweet Gum Head was the club for achieving drag stardom. Martin Padgett evokes the fantabulous disco decade by going deep into the lives of two men who shaped and were shaped by this city: John Greenwell, an Alabama runaway who found himself and his avocation performing as the exquisite Rachel Wells; and Bill Smith, who took to the streets and city hall to change antigay laws. Against this optimism for visibility and rights, gay people lived with daily police harassment and drug dealing and murder in their discos and drag clubs. Conducting interviews with many of the major figures and reading through deteriorating gay archives, Padgett expertly re-creates Atlanta from a time when a vibrant, new queer culture of drag and pride came into being.

Drag, Drugs, Disco, and Atlanta's Gay Revolution

A Night at the Sweet Gum Head

The little-known story of the man who sparked a groundswell of gay activism after a wrongly decided Supreme Court decision. Michael Hardwick had no idea that when a police officer stood at his bedroom door on August 3, 1982, he would become a face of the gay rights movement. Arrested for sodomy, Hardwick sued for his right to privacy all the way to the Supreme Court, even as the HIV/AIDS epidemic began its toll. When he lost, his era-defining case inspired a half-million people to protest, and the ruling became one of the most reviled of its time. Today, Bowers v. Hardwick reverberates again, as the rights of privacy underpinning legal abortion, contraception, and same-sex relationships come under fire. But the individual Michael Hardwick has faded from memory—his story has been relegated to legal arcana, with only a pale rendering of his life outside of the Supreme Court case. In The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick, Martin Padgett assembles the complete kaleidoscope of Hardwick’s life—as a child of Stonewall, as an artist, and as one of many thousands claimed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Blending biography and history, Padgett traces how Hardwick became a political symbol, first by chance, then by his own choice, even when it made him an object of derision and scrutiny. From the then-unopened archives of legal scholar Laurence Tribe—who argued Hardwick’s case alongside the ACLU—to hours of new interviews with Hardwick’s surviving family and friends, Padgett emerges with a story of someone who stood up for equality despite the infamy he knew would attach to him. He reveals how Hardwick forced America to come to grips with queer people—and to acknowledge its moral failures toward some of its most marginalized citizens. In The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick, Martin Padgett reveals the halting shifts in American sexual politics over the last half-century, posing urgent questions about the deliberations of the Supreme Court, and returning to Hardwick the humanity stolen from him decades ago.

Sex and the Supreme Court in the Age of AIDS

The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick

An electric and intimate story of 1970s gay Atlanta through its bedazzling drag clubs and burgeoning rights activism. Coursing with a pumped-up beat, gay Atlanta was the South's mecca—a beacon for gays and lesbians growing up in its homophobic towns and cities. There, the Sweet Gum Head was the club for achieving drag stardom. Martin Padgett evokes the fantabulous disco decade by going deep into the lives of two men who shaped and were shaped by this city: John Greenwell, an Alabama runaway who found himself and his avocation performing as the exquisite Rachel Wells; and Bill Smith, who took to the streets and city hall to change antigay laws. Against this optimism for visibility and rights, gay people lived with daily police harassment and drug dealing and murder in their discos and drag clubs. Conducting interviews with many of the major figures and reading through deteriorating gay archives, Padgett expertly re-creates Atlanta from a time when a vibrant, new queer culture of drag and pride came into being.

Martin Padgett

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