From FIGHT OF THE CENTURY, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman.
BY MARLON JAMES James is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2019. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize.
This is not an essay about lynching. But the curious landmark case of Lawrence v. Texas made me think about it all the same. And not just because it was inflamed by two different kinds of panic over a specific fear in the unpoliced white imagination, what writer Greg Tate once called “the black sex machine gone berserk.” Quick recap: When Robert Eubanks, a white man of Harris, Texas, called the police on his friend John Geddes Lawrence Jr., a white, gay fifty five- year-old medical technologist, and mutual friend Tyron Garner (black), it was because he noticed that Lawrence and his on‑and-off again lover had hit it off way too well, and while he went out to get soda, he jealously surmised that they were getting it on. Many white people profess ignorance at how racism actually affects black people yet demonstrate full awareness of how to use it for the most damage. Eubanks called the police, counting on their hair-trigger reaction, yet more likely discounting how bloody these encounters usually play out.
But Eubanks, in an action that would go viral with white women twenty years later, called the police on a black person having too much fun. And like quite a few white men from the good old South, Eubanks knew exactly what to say to get his revenge. He called the police to report not a sex but a gun crime, specifically “a black male going crazy with a gun” at Lawrence’s apartment. The recklessness of Eubanks’s imagination remains stunning, but the black gun in the white mind has often been inseparable from the black cock. As for hard black cocks, the police claimed to have seen that and more when they stumbled on Lawrence and Garner in flagrante delicto. If nothing else, Eubanks was as excellent a reader of racial assumptions as he was of sexual chemistry. Garner was two things in the Middle American fancy wrapped into one: big black gun as phallic symbol and a big black penis as gun substitute. It’s remarkable how a case that would go on to make great strides for sexual orientation started out with white America’s warped perceptions about race. This was a case that could have gone to the Supreme Court for very different reasons had the police chosen to act differently—meaning had they assumed that Garner was the kind of threat Eubanks claimed he was. But whatever it was the police saw those two men doing, both were arrested and charged with a misdemeanor under Texas’s anti-sodomy law.
But back to lynching. And with it a side on bestiality. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissenting opinion, argued that in the wake of the Lawrence v. Texas decision—which invalidated sodomy laws in twelve other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory state—laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity would not prove sustainable.
Slippery-slope theory is a common trope of conservative thinkers, as is conflation, but the opinion was nonetheless curious given that in states like Texas, acts of bestiality were actually legal. Read more via Time