You're listening to the microversion of the Savage Love Cast at Savage.lo.

In 1986, in Bowers V. Hardwick, the Supreme Court of Health State Anti-Satime Laws,

it's a Supreme Court rule that there was no constitutional right to engage in homosexual acts,

and that states, good man, gay sex, and arrest gay men.

The details, the actual case is infuriating. A bigoted Atlanta cop with a personal beef against a

gay bartender went to that bartender's apartment to serve an invalid warrant and walked into that

guy's bedroom where he was having sex with his boyfriend at the time. He arrested them both on the

spot for violating Georgia's anti-Satime statute. The Bowers decision said that that cop had

every right to do so. That gay men did not have a right to privacy. That Georgia had every right

to throw gay men in prison for having sex with each other. Prison, where as David Letterman joked

on the night the Bowers decision came down, prison, where no one ever has gay sex.

I had to wait a whole day to read the actual decision. It was 1986, so it wasn't online right away

because there was no online. I was at a rehearsal the next day, and rehearsal came to a stop

when someone carried in a pile of newspapers. The New York Times published the decision in full.

The room went silent as everyone read. Some of us wept. All of us were furious. We were being told

by the Supreme Court by our own government again that our bodies were our own,

that we couldn't make our own choices about our own bodies, that we remained second class

citizens. It was devastating. Last week, devastating news from that same court, that we knew this was

coming, somehow didn't make the news, any less devastating. In Dobbsville, Jackson Women's Health

Organization, the Supreme Court of Health Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban and overturned

Roe v. Wade. In their dissent, the three liberal justices still on the court said the decision

in Dobbs consigned women to second class citizenship, or reconsigned them. American women are less

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