Head Cases

"I'm talking about people who don't set foot in these seedy joints," she says.

Kansas City, Columbia and St. Louis have anti-discrimination ordinances, but homosexuals elsewhere in the state may be denied housing or jobs on the basis of their sexual orientation. Even though no one in Missouri has been prosecuted for having same-gender sex in private, a law decreeing that gay sex is illegal is a big hurdle, Lieberman says. "There's a lot of important reasons for that law to be struck down. It prevents us from enacting other laws promoting equality. It justifies courts' denying custody and parenting rights to gays and lesbians because they're criminals."

As in Missouri, the Kansas sodomy law has evolved over the years.

In 1855, Kansas Territorial Laws called sodomy "a crime against nature," punishable by confinement and hard labor not less than ten years." More than a hundred years later, in 1969, legislators redefined sodomy as "oral or anal copulation between persons who are not husband and wife or consenting adult members of the opposite sex, or between a person and an animal, or coitus with an animal." In 1983, the Kansas Legislature changed the criminal sodomy law, adding the words "members of the same sex."

Activists have made little effort to convince the heavily Republican Kansas Legislature to change or repeal the law. "I don't think anything has been done," says Steve Brown, president of the Kansas Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Democratic Caucus, a special-interest group lobbying for equal treatment for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered persons. "Repealing sodomy laws is not high on the Republican agenda."

At the moment, all eyes are on the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard a challenge to Texas' homosexual conduct law and is expected to rule in June. Gay rights advocates hope the court will overturn its 1986 ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick.

Unlike Robert Rowe and the Award Video defendants, Atlanta bartender Michael Hardwick was arrested while having sex in the privacy of his own home.

A police officer had gone to Hardwick's house at 3 a.m. to serve Hardwick with a warrant for drinking in public. Hardwick's roommate opened the door for the officer, who then found Hardwick and another man having oral sex in a bedroom. The officer arrested the two men under Georgia's sodomy law. Hardwick took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against him 5-4.

In a majority opinion written by Justice Byron R. White, the court refused to acknowledge that gay Americans had "a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy." Chief Justice Warren E. Burger added that to rule in Hardwick's favor "would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching."

Writing for the four dissenters, however, Justice Harry A. Blackmun criticized his colleagues' "almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity" and mentioned another Supreme Court ruling that was overturned within three years.

"I can only hope that here, too, the Court soon will reconsider its analysis and conclude that depriving individuals of the right to choose for themselves how to conduct their intimate relationships poses a far greater threat to the values most deeply rooted in our Nation's history than tolerance of nonconformity could ever do. Because I think the Court today betrays those values, I dissent," Blackmun wrote.

The ruling mobilized gay activists across the country, who have been doing their best to rewrite state law books. Missouri's PROMO was founded within days of the decision.

The current Texas case is a rerun of Bowers v. Hardwick. Police arrived at John Lawrence's Houston home after a neighbor filed a false report of a domestic disturbance. The officer discovered Lawrence and Tyron Garner having sex, and the men were later convicted of misdemeanors and fined $200 each. They appealed their convictions but were refused by the Texas Supreme Court.

If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against Texas in June, states will be forced to reevaluate their lingering sodomy laws.

Dick Kurtenbach, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri, says that the court's willingness to take the case bodes well for the defendants. "Unless they want to make things better, they wouldn't take this same issue," Kurtenbach says of the justices.

If the Supreme Court does throw out the Texas law, it could do so with two arguments, Wunrow says. The court might rule based on privacy, saying the state has no business involving itself in what goes on between consenting adults in their own homes. Or it might turn to the concept of equal protection, saying that homosexuals have the same right to oral sex that heterosexuals do.

If the court rules based on equal protection, the states could recriminalize heterosexual sodomy to make things equal.

But that seems far-fetched, even in prudish Missouri and Kansas.

"It is unlikely Kansas and Missouri will criminalize all sexual behavior except the missionary position," says Alex Flemington, president of the Four Freedoms Democratic Club, Kansas City's main political organization for gays and lesbians.

But Wunrow won't rule it out, at least in the governmental halls of Jefferson City. "I'm sure a notion like that would get some votes," he says.