That opinion was overturned in 2003 by the Court in Lawrence v. The 5-4 decision, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in his concurring opinion, “To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.” Hardwick later sued in federal court and the case eventually wound up before the Supreme Court. When police later went to Hardwick’s house to serve an arrest warrant, they entered and went into Hardwick’s bedroom where he was having sex with another man. He worked at a bar and was cited by an Atlanta police officer for allegedly drinking in public outside the bar. In a fashion, that’s what happened to Michael Hardwick. Atlanta was still a Bible Belt, conservative kind of town in the ’70s and ’80s, so there were real world consequences to being outed.”Ībby Drue (from left), Charlie Paine, Dave Hayward and Gil Robison look over articles while gathered near the Virginia-Highland house where Michael Hardwick was arrested for sodomy in 1982, leading to the historic Bowers V. “You might find a club flyer or advertisement but photos, not so much. “You can sometimes find photographs of buildings but very little of what was happening inside,” said Randy Gue, urban historian and Curator of the Political, Cultural and Social Movement Collection at the Rose Library at Emory University. So documentation of lives people led can be difficult to find even now. For generations, being gay and surviving meant hiding. For the gay community, however, it is particularly complex. Losing historical landmarks or having them go unnoticed by subsequent generations is an eternal issue for many communities. Mark McDonald, president and CEO of the Georgia Trust, said the fellowship was the first in its 47-year history that the trust has awarded to an LGBTQ initiative. Paine recently received a $5,000 fellowship from the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation to help Historic Atlanta document the city’s remaining gay landmarks and develop a plan to preserve them. “As LGBTQ spaces are disappearing from the urban landscape, it has really concerned the community,” said Charlie Paine, who chairs Historic Atlanta’s LGBTQ advisory committee. Yet, the importance of Second Sunday has not been lost on those who were there in the early days, or on those who came of age when gay marriage was legal and HIV was treatable. Today the landscape is filled with sprawling, anonymous, modern apartment complexes. The building where the men held their first meetings is long gone.
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It will commemorate Second Sunday, the movement for Black gay men started in the condominum of Maurice Franklin who lived not far from the park. The second marker is proposed for Old Fourth Ward Park. The Virginia-Highland house where Michael Hardwick was arrested for sodomy in 1982, leading to the historic Bowers v.