Twenty years ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision, one that marked a new pivot in the battle for LGBTQ+ equality. In 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas, the high court struck down the country’s remaining anti-sodomy laws, which for years had empowered law enforcement to broadly discriminate against queer Americans.

But while the decision may have seemed to materialize out of thin air, writes Wesley G. Phelps in his new book, Before Lawrence v. Texas: The Making of a Queer Social Movement (Univ. of Texas, Feb. 7), “the case should be viewed as the culmination of a social and legal revolution that had been building for nearly three decades rather than a sudden or unexpected development.”

In a starred review, Kirkus called Before Lawrence v. Texas a “bracing journey through decades of struggle for queer equality.” I spoke with Phelps by phone about the significance of the decision in the long arc of LGBTQ+ rights, the lessons that activism around the case has for advocates today, and the threats Lawrence faces at a moment of renewed hostility against queer communities. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you center your book on Lawrence v. Texas?

Lawrence is the foundation for all the recent gains in the movement for queer equality that have happened since 2003. If you think about the many achievements since then—the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the partial nullification of the Defense of Marriage Act, the marriage equality ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Bostock v. Clayton County decision recognizing that gay and transgender people are protected by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—none of those would’ve been possible if queer people’s romantic lives had still been criminalized.

Could you tell me about some of the key organizing that ultimately led to Lawrence?

One of the earliest cases I document is Buchanan v. Batchelor. Alvin Buchanan was arrested for violating the Texas sodomy law in 1969. His case went to a federal court in 1970, and he and his attorney challenged the constitutionality of the Texas sodomy law. They got a favorable ruling in that case from Judge Sarah Hughes. She didn’t rule based on the constitutional rights of Buchanan. She ruled on the constitutional rights of a married couple, saying that the law violated their privacy rights within their marriage. However, because the statute applied to everyone before 1974, she nullified the entire law. That was the first time a federal court struck down a state sodomy law on constitutional grounds.

That laid the groundwork for several other cases that followed. Probably the most important case I document is Baker v. Wade, which was filed in 1979. In that case, Don Baker was the plaintiff. He was a local Dallas activist. He hadn’t been arrested for violating what was then known as the homosexual conduct law. But he said that just the existence of the law was a threat of prosecution and also served as a justification for all kinds of discrimination against gays and lesbians. He got a favorable ruling at the district court in 1982. Judge Jerry Buchmeyer ruled that the homosexual conduct law violated the privacy and equal protection rights of gay and lesbian Texans. That was eventually overturned at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans in 1985. And then the following year, in 1986, the Supreme Court refused to hear it.

By the time John Lawrence and Tyron Garner were arrested in 1998, their legal team didn’t have to invent a legal strategy out of thin air. It had already been established by the cases that came before.

The book explores complex legal arguments, but it still feels broadly accessible—in large part, I think, because you animate it with stories that capture how anti–LGBTQ+ laws affected queer Americans’ everyday lives. Was that balance important for you to strike?

I’m trained as a social historian, and so the focus of my career has been to tell the stories of real people, to expose the human stories behind some of these larger historical trends. So, when I learned about these cases that came before Lawrence, I just thought, I want to know about these real people. Because often we talk about cases without knowing about the people. When people talk about Lawrence, they often don’t know about John Lawrence and Tyron Garner. They don’t know about what those two went through.

I think that it’s crucial to understand these human stories and the personal sacrifices people made. It’s important to know the legal strategies of these cases and the constitutional arguments. But it’s also important to know what the personal motivations were for filing these cases and seeing them through to the end.

What lessons does the organizing around Lawrence and other cases have for advocates today?

The biggest lesson is that winning these victories takes a tremendous amount of work and funding and support from an organized community. And anything worth achieving is going to take that kind of long-term approach.

Another lesson for advocates is the value of using the judicial system. Many advocates, especially over the past two or three years, have grown somewhat sour on using the courts to try to advance equality, mostly because of the disappointing decisions we’re seeing from the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court is really just the last court available. I have a quote in the book about a Supreme Court decision being the punctuation at the end of a very long sentence. I’d encourage advocates not to get too discouraged by what the Supreme Court is doing, though it’s been quite detrimental over the past few years. But there are other avenues to pursue. In one case I document—Morales v. Texas—activists decided that the federal courts were no longer a fruitful avenue for securing rights, so they decided to go through state courts and launch a state constitutional challenge to the sodomy law and were quite successful.

How is Lawrence in danger in a post–Roe v. Wade world?

I think that the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision is a very real threat to queer equality today, not to mention a threat to women’s reproductive health and rights. In the majority opinion for Dobbs, the justices go out of their way to suggest that this is only about abortion, that it’s not about other kinds of rights that derive from the constitutional right to privacy. But in Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion, he says that this isn’t just about abortion and that we need to revisit other cases based on the right to privacy. The head of the Texas Right to Life filed an amicus brief in Dobbs in which he argued that Obergefell should be on the list and that Lawrence should be on the list.

The reason for that is that Lawrence was decided only on the issue of privacy, meaning that with Roe overturned, these other cases based on privacy are at risk. The attorney general of Texas has already said that if Lawrence is overturned, the state still has the sodomy law on the books, and he’ll be ready to enforce it the very next day. That’s a real threat, because if Lawrence is at the center of recent gains for queer equality, overturning it is going to put those achievements in jeopardy.

Brandon Tensley is the national politics reporter at Capital B and a freelance culture writer.