COURTING JUSTICE: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court.

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie
• Position: Review

COURTING JUSTICE: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court by Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price Basic Books, $32.50

IN 1953, WHEN A GROUP OF brave souls in a seedy garment district of Los Angeles launched the nation's first gay magazine, gays and lesbians were thought to be as dangerous and sneaky as communists, lurking everywhere and threatening the nation's moral foundation. Not surprisingly, a year after it started, the Postmaster General dubbed ONE magazine obscene and banned its distribution.

Tame by modern standards, ONE hardly matched the girlie magazines of the time and only delicately talked about sex. (In one short story, a lesbian couple touched each other four times before living happily ever after--which was apparently the story's real crime in the eyes of the government.) But that didn't stop the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals from branding the October 1954 issue of ONE "morally, depraving and debasing."

When ONE decided to fight the L.A. postmaster over its decision, even the ACLU wouldn't represent it, having defended the constitutionality of laws that made homosexual behavior criminal. But ONE's editors did manage to find a lawyer, and much to their surprise, in 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court took up their case, its first ever dealing with homosexuality. Even more shocking, without even hearing arguments in the case, the court ruled in ONE's favor, giving life to the country's gay rights movement more than a decade before the Stonewall Riots.

Yet ONE Inc. v. Olesen barely made The New York Times, and today, even many gay rights activists likely haven't heard of the landmark Supreme Court decision. That's probably because it was followed by four decades of hostile rulings from the nation's top court relegating gays and lesbians to second-class citizenship. In a remarkable piece of reporting, writers Deb Price and Joyce Murdoch resurrect ONE's story, along with many others, in fresh detail in their new book, Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court.

Murdoch, managing editor of the National Journal, and Deb Price, the first nationally syndicated columnist on gay and lesbian issues, have scoured the National Archives, interviewed former court clerks, and tracked down many of the original plaintiffs and defendants to hear their tales. The stories they tell are as much about cases the justices actually heard as the ones they turned down. Read together, the decisions show a pattern of absurdly contradictory rulings that...