Tyrone Garner, who challenged Texas’ sodomy law to the U.S. Supreme Court and won a landmark decision, has died, according to 365Gay.com. According to Gay.com, Garner died Sept. 11 in a Houston hospital at the age of 39; he had been suffering from meningitis and had been in his brother’s care for the past six months.
In 1998 Garner and John Lawrence were charged under the sodomy law after police burst into Lawrence’s Houston home in search of an armed intruder and discovered the two men having sex. Ultimately—on June 26, 2003—the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Texas sodomy law in a 6-3 decision and reversed the court’s 1986 ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick, which had upheld a similar statute in Georgia.
Lambda Legal Executive Director Kevin Cathcart said that ‘because Tyrone Garner and John Lawrence had the courage to challenge homophobic sodomy laws, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that love, sexuality and family play the same role in gay people’s lives as they do for everyone else.’
The Black Caucus of the National Stonewall Democrats commented that ‘the GLBT community lost one of its most courageous heroes. Tyrone Garner was not your traditional activist. … However, in his own silent existence he was one of the titans of our movement.’