Texans You Should Know is a series highlighting overlooked figures and events from Texas history. As a just-out-of-college reporter for the Dallas Morning News in 1979, I watched a landmark event in Texas history unfold, though it would be years before I understood its significance. That November, a former sixth grade teacher from Dallas named Don Baker filed a class action federal lawsuit (Baker v. Wade) challenging Texas’s notorious “Homosexual Conduct” law, known throughout the state’s gay communities simply by its state statute number, 21.06.Gay activists across the country had made strides in the seventies, as twenty states repealed their sodomy laws during that decade. But Texas went the other direction by passing the homosexual conduct law in 1973, making “deviate sexual intercourse” a crime punishable by…
The post The Dallas Teacher, Navy Vet, and Devout Christian Who Fought to Overturn Texas’s Sodomy Law appeared first on Texas Monthly.
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