Nevada’s sodomy law came a decade ahead of U.S. ruling

By Timothy Pratt

Thursday, June 26, 2003 | 11:22 a.m.

On hearing of the Supreme Court's decision repealing a Texas law against sodomy, several longtime members of the Las Vegas Valley's gay community recalled their own battles in Nevada.

They pointed to the repeal of Nevada's own sodomy law in the state Legislature, almost 10 years to the day on June 16, 1993.

"Our Legislature was a decade ahead of the national court," said Kevin Kelly, a Las Vegas attorney who took a case to district court challenging Nevada's sodomy law weeks before the legislative decision was made in Carson City.

The Las Vegas case involved a man who met an undercover agent at a local gym and then was charged with violating the sodomy law after the agent went to the man's house.

Kelly represented the man and intended to challenge the law's constitutionality, but the case was dropped.

The district attorney at the time "tried to prosecute, but then they realized the significance of the case and dropped the charges," Kelly said.

Kelly challenged the lower court's decision in Nevada's Supreme Court but that court denied the challenge as moot.

While the court was still deliberating, the state senate passed a repeal of the sodomy law.

The bill was before the Assembly and "the court wanted to know what the legislature was doing, while the legislature wanted to know what the court was doing," Kelly said.

On June 16, the bill was signed into law.

Kelly said he took the case because he himself was a victim of the law when he was shot by a male prostitute in 1982, a case that caused a great deal of controversy at the time.

After the incident, he was urged to step down as a Special Master in District Court, which he did.

"I defended the case because I thought the law was unfair, archaic and needed to be repealed," he said.

"I know that there are a lot of people still suffering within our community in society and today's decision validates many people who still haven't come out of the closet," Kelly said.

Rob Schlegel, a publisher of the Las Vegas Bugle, the valley's gay newspaper for the last 25 years, recalled those events and the struggle last November against Question 2, which added language to the Nevada Constitution defining marriage as only between a man and a woman. The ballot measure passed by a clear majority.

He said that another recent decision to legalize marriages of the same gender in Canada, together with today's Supreme Court decision, will create a ripple effect.

"Today's decision shows that it's just a matter of time before tolerance and justice prevail," Schlegel said.

"I don't care what the voters said on Question 2, if somebody from Canada comes down here ... it will eventually go to court and a judge will ... stand up for what is right and repeal that law as well," he said.

Allen Lichtenstein, counsel for the local chapter of the ACLU, whose national office participated in the case, said the decision was "very powerful."

"It affirms the fundamental liberty and right to make your own private decisions about sexual matters and that it is not the state's function to patrol those decisions among consenting adults," Lichtenstein said.

"It also explicitly affirms the dignity of gays and lesbians," he said.