The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial.
Capozzola, Christopher
The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial
by Casey Charles
University Press of Kansas. 320 pp., $35.
It was anyone's worst nightmare. On a fall day in 1983, after
learning that her partner had been in a car accident, Karen Thompson stood separated from Sharon Kowalski by nothing more than a hospital
door--a barrier Thompson had no legal right to cross. Kowalski's
parents, who simply could not believe their daughter was a lesbian,
refused to grant any say over Sharon's fate to a woman they
regarded as her deranged and malicious "landlady." The battle
soon turned to the courts. Separated completely for more than three
years, Thompson and Kowalski eventually won legal recognition in 1992 as
a "family of affinity," and live together to this day. In The
Sharon Kowalski Case, Casey Charles provides a rich and gripping account
of this courtroom drama and its implications for lesbian and gay rights.
The decision in the Minnesota Court of Appeals is of little value as
legal precedent; the true significance of the case was its hearing in
the court of public opinion. Charles sets the case against the
historical backdrop of the 1980's, a time when AIDS had made the
legal status of care-giving a hotly political issue, and before the
changes in disability rights that followed the Americans with
Disabilities Act in 1990. He reconstructs the case from trial
transcripts, personal interviews, and Karen Thompson's 1988 memoir
(relying a little too much, and a little too uncritically, on the last
of these sources). He exerts enough discipline over the endless maze of
court hearings and legal motions to construct a compelling narrative
while still allowing all the participants to speak for themselves. In
debates about same-sex marriage, hospital visitation rights almost
always come up, showing that Karen Thompson's 1983 hospital-room
nightmare continues to haunt any dream of full equality. The Sharon
Kowalski Case shows how much has changed--and how much has not.
