Cabell Chinnis Talks About Life as a Gay Supreme Court Clerk

The New York Times on June 9 featured a front-page story titled, "Exhibit A for a Major Shift: Justices' Gay Clerks." The article looked at the interactions of Supreme Court justices and their gay court clerks in the 1980s. One of the clerks interviewed was C. Cabell Chinnis, who clerked for Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. when Justice Powell was considering his crucial vote in the Bowers v. Hardwick case, involving a George law that criminalized sodomy. The article states,

C. Cabell Chinnis, a gay lawyer who practices law in Palo Alto, Calif., was one of Justice Powell’s clerks as the justice was struggling with how to vote in the Hardwick case. In an interview, Mr. Chinnis said his boss must have known about his sexual orientation. “He had met my boyfriend,” Mr. Chinnis said. 

Indeed, the justice sought him out for advice precisely because he wanted to learn about the mechanics of gay sex, Mr. Chinnis said, recalling an uncomfortable exchange on the subject. 

“This 78-year-old man is asking me about erections at the Supreme Court,” he said.
The conversation was unusual, as Mr. Chinnis was not the clerk who had been assigned to work on that case. But the two kept talking as the justice wrestled with the issues in the case. At one point, Mr. Chinnis recalled, he made a plea to his boss based on a comparison to a pending case about the right to vote in judicial elections. 

“It’s more important to me to make love to the person I love,” Mr. Chinnis remembered saying, “than to vote for a judge in a local election.”

Justice Powell initially considered striking down the law, but ultimately voted to uphold it.