This story really starts several decades before the decision and ended in part in 2003. There were rarely-enforced sodomy laws on the books until the past two hundred years or so. The laws were designed to make religiously condemned behavior illegal, promote child bearing and stigmatize groups who participated in behavior that was considered outside the mainstream. Therefore, when they were enforced, they were targeted at those unfavored people:
In America, the application of sodomy laws was strongly slanted along lines of race, ethnicity, and class. The U.S. Census Bureau reported in 1880 that 63 prisoners were then incarcerated for crimes against nature. A majority (32) of the prisoners were males of color in the South. A third of the white prisoners were foreign (European) born. Other evidence suggests that virtually all the prisoners were laborers or farm workers.
These laws began to be enforced more stringently when the United States started panicking over morality, gender roles and later, child abuse. They quickly morphed from something that was not seen as a pressing issue (indeed the first sodomy law Thomas Jefferson advocated for actually reduced the punishment for it as compared to previous laws - and his liberal version was rejected) into an institutional regime used to criminalize and marginalize gay and gender nonconforming people. Laws appeared in every state and became more secular.
Then there was the McCarthy Era, the Red Scare and the Lavender Scare.