Queer Clout

Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics

Timothy Stewart-Winter

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780812224061, 9780812247916
• eBook ISBN: 9780812292459
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In postwar America, the path to political power for gays and lesbians led through city hall. By the late 1980s, politicians and elected officials, who had originally sought political advantage from raiding gay bars and carting their patrons off to jail, were pursuing gays and lesbians aggressively as a voting bloc—not least by campaigning in those same bars. Gays had acquired power and influence. They had clout.Tracing the gay movement's trajectory since the 1950s from the closet to the corridors of power, Queer Clout is the first book to weave together activism and electoral politics, shifting the story from the coastal gay meccas to the nation's great inland metropolis. Timothy Stewart-Winter challenges the traditional division between the homophile and gay liberation movements, and stresses gay people's and African Americans' shared focus on police harassment. He highlights the crucial role of black civil rights activists and political leaders in offering white gays and lesbians not only a model for protest but also an opening to join an emerging liberal coalition in city hall. The book draws on diverse oral histories and archival records spanning half a century, including those of undercover vice and police red squad investigators, previously unexamined interviews by midcentury social scientists studying gay life, and newly available papers of activists, politicians, and city agencies.As the first history of gay politics in the post-Stonewall era grounded in archival research, Queer Clout sheds new light on the politics of race, religion, and the AIDS crisis, and it shows how big-city politics paved the way for the gay movement's unprecedented successes under the nation's first African American president.

1

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A Little World Within a World

“I MOVED TO my own place when I was eighteen, to a building near Clark and Division, which was the place to live if you were gay,” recalled John, a gay man, in 1983. The year to which he referred was 1950. The previous year, John’s priest had been shocked by his disclosure at confession that he had had a sexual encounter with another teenage boy. John added that once he moved to Chicago’s Near North Side, “When you applied for a job, you hesitated to give an address in that area. Quite often I gave my parents’ address to avoid remarks like ‘The queer North Side, eh?’ or ‘Is that near Clark and Perversion?’”¹ Though Americans had long viewed cities as dens of iniquity, foreignness, and political radicalism, as whites began to move to the suburbs in the 1950s, sensational depictions on television and in movies cemented the cities’ reputation as dangerous. In novels and in newspapers, cops and G-men did battle to reclaim the urban jungle from dangerous criminals and sex fiends.

But cities were also places where blacks and gays could develop communities. African Americans left the Jim Crow South for Chicago in large numbers, with nearly half a million crowding into the South Side’s “black belt” by 1950. As the boundaries of the black belt threatened to burst into the surrounding white residential areas, violence flared, yet African Americans found the chance for better work and pay in Chicago than in the places they had left behind. Gay men and women also found work, friends, and ways of living that were impossible in the small towns or the provincial urban neighborhoods where they had grown up. When sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey first traveled from Indiana to Chicago in the summer of 1939 in search of homosexuals to interview for a possible research project, he found himself swept up in a dizzying array of parties, clubs, and bars, “which would be unbelievable if realized by the rest of the world,” he wrote to a colleague.² Almost three decades later, one Chicago lesbian went so far as to lament how deeply involved younger lesbians seemed to become in the city’s queer communities: “[J]ust because they’re homosexual, the gay life becomes everything.”³ Many men and women were afraid to dip their toes into the gay world, but urban America offered many others access to a limited degree of freedom.

The most visible gathering places for gays and lesbians in 1950s Chicago were in the two main entertainment districts, north and south of downtown. On the South Side, just north of the historic black commercial center of Bronzeville and a block from the city’s first high-rise public-housing project, which opened in 1950, the jazz trumpeter “Tiny” Davis, known as the Female Satchmo, opened a jazz club with her partner Ruby Lucas. At Tiny and Ruby’s Gay Spot, later demolished to make room for the Dan Ryan Expressway in 1958, Davis recalled, “The daddies are daddies and the fems are fems.”⁴ At Big Lou’s, a Rush Street lounge on the mostly white Near North Side, a police officer in early 1952 reported “observation of effeminate men and mannish women in the place, males dancing with males, females dancing with females, and undue demonstrations of intimacy between women at the bar.”⁵ Between the two places, at the Town and Country Lounge in the basement of the Palmer House hotel in the central Loop commercial district, predominantly white gay men gathered for cocktails, often under the noses of straight hotel guests, and well-heeled men mingled with male window dressers and “ribbon clerks” working in downtown department stores.⁶

As gay enclaves developed, a small number of Chicagoans, mostly gay men but some notable women as well, launched tiny organizations aimed at improving the status of homosexuals. Chicagoans founded in 1954 the first chapter outside California of the Mattachine Society, the pioneering national “homophile” group in the postwar era, which advocated greater acceptance of gays and lesbians, their successful social and cultural “adjustment” in American society, and more sympathetic views of their lot on the part of experts. Homophile groups sought to improve the status of the homosexual in American society by holding discussion groups; meeting with sympathetic doctors, lawyers, pastors, and scholars; and publishing newsletters and magazines. The homophile movement also discussed the need to reform criminal laws against same-sex acts.

In many ways, the federal government drove the state repression of homosexuality in the quarter century after World War II. In the so-called lavender scare, officials investigated and purged gay and lesbian federal employees, beginning in 1950. That year, Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska launched an investigation of gay employees in the State Department, sparking a wave of hostile press attention that coincided with the anticommunist panic in Washington and Hollywood. In a 1953 executive order, President Dwight Eisenhower excluded gays and lesbians from federal employment on the grounds that they constituted security risks, codifying the antigay purge that Congress had initiated. The suppression of urban vice increasingly intersected with Cold War politics and the expanding mission of federal law enforcement.

But antigay policing in the 1950s entailed more variation and unevenness than the lavender-scare framework alone can explain. The federal bureaucracy’s persecution of gays and lesbians became unrelenting and systematic. Local police departments across the country cracked down on gays and lesbians as well, in many cities more aggressively than in the interwar period. In the words of one gay man, however, queer life in Chicago in the years after World War II felt like “a regular wavelike pattern of freedom for homosexuals and then a period of crackdown.”⁷ There, politicians viewed the presence of establishments catering to gays and lesbians—especially on the North Side, where they were situated near predominantly white tourist and convention areas—as a law-enforcement and public-relations problem. Under pressure from politicians to crack down on vice, municipal police and officers of the county sheriff conducted raids on gay spots, humiliating the patrons by distributing the names of those arrested to newspapers for publication. This occurred often enough that patrons calculated the likelihood of such raids in weighing how closely to associate with other gay people. The police who launched Chicago’s antigay crackdowns had typically faced demands to do so from muckraking reporters and elite reformers, especially the Chicago Crime Commission, an offshoot of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry. To these business-led reformers, homosexuality was to be regulated as a form of illicit vice. Not only were the operators of a gay bar potentially subject to criminal penalties in much the same manner as sex workers, pornographers, gamblers, and abortion providers, but so were the patrons. Law-enforcement agencies ensnared gay Chicagoans in small but growing numbers.

The emergence of the homophile movement in the 1950s was deeply shaped by local law enforcement. Situating homophile activism in the context of urban politics reveals two important points about the midcentury politics of sexuality. First, the tiny gay movement that arose in the course of the decade was shaped by the necessity of concealment. The figure of “the pervert” increasingly populated America’s big-city newspapers, appearing abstractly as a threat to the social order or concretely as a result of being exposed and then, usually, terminated from employment. Joining the homophile movement required overcoming the fear of being blackmailed, robbed, or—above all, and most universally—simply being exposed as gay, even to relatives or friends. Pearl Hart, a lawyer who advised homophile activists in postwar Chicago, was also experienced in defending other clients—those charged as communists or prostitutes, for example—who similarly faced stigma and pressure to conceal their deviation from the American mainstream. Second, the gay world was defined as deviant because gay sex was removed from the domestic, procreative, marital relations of proper breadwinners and their families. Gay people commonly believed that politicians most often cracked down on gay life during election campaigns, appealing to voters who were assumed to consist of such families. But for many of their patrons, queer bars were crucial sources of comfort and conviviality. “When you walked through that door,” recalled Esther Newton, who later published an ethnographic study of female impersonators based on her University of Chicago dissertation, “it was like you dropped through a trap door into this other world.”⁸ Gay bars and nightclubs served as an insecure haven from the rest of the city. Women, even more than men, frequently gathered at house parties. One woman recalled her friends carrying their party clothes, lest they attract hostile attention on the streets: “When we got to the party we’d take off the skirts, put on the pants, and have a party, and before we’d go home we’d take off our pants, put on our skirts, and bundle up the pants and go home.”⁹ Those who deviated from the postwar sex and gender order, no less than from its conformist political orthodoxy, were forced underground.

The gay subcultures of America’s largest cities mirrored the self-consciously rough-and-tumble spirit of postwar big-city life. In Unlike Others, a pulp paperback novel published in 1963 and set in Chicago, Valerie Taylor captured in brilliant detail how deeply gay life was embedded in—yet marginal to—local politics. Taylor’s protagonist, Jo, spends her days working in a downtown office tower as the underpaid assistant to the womanizing male editor of a corporation’s in-house employee newsletter. Meticulously concealing her private life from her boss, she finds her way into the city’s lesbian subculture after hours. At one point, Jo is awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call from her best friend Richard, a gay man who has been arrested in a bar raid. “Knowing the percentages,” Taylor’s narrator observed, “you never betrayed anyone. If you had straight friends who knew what you were and accepted you just the same, without any reservations—[Jo] never had, but some of the boys claimed it was possible—you never gave anyone away to them. It was a little world within a world.”¹⁰ Friends and lovers thus faced the risk of becoming enmeshed in the dangerous clutches of policemen, with money and influence offering the only means of escape.

The predicament of Jo and her friends offered a vivid metaphor for the status of gays and lesbians in the public sphere of America’s second-largest city. Gayness, spying, and concealment were powerfully linked together in popular culture of the era. Gay people may have been “deviates,” but if Taylor was right that their subculture prized “loyalty” so highly, that feature aligned them—rather ironically—with the mainstream American preoccupation in the Eisenhower years with questions of loyalty and disloyalty, even if their allegiances took an improper object. Public disapproval was forceful. Nonetheless, one gay male Chicagoan recalled, “the umbrella was still protecting us, of ignorance. I mean, not many people knew about homosexuality.”¹¹

“They Carry on like ‘Father Time’”

During the Great Depression and World War II, queer life was more visible in Bronzeville, the bright-light district on the African American South Side, than anywhere else in Chicago. Though politically subordinate to white police and property owners, Bronzeville offered perhaps the nation’s richest and densest concentration of black culture and commerce.¹² Since the early twentieth century, when the black-owned Chicago Defender, one of the most prominent black newspapers in the nation, exhorted its many Southern readers to come north in search of freedom, white politicians had allowed prostitution, gambling, and gay entertainment to flourish in black neighborhoods.¹³ “As in all Northern cities, the lowest of the races get together,” wrote the authors of a 1950 guidebook to the city’s nightlife. “This is most common among the degenerates in the twilight zones of sex. They meet everywhere, but their principal point of congregation is around Drexel Avenue and 39th Street,” an intersection in the heart of Bronzeville’s entertainment district.¹⁴ For example, the multiracial Finnie’s Halloween Ball, an intensely competitive contest in female impersonation, was covered extensively in the early 1950s in Ebony and Jet, African American magazines produced by Chicago’s Johnson Publications and distributed nationwide. Glamorously dressed female impersonators competed for prizes. “More than 1,500 spectators milled around outside Chicago’s Pershing Ballroom,” said a 1953 article in Ebony, describing one such drag ball, “to get a glimpse of the bejeweled impersonators who arrived in limousines, taxis, Fords and even by streetcar.”¹⁵ Black queer life was thus visibly woven into the public culture of the black South Side.

For black Chicagoans in the 1950s, the daily risk of encountering police harassment did not depend on one’s sexual inclinations. Life in the slums of the postwar urban North, and later in its segregated housing projects, was controlled by a police force drawn from all-white blue-collar neighborhoods. African Americans were accustomed to police brutality, and they had had little success in challenging it in the face of a dominant culture that held the police in high esteem. What little progress black activists made against police brutality in the 1950s occurred in the courts. Although the city’s mainstream newspapers often ignored crime in black neighborhoods, in the second half of the 1950s the African American press increasingly covered the brutal treatment of black citizens by white officers, even in the citizens’ own homes. The Defender had drawn attention to police brutality on the South Side in a high-profile series of articles in 1958. That year, for example, thirteen Chicago police officers broke into James Monroe’s house in the middle of the night based on a false tip in a murder investigation; woke him and his wife with flashlights; and struck, pushed, and kicked him and his six children. In a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Monroe could sue the involved officers for civil damages under a federal statute originally meant to suppress the Ku Klux Klan in the post–Civil War South.¹⁶ Nevertheless, on the city’s South Side, police harassment remained a fact of life. Not until the second half of 1963 did a sustained campaign of protest against police brutality in Chicago’s black neighborhoods begin to take shape.

For white gays and lesbians, police harassment increasingly constituted their most important point of contact with the state. African Americans in Chicago in the 1950s faced police harassment regardless of whether they were que...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. A Little World Within a World
• 2. Maximum Feasible Intimidation
• 3. Freaking Fag Revolutionaries
• 4. Clark and Diversey is Our Ghetto!
• 5. Lesbian Survival School
• 6. Balance of Power
• 7. A New Disease is Not Welcome Here
• 8. Flexing Gay Economic Muscle
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments