Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Northwest (later Kennedy) Expressway. Newspapers repeatedly speculated on several possible theories—was it a teenage gang or a crazed sex degenerate?—that implicated bowling alleys, schools, movie theaters, and bars as potential sites of abduction. A psychiatrist who worked frequently with the criminal courts quickly declared they “were killed by a member of Chicago’s colony of sex degenerates,” even though the autopsy “disclosed no signs of sexual molestation.” This expert publicly called on police to “round up every known sex offender and moron,” further advising police that “there are several Chicago areas where persons with abnormal sex attitudes tend to congregate.”⁶³

      The extremely brutal nature of this crime (the Schuessler-Peterson murders), the lack of solid leads, and the dispersion of potential clues across the disparate landscape of the North Side all helped to unleash the imaginations of millions. The boys’ bodies were found naked, strangled, and mutilated, not far from horse stables.⁶⁴ In the absence of leads, police sought out “sex degenerates,” who, one representative expert told a reporter, “often seek their prey in movie theaters.” Journalists reported that some of the county forest preserves had long “been frequented by sex degenerates.” Perhaps, one expert suggested, the killer could be found if his “previous sex deviations” happened to be already “known to police.” Within just a few days, city and sheriff’s police were “rounding up persons whose recent actions indicated sex degeneracy or sadism.”⁶⁵ Police combed through lists of paroled sex offenders, interviewed more than 300 “sex deviates” in six months, and several times released the names of suspects who were later dropped from the inquiry. In one case, police released a suspect’s name with the “incriminating” fact that he had on his person, at the time of his arrest, a business card from a “gathering place for sexual degenerates.”⁶⁶

      Gay men were not the only ones the police questioned—at one point, the employees of eighteen Northwest Side packing plants were interviewed—but gay men were the group to which the police kept circling back.⁶⁷ One columnist claimed that, according to “a friend of mine who is an experienced and successful policeman,” it is best “to round up sex deviates” and that “in a high percentage of cases, this procedure leads to the discovery of the murderer.” This, of course, implied that harsher punishment of those showing signs of “deviation” could have prevented the crime.⁶⁸ Ordinary Chicagoans, too, demanded that city elders “place under constant surveillance or remove completely from society all known and suspected sex offenders.”⁶⁹

      The city’s obsession with the Schuessler-Peterson murders sheds light on how race and class determined the political meanings of violence against children. Daley frequently repeated an offer of a $10,000 reward to anyone who helped solve the triple murder. After the Schuessler boys’ father died of a heart attack several weeks later, Daley even proposed that the city provide “some program of aid” to the grieving widow. It is instructive to compare Daley’s response to the triple murder with his handling of the case of another young Chicagoan slain in a widely publicized murder during Daley’s first year as mayor. Daley proposed no reward in the murder of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Chicagoan killed two months earlier—albeit in Mississippi—in the twentieth century’s best-known lynching, and no municipal outlay to support his mother, the grieving Mamie Till Bradley, though she, too, was a single mother. (Daley did wire President Dwight Eisenhower, asking the federal government to become involved in the investigation.⁷⁰) At least one letter published in the black-owned Chicago Defender invoked both crimes in a broad indictment of society’s treatment of children; Mrs. Bradley, the newspaper reported, sent her condolences to the mothers of the three murdered white boys.⁷¹

      The perception of gays as predators profoundly shaped the response of law enforcement to crimes against children. This fact has been airbrushed out of accounts of the Schuessler-Peterson case, which was for decades among the nation’s best-known unsolved murders. Even the best book written about the murders, which was written from a law-enforcement perspective but generally avoids sensationalism, misrepresents profoundly the reasons for the investigation’s focus on gay men. “Single men living unconventional lifestyles and other persons unable to make a good accounting of their whereabouts on the nights in question fell under suspicion,” the authors acknowledge. But they portray police harassment of gays and lesbians in a more benign light than the evidence warrants: “A rumor that gained currency among the cops and reporters was that the slain boys and their schoolyard chums were in the habit of extorting money from known homosexuals—demanding cash in return for silence. For this reason, investigators took a hard look at the gay community.”⁷² In fact, however, gay men were targeted for investigation not only—indeed, not primarily—because they were victims of blackmail but rather because they were seen as possible predators.

      These investigations could destroy careers quietly even if no charges were ever filed. One of those questioned and forced by the Chicago police to take a lie-detector test was Samuel Steward, a writer and English professor at DePaul University, a Catholic university on the North Side. In March 1956, Chicago police interviewed Steward at his home and then brought him to a police station to answer questions about his whereabouts the night of the murders. In order to give an alibi, he had had to explain that he was an English professor at DePaul University. Though he passed the lie-detector test, he wrote in his journal that day, “If word of this gets to DePaul … it would definitely end me there.” Steward later said in an interview that he was cleared of the murders “largely because I had no car” and did not know how to drive, and thus could not have dumped the bodies in the forest preserve. By the end of the same week, however, he had been called in to meet with the dean of the school and was told his contract would not be renewed. “I tried to get him to say why,” Steward wrote in his diary, “but all I could force out of him was ‘Shall we say for outside activities?’”⁷³ Steward’s firing illustrates how easy it was for employers to accede to the pressure of press and police for the persecution of innocent gay citizens in the wake of a sex-crime panic. The lucky ones were those eased out of a job quietly.

      Because the sex-crime panics normalized the idea that gay people did not enjoy ordinary procedural rights, the repeated investigations fostered a climate of fear. In December 1956, the disappearance of two young sisters, Barbara and Patricia Grimes, who had also gone to the movies, and the discovery of their bodies a month later, evoked a similar panic. “Chicago seems to have gone quite off its rocker about the Grimes case,” wrote one gay man that spring, describing its impact on gay men sought by the police.⁷⁴ In July 1957 it was reported that a “limping blond youth” had been seen with Robert Peterson by the eye doctor who cared for his younger sister; dozens of citizens called and wrote the police with tips.⁷⁵

      In late 1959, eight detectives within the Chicago police department’s sex bureau were still assigned full time to the Schuessler-Peterson investigation.⁷⁶ By the fifth anniversary of the murders, in the fall of 1960, the Tribune reported that 44,000 people had been interviewed and 6,500 reports and complaints investigated. Of 3,500 suspects questioned, 45 were indicted, and 40 convicted of various crimes, including crimes connected to “perversion.”⁷⁷ Nearly two years later, a national gay magazine reported that the case “has led to continued police harassment of homosexuals (as alleged suspects) throughout the Midwest.” And new suspects were still being rounded up.⁷⁸ It is difficult to overstate how powerfully the media-generated sex-crime panics of the 1950s—and the Schuessler-Peterson murder investigation in particular—struck fear into gay men.

      Although the black press did not call for police crackdowns on deviates in the manner of the white-owned daily papers, black middle-class respectability politics increasingly shaped the coverage of queer life in the black media. The drag balls that had been a staple of Ebony and Jet received noticeably less coverage by the late 1950s, and as civil rights activism became more prominently featured, queer culture was less often portrayed in favorable ways. A Defender reader complained, “I saw in your paper some months ago some men dressed as women. Please don’t advertise the mess.”⁷⁹ In 1960, a black reformer complained СКАЧАТЬ