Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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       Inkblots and Individual Rights

      In the midst of continuing police harassment and media-generated sex-crime panics, as well as a nascent national movement for African American civil rights, Chicago’s homophile movement took shape. By some twist of fate, Chicago had been the site of the nation’s earliest gay-rights organization yet uncovered, the Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 by Henry Gerber, a postal clerk and Great War veteran living on the city’s North Side. The group was quickly shut down by the police, its files confiscated, and Gerber let go by the post office. In 1940, a pen pal asked Gerber about forming an organization for homosexuals. “Let me tell you from experience,” he replied, “it does not pay to do anything for them. I once lost a good job in trying to bring them together.”⁸¹ Still, Gerber’s activism illustrates the transatlantic influence of Magnus Hirschfeld and other German sexologists, and it was a precursor to the American gay movement of the postwar period.

      The homophile movement began decades later among white liberals, most of them men. Mobilizing around an individual-level trait not shared with family members, such as one’s homosexuality, often entails spatial and emotional distancing from one’s family and neighborhood of origin. For this reason, participating in such a movement was perhaps inevitably both less attractive to and less possible for black than for white Chicagoans. In the working-class queer city, to be sure, there was some crosstown traffic. An African American male-to-female transgender Chicagoan living on the South Side recalls that she “was always up on north side, in and out of there,” especially the mostly white, bohemian and queer enclave of Old Town, where she encountered a multiracial transgender social network—including other street queens who “introduced me to the doctor they were getting their hormones from.”⁸² But the racial segregation of Chicago’s neighborhoods and workplaces curtailed the possibility of interracial queer political mobilization.

      To most gays and lesbians in the early Cold War era, the risks of forming an organization based on their sexual orientation collectively outweighed the potential benefits. In the late 1940s or early 1950s, Shirley Willer was a young nurse in her twenties when a gay male friend died in a Catholic hospital in Chicago. Willer believed that her friend received inadequate care because he was perceived to be gay. Along with perhaps five friends, she recalled, she went to see a lawyer named Pearl Hart to ask about starting a formal organization of gays and lesbians. “We asked Pearl how you went about starting a group, and she said, ‘You don’t. It’s too dangerous.’” At that time, Willer said, “Pearl was like everyone else. She felt that people would get further by simply doing things quietly without announcing themselves.” Willer abandoned the notion of founding an organization and instead established an informal network of mutual aid. “Nothing came of that meeting, no formal organization, so my girlfriends and I did things pretty much on our own,” Willer recalled. “We took in young women and sometimes young men who had been thrown out of their homes.” She felt her nurse’s salary enabled her to help these young people, who “wouldn’t take jobs where they would be in danger of being fired because of being gay” and consequently took “the dirty jobs, the rough jobs.”⁸³

      It was not until 1954—after the California-based Mattachine Foundation had reorganized as the Mattachine Society, at its spring 1953 convention—that Midwesterners formed their first homophile group since Gerber’s. The Mattachine chapter in Chicago produced a newsletter from mid-1954 to early 1956, which published detailed, often quite well-written book reviews challenging literary conventions of gay representation. In 1954 and 1955, the Chicago group sponsored both closed and public discussions of such topics as “The Deviate and His Job” and “The Ethics of the Sex-Deviate,” as well as book discussion groups and fund-raising art sales. Participants in Chicago’s first homophile group looked to its West Coast progenitor as a model. One Mattachine member reported in the group’s newsletter about a trip to the West Coast: “The Society in San Francisco is probably further removed from the organizational growing pains Chicago has.” He was impressed, he said, that Mattachine Society pamphlets were available in the waiting room of the city health department’s outpatient clinic. The man reported that a police crackdown then under way in the City by the Bay “has the approval of most deviant residents of the city” because it focused on “that minority of deviants whose promiscuity in public places is flagrant and objectionable.”⁸⁴ Thus, if California was frequently held up as a model, the example was not necessarily always a radicalizing influence.

      Chicago’s early homophile activists, like their counterparts in coastal cities, used a patriotic rhetoric that suffused much of American life in the early Cold War. Yet, however eager they were to integrate themselves into postwar society and assert a respectable image, homophile organizers also included many leftists, who deviated in other ways from the postwar consensus. Pearl Hart, the crucial figure in the emergence of the homophile movement in Chicago, emerged out of left-wing politics (see Figure 2). Born in 1890 and raised Jewish in Traverse City, Michigan, she belonged to a generation in which there were almost no women attorneys, but she practiced law in Chicago from 1914. In 1933, Hart became a public defender in Chicago’s Morals Court (later the Women’s Court), where she improved the legal representation, and sharply reduced the conviction rate, of women arrested on prostitution charges.⁸⁵ Active in the Henry Wallace presidential campaign and the National Lawyers Guild, Hart was described by the journalist I. F. Stone in 1953 as “famous throughout the Midwest for a lifetime of devotion to the least lucrative and most oppressed kind of clients.” She defended immigrants and Communists charged under the anticommunist Smith Act of 1950. She argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, and won, a 1957 case limiting the power of immigration officials to ask an alien awaiting deportation questions about how he used his free time and what newspapers he read.⁸⁶

FIGURE 2. Pearl M. Hart, date unknown. Courtesy of Gerber/Hart Library and Archives.

      Hart never identified herself publicly as a lesbian, even though she did more than any other Chicagoan in the 1950s to advance gay rights. Renee Hanover—who later said she came to Chicago as part of the Communist Party underground in the 1950s, then became Hart’s student at John Marshall Law School in downtown Chicago, and finally joined her in opening a legal practice focusing on cases affecting women—recalled how Hart managed being both a lesbian and a lawyer. When they met, Hanover recalled after Hart’s death, “of course she knew I was queer and I knew she was queer; I didn’t think that she knew she was queer. To know Pearl is to know this [feeling]! … She really felt that one’s personal life was one’s own.” She was “very conservative in that way. But not conservative in terms of gay community cases. She’s the one person who would take these cases.”⁸⁷ She was accustomed to representing clients despised by mainstream commentators.

      Indeed, as with homophile groups in every city, organizing was hampered by the fact that pseudonyms were the custom. One of the original Chicago Mattachine chapter’s first newsletters reported that the group had “formally approved Mr. Frank Beauchamp, who had generously offered to relinquish his privilege of anonymity as a member of the Society,” and this would allow the group to “proceed to the next step toward legal recognition under the Illinois Not for Profit Corporation Act.”⁸⁸ After its address was published in national Mattachine Society literature, mailed by the San Francisco headquarters, the organization received correspondence from readers across the Midwest. “From Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio came offers of help,” wrote the newsletter editor, and “leaders throughout these States also inquired about forming chapters in their own communities.”⁸⁹

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