Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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СКАЧАТЬ it up as would be the case a decade later. The complaints described in the Chicago Mattachine Society newsletter in this era focused more on the risk of exposure in the workplace than on police practices (though, of course, the latter could and often did precipitate the former). Indeed, there was no discussion of the Chicago police department in the newsletter at any point during the chapter’s first incarnation. Only one article that appeared at that time directly took up the question of the state—rather than religious and medical authorities—as persecutors of gay people, and that article lodged its complaint not against the city or state but against the federal government, as well as against corporations influenced by the example of discrimination that federal policies offered. “Not only has the Federal Government expressed its aim to refuse to employ homosexuals for the sake of ‘tightening security measures’ or ‘improving moral standards,’” wrote the author, who published only under the initials J. B., “but an increasing number of private businesses are following the Government’s lead.” The author explained that federal policies had altered the climate for gay employees of local private firms. “Investigative agencies purporting to be miniature FBI’s,” observed another article in the Chicago Mattachine newsletter, “have sprung up to meet this demand for employee screening. Listed on the letters of one of these local agencies are the ‘undesirables’ this agency specializes in ferreting out; in bold print ‘homosexuals’ stands out.”⁹⁰ Some local employers had, unfortunately for gay people, begun to take their cue from the federal government.

      However timid by the standards of a later era, the Mattachine newsletter talked back to a culture that relentlessly demonized gay people. “In America at least,” sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in his influential 1963 book Stigma, “no matter how small and how badly off a particular stigmatized category is, the viewpoint of its members is likely to be given public presentation of some kind.”⁹¹ After a psychiatrist spoke at one Mattachine meeting and advanced the view that homosexuality could be treated and cured, the editors published letters of complaint from members. After the philosopher Gerald Heard spoke at an early meeting, one member wrote a letter denouncing Heard’s claims as pretentious: “As for [his] notion that the ‘intergrade’ has this great creative potential because he’s ‘relieved of the burden of procreation’—well, just ask the average invert where most of his energy goes.”⁹² The organization engaged in fledgling dialogues with activists in other cities, comparing their predicaments. Chicago’s Mattachine chapter held a daylong benefit art show, during which viewers watched a recording of a 1954 local television program, which had been shipped from Los Angeles, where it was taped, and which most members apparently found disappointingly unsympathetic toward gay citizens.⁹³

      The Chicago Mattachine group also engaged in a surprisingly bold project to help produce knowledge about homosexuality. Inspired by the path-breaking research of Evelyn Hooker, the psychologist and expert on gay men’s mental health, its members volunteered to take Rorschach inkblot tests for the cause. They also recruited their friends to participate in Hooker’s research. In retrospect, this may have been the chapter’s most important contribution to gay equality. The collaboration began in 1954 when Hooker stopped in Chicago on a cross-country trip to meet with chapter members. Her work was pioneering because, unlike previous scholarship, it did not rely on convenience samples made up solely of those gay men who sought a cure or had trouble with the law but instead recruited participants from homophile groups.⁹⁴ After Hooker’s visit, the Mattachine group “offered its services in obtaining 37 volunteers” to take Rorschach inkblot tests for a Chicago doctor interested in studying “non-institutionalized homosexuals.”⁹⁵ Hooker cited her conversations with Chicago Mattachine members, along with their counterparts in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, in her first published account of this research on gay men’s mental health, which she presented earlier at a 1956 conference in Chicago and published that same year in the Journal of Psychology.⁹⁶

      Despite such activities, the Chicago Mattachine group had trouble staying afloat. By mid-1956, San Francisco activist Hal Call visited Chicago and pronounced the chapter “practically dormant,” reporting a high level of fearfulness on the part of the gay Chicagoans he met, and no newsletters appear to survive from after the summer of 1955.⁹⁷ During a brief revival in 1957, the Mattachine members managed little more than to publish a pamphlet—although a significant one—written by Pearl Hart, titled “Your Legal Rights.” The pamphlet might best be summarized as a description of what was likely to happen to a gay man or lesbian—though it referred only to “individuals,” not homosexuals—after being arrested.

      The focus of the pamphlet was on laws used against gays. The main right emphasized was the right of an arrested person not to answer questions. “No police officer,” said the brochure, “has a right to question a person who has committed no offense, and the law does not require the person to answer indiscriminate questioning because the police happen to be making an investigation, or because there is a so-called ‘crime wave.’” The pamphlet also included a list of Illinois criminal offenses that “are frequently invoked against individuals,” including laws against public intoxication; patronizing or maintaining a disorderly house; “the infamous crime against nature”; the commission of lewd, lascivious, wanton, indecent, or lustful acts in public; and that broadest charge, “disorderly conduct.” The Mattachine Society’s Chicago Area Council, as it was known, offered the leaflet through the mail for 25 cents.⁹⁸

      “Your Legal Rights” drew heavily on patriotic rhetoric, claiming that the “founders …, wisely foreseeing the necessity for limiting the extent of the law and the methods of its enforcement, drafted the Bill of Rights.” The pamphlet, even while framing its topic as the rights of “individuals,” not homosexuals, gamely evoked the emotional tenor of bar raids and similar forms of police harassment: “the primary need for many arrested persons is to eliminate the feeling of fear which so many entertain because of lack of knowledge of legal procedures.” But the “rights” described in “Your Legal Rights” were in fact rather few, in this age before Miranda and other legal precedents that augmented the rights of criminal defendants. For several brief periods in the 1950s, Chicago’s gay men and women organized to give voice to their frustrations over police harassment and social and political marginalization. But it would take a national movement for civil rights to show them how to organize effectively.

      * * *

      In the second half of the 1950s, periodic sex-crime panics continued to result in police harassment of gay men. When a fifteen-year-old girl’s body was found in Montrose Harbor in 1957, for example, the 44th Ward Republican committeeman, Robert Decker, railed against the leniency of judges in “loosing sex degenerates upon our streets,” while Democratic alderman Charles H. Weber from the neighboring 45th Ward added that “if we want to protect the youngsters, we’ll have to organize a campaign to get [them] off the streets after dark and go after the sex maniacs who make our streets dangerous.”⁹⁹ After another gruesome murder on the North Side in 1960, a crime reporter said, “In the area, police know that a number of men with criminal sex records live and work,” adding that they had been questioned.¹⁰⁰ “Chicago had quite a ‘heat wave’ this year,” wrote a columnist for the Los Angeles–based homophile magazine ONE in mid-1959, using a meteorological metaphor that both punned on a slang term for police and reflected an era when police repression seemed to many gays and lesbians like a force of nature.¹⁰¹

      At the same time, even though Chicago was the scene of intense—and intensifying—policing, gay citizens could sometimes carve out space for themselves in a city where the establishment was well known for corruption and graft. Chicago’s Mattachine chapter struggled to attract more than a handful of members in the 1950s, but it offered a response to the increasingly systematic policing of gay life by local authorities and to the isolation and exclusion from mass society that gays and lesbians felt. Though marginal and lacking influence in the 1950s, the movement’s emergence paved the way for more ambitious mobilization in later years.

      In the 1950s, moreover, gay bars only erratically enforced СКАЧАТЬ