Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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      Maximum Feasible Intimidation

      IN THE 1960s, as breadwinner liberalism came to dominate American politics, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley insisted on interpreting its terms narrowly. As the Democratic Party’s most powerful boss, Daley was present at the creation of America’s eight years of liberal governance, playing a widely acknowledged role in the nomination of John F. Kennedy for president. Yet even as Chicago became the first major American city in which private, consensual homosexual acts were not a crime, police stepped up their war on gay nightlife. Though Daley did not protest when the Illinois legislature decriminalized same-sex acts, he lobbied that same year for changes to state liquor laws that helped shut down gay public life in his city. Gays and lesbians were no longer criminals, but for them to gather in an establishment serving alcohol became more dangerous.

      Even as Daley became his party’s most powerful boss, his political agenda remained strikingly parochial. His reputation as the Democrats’ preeminent kingmaker was secured at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in July 1960, where he helped engineer the nomination of Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy for president, in part by unceremoniously dumping his own former mentor in state politics, the two-time failed presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Although no one can know precisely why Daley threw his support to Kennedy, the rewards he reaped went beyond the debt the young president later owed him. Having a Catholic at the top of the ticket—as well as a Protestant, Otto Kerner, running for governor—played on the enthusiasm of Catholics eager to cast a vote for the first Catholic president. Kennedy’s nomination thus helped Daley defeat the incumbent state’s attorney, Benjamin Adamowski, whose muckraking had exposed a police corruption scandal early in the year.¹ For Daley, a fellow Catholic at the top of the ticket would maximize the turnout of loyal white working-class voters in November, and thereby help take the pressure off corruption in his police department. As Norman Mailer would later put it, Daley “was not a national politician, but a clansman.”²

      In the liberal era that he helped to launch, Daley of Chicago played a contradictory role. He united his city’s Catholic and black voters behind Kennedy in a bitterly fought election that pushed his party back into the White House in 1960.³ Under President Lyndon Johnson, Daley took full advantage of Great Society funds for urban redevelopment. Yet he fought tooth and nail, and successfully, for the right to keep Chicago schools largely segregated.⁴ He also exerted extraordinary pressure to circumvent the program’s requirement that those affected at the grassroots level be permitted “maximum feasible participation” in antipoverty programs. As a machine boss, Daley perceived the program as a threat to his power; brooking no rival, he cowed Johnson with his insistence that federal funds flow through city hall. Most famously, he outmaneuvered the campaign by Martin Luther King, Jr., to protest the isolation and poverty of the city’s African American ghettos during the Chicago Freedom Movement. The Chicago machine under Daley seemed to advance urban liberals without advancing urban liberalism.

      Daley was deeply identified with the New Deal’s vision that blue-collar white men should be able to get jobs that would allow them to support a family. With respect to questions he understood as moral rather than economic, however, Daley’s vision of liberalism became more exclusionary. As urban life was increasingly sexualized, Daley did not incorporate the notion of sexual freedom into his parochial liberalism. In the neighborhoods stretching north from the Loop along the lakefront—especially along North Michigan Avenue, where offices, restaurants, and hotels began to boom in the early 1960s—the police increasingly sought not to corral and confine gay life, but to eliminate it.⁵

      As city officials secured federal funds for urban renewal and highway construction and as they implemented the Daley administration’s ambitious 1958 plan for construction in the Loop and on the Near North Side, middle-class reformers demanded crackdowns on vice and on organized crime, while city policy makers worked to rebuild downtown in a way that would lure white families with children to live, shop, and play there. Though Chicago was the birthplace of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine and home to the famous Playboy Mansion, the city sued Hefner under obscenity laws and confiscated copies of the magazine after actress Jayne Mansfield appeared nude in the June 1963 issue.⁶ But the lawsuit was unsuccessful. Not only that, but beginning in 1965, gray-flannel-suited men visiting Chicago for conventions saw the Playboy moniker in illuminated white letters, nine feet tall, on top of what had formerly been the Palmolive Building. Three years later, Hefner was called “Chicago’s most spectacularly successful citizen.”⁷ As urban life was increasingly sexualized, Daley with limited success worked to contain sexual expression and material he saw as incompatible with family life.

      In the 1960s, Chicago experienced the clash between urban liberalism—characterized by its opportunist mix of machine- and reform-oriented politics, its investment in the male-breadwinner household, and its continued strength among ethnic working-class whites—and the rising tide of rights-based movements among racial and sexual minorities. In a city increasingly bifurcated—between glass-and-steel towers and brick-and-concrete public-housing projects—black civil rights activists struggled to gain traction in challenging inequality in education and housing, and local homophile groups began to reach beyond their tiny discussion groups and into the public square. It was in this moment that Daley’s police department stepped up its harassment of both African Americans and queers.

       “An Act Not Likely to Be Noted”

      In 1961, the Illinois legislature passed two new laws affecting the policing of gay life. The first, which ostensibly liberalized the legal status of gay people, was the enactment of a criminal code reform that, among other things, decriminalized gay sex—the first successful such move in the country—by repealing the Illinois “crime against nature” statute. But the second law reform of 1961, which altered liquor regulations in a way that gave the city of Chicago more power to keep gay bars closed after a raid, had far more impact on gay life at the time. Chicago’s experience thus revealed that legalizing intimate acts was not enough to make gay people feel safe when they gathered.

      By adopting a package of criminal law reforms based on the Model Penal Code proposed by the American Law Institute (ALI), the Illinois legislature repealed the long-standing statutory prohibition on private homosexual behavior between consenting adults.⁸ A joint committee of the state and Chicago bar associations had spent six years transforming the ALI’s model code into a new set of proposed criminal laws for Illinois. In so doing, the group left in place the ALI’s recommendation to repeal the “crime against nature” statute. These liberal lawyers, according to at least one participant, were heavily swayed by the arguments made against criminalizing sodomy by Indiana University sexologist Alfred Kinsey.⁹

      Advocates for decriminalizing same-sex acts justified their position not by asserting that people had a right to engage in those acts but by arguing that their criminalization led to extortion and blackmail. Blackmail was in fact a real problem. In a sample of 458 nearly all-white gay men interviewed in Chicago in 1967, 9.4 percent said they had been blackmailed by someone concerning their homosexuality, most often by a casual sexual partner.¹⁰ Liberal social scientists cited blackmail in arguing that however reprehensible a citizen’s hidden, stigmatized, СКАЧАТЬ