Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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СКАЧАТЬ lawyers hired to write the comments that accompanied the tentative draft of the new criminal code, circulated to the state legislators before they cast their votes, noted that criminalizing “an act not likely to be noted by parties other than those admittedly involved” would foster “a secretive situation extremely difficult of proof or disproof—and thus, lends itself … to the dangers of extortion and blackmail.”¹¹ The document referred to the acts that were to be legalized only as “sexual conduct between consenting adults.”¹² In short, such laws would create the conditions for an increase rather than a decrease in crime.

      When the state criminal law reform was drafted, the principal players in the debate were the gun lobby, defense lawyers, and the Council of Catholic Churches.¹³ Participants in the homophile movement played no part—a testament to their marginality in 1961. And although insiders knew that the bill decriminalized sodomy, they dared not discuss the fact publicly for fear of threatening its passage, according to Dawn Clark Netsch, then a legal counsel to the governor.¹⁴ Press accounts of the criminal-code reform mentioned the sex provisions in language that appeared to be borrowed from the bar association’s committee and its spokesperson, Professor Charles Bowman of the University of Illinois College of Law. They labeled it the product of “a more mature attitude toward immoral conduct,”¹⁵ or of a need for sex offenses to be “spelled out more clearly.”¹⁶ A lawyer who wrote a synopsis of the code for the Illinois Bar Journal professed that, before the new code’s passage, there was “considerable litigation and confusion … as to the specific acts included in the crime against nature.”¹⁷ To the limited extent that a public case was made at that time for decriminalizing private consensual homosexual acts, it centered on clarity and modernization rather than sexual freedom or homosexual rights.

      Though the repeal of the Illinois sodomy law was an early harbinger of the gay-rights revolution, even most members of Chicago’s homophile organizations were unaware of it at the time. “Most of the members present had no positive knowledge of the new deviant relations law until the meeting with Pearl Hart,” reported the president of the new Daughters of Bilitis Chicago chapter, the month after the change went into effect.¹⁸ The two national gay magazines of the era, both published in California, reported on the change. Del Martin, who had cofounded the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco in 1955, wrote in the group’s magazine, The Ladder, that “while the homophile movement has long expounded the need to change our sex laws to this effect, now that it has happened I can’t help wondering if there will be any appreciable difference in the attitude of law enforcement regarding the homosexual.”¹⁹ In Chicago, the sodomy-law reform had no discernible effect on the trajectory of gay mobilization in Chicago—nor, as we shall see, on policing. By September 1970, when members of Chicago Gay Liberation spoke at the plenary session of the Black Panther Party–sponsored Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, their statement declared, “Any homosexual from Chicago, where homosexuality is legal, will tell you that changing the law makes no difference.”²⁰

      At Daley’s behest, the legislature also passed, in the very same session, a law that enabled Daley to keep taverns shut during license-revocation-appeal proceedings. This law’s impact on gay communal life was far more immediate and concrete than the theoretical benefit gays and lesbians might derive from the new criminal code. Because the statute dealt with liquor regulations, Daley could not enact this more significant measure municipally. Rather, it required an act of the state legislature, where downstate Republicans initially opposed it. Politicians from more rural parts of Illinois “contended enactment of the bill could lead to harassment of legitimate business men.”²¹ The Democratic Senate majority leader and a key Chicago machine politician, George W. Dunne, assured his colleagues otherwise: “This bill is not directed at the ma and pa taverns,” he said, “but at the dens of iniquity that are operating in Chicago.”²² Yet it was squeezed through the legislature by limiting its application to Chicago—a provision that would, nearly a decade later, lead the state’s high court to strike it down. (The final law was written so that it applied to cities with more than half a million residents, of which Illinois had only one.) This debate departed from the usual pattern of partisan conflict in Springfield, in which Chicago Democrats typically argued for, and downstate Republicans against, higher spending and taxes. In the padlock law, the machine fought for the power to crack down more harshly on nightlife, while Republicans prevented such power from being exercised outside Chicago’s city limits.²³

      The new measure effectively strangled those best positioned to fight back against the war on gay sociability. By depriving bar owners of revenue while they appealed a liquor-license revocation, a process that could drag on for months or even years, the new measure added significantly to the financial risk involved in running a gay bar in Chicago. Daley portrayed the measure as a step against organized crime. One reporter said, referring to the mayor’s power before the new law’s passage, “When he closes a tavern for serious offenses, the operator can reopen for as long as two years while appealing the revocation.”²⁴ The presence of “deviates” was clearly among the “serious offenses” that politicians and journalists alike understood to be a legitimate ground for closing a tavern. For the mayor of Chicago, homosexuality became a political question almost exclusively in the context of the regulation of vice. So far were gays and lesbians from being deemed a political constituency that they lacked, in some sense, even the right to assemble.

       War on Vice

      Even more consequential for gay citizens than the sodomy-law repeal and the law allowing the padlocking of taverns appealing license revocation was still another transformation that occurred in 1960, unfolding in Chicago rather than Springfield: a churning of the cycle of scandal and reform in the police department. A major scandal broke in January 1960, in which a police station on the Northwest Side (on Foster Avenue just east of Damen Avenue) was revealed as the epicenter of a large-scale burglary ring. Though Daley had consolidated his authority yet further after his reelection to a second term in 1959, the so-called Summerdale scandal that erupted early in 1960—named for the police station at its center—seemed to confirm the harshest charges of the machine’s critics. Daley had in fact loosened the regulation of organized crime after taking office, adding to his vulnerability: As a favor to his backers in the organized-crime syndicate, he had abolished the police intelligence unit, known as “Scotland Yard,” in 1956.²⁵

      FIGURE 3. New Chicago police superintendent O. W. Wilson being filmed by WGN-TV, 1960. Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.

      The mayor managed not only to avoid being tarnished but even to benefit from the Summerdale affair through a politically brilliant step: He hired a new police superintendent, a reformer from outside, and authorized him to revamp the department from top to bottom. The choice of O. W. Wilson, a nationally prominent police reformer and the dean of the School of Criminology at the University of California, Berkeley, restored confidence in Daley and showed his commitment to professionalism (see Figure 3).²⁶ Arriving in the spring of 1960, Wilson was given wide authority to revamp the department. The Chicago job enabled him to implement his ideas about reorganizing big-city police departments, which involved a costly modernization of facilities and centralization of operations. The most up-to-date equipment was purchased, psychological profiling was adopted as a means of identifying officers for promotion, and a new intelligence division—the existence of which was widely publicized even as its actual operations were kept secret—was established.²⁷

      Wilson was a strong believer in policing vice aggressively. At the same time as the State Department’s dismissals of “security risks” at the national level decreased overall by focusing more exclusively on homosexuals than it did in the 1950s, it was local political authorities who most directly organized antigay policing in the Windy City.²⁸ Newspapers spread the word СКАЧАТЬ