Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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СКАЧАТЬ commission, which deemed him “incorrigible” and sent him to the State Industrial School for Boys. There, “they immediately locked me up and kept me away from all the other boys. This is the way that they handle homosexuals: they lock them up and that’s it.” Released after two months, he said nearly all the other boys were kept for six. “It’s awfully strange some of the kids they have in there that shouldn’t be there,” he recalled several years later.⁴⁹ Working-class black queer teenagers were treated even more coercively. Thus, Ron Vernon, a “flamboyant” black teenager who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, recalls that when he began high school in the early 1960s, he was “sent to a counselor immediately … because of my overt femininity.”⁵⁰ Later, a family court judge asked the boy’s father during a hearing if he were “aware that your son is a homosexual?” The son recalled, “My father is a very honest man, and just said, ‘Yeah.’ So they said, ‘Well, we’re going to send him to Galesburg Mental Institution to try to correct his homosexuality.’” The boy, twelve or thirteen at the time of the hearing, would spend much of his adolescence in and out of the custody of the state of Illinois.⁵¹

      In the first half of the 1960s, it became more common for newspapers to publish the names and addresses of all those arrested in a bar raid, a practice that peaked in the spring and summer of 1964 with a merciless series of raids. Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie, a Republican with aspirations to higher office, escalated the war on vice by orchestrating a huge raid on an outlying gay club, Louie’s Fun Lounge, on a barren stretch of road in an unincorporated area on the western edge of Cook County. Commercialized vice had flourished on Mannheim Road since the construction of O’Hare airport nearby was completed in 1955. The patrons referred to the place as “Louie Gage’s” or “Louie Gauger’s,” after the club’s proprietor, Louis Gauger. Like other owners of gay bars, Gauger had mob ties. He had angered the sheriff by refusing to testify against Mafia kingpin Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo when Ogilvie unsuccessfully prosecuted the latter in 1960 for income-tax fraud.

      Not only journalists but also politicians competed to show they were tough on vice. Aggressive raids on gay establishments in the mid-1960s were partly a manifestation of the race for voters’ allegiances between the Cook County Democratic Organization—that is, the machine—and the Republican Party, which traditionally was powerful downstate but could also win elections in suburban areas both outside Cook County and just within its borders. In fact, a promise to escalate the war on vice in outlying parts of the county had been the cornerstone of Ogilvie’s campaign strategy in 1962: He promised to “raid and close the syndicate gambling casinos and vice dens which have flourished for decades.” He even singled out the Fun Lounge specifically for criticism, in a campaign that focused on which candidate was “best qualified to turn the heat on the mob.”⁵² In the first months of 1964, as Republican and Democratic candidates geared up for the April primary election, charges and countercharges flew, hinting that a crackdown on vice might be in the offing.⁵³ A Republican candidate for state’s attorney “accused Mayor Daley of ‘looking the other way’ instead of cleaning up syndicated crime in Cook County”⁵⁴ and promised to reopen the “Sex Bureau” of the state’s attorney’s office “because the streets of Chicago are not safe for our women.”⁵⁵

      Ogilvie’s officers humiliated the bar patrons in a spectacular fashion. Early on the morning of Saturday, April 25, 1964, the sheriff blockaded the front and back doors of the Fun Lounge. Undercover sheriff’s police officer John Chaconas later testified that just before the raid he had seen “10 or 15 male couples dancing and half a dozen male couples embracing.”⁵⁶ “They just burst in the front door and lined up inside so no one could go out the front door,” recalled one gay man. “They had sent somebody around the back,” he said, noting that he escaped arrest by passing through the beer storage room into owner Louie Gauger’s own living space behind the club, where the man waited out the raid.⁵⁷ They arrested six women and 103 men; loaded them onto school buses; paraded them in front of news photographers while those arrested tried to cover their faces; and supplied reporters with the names, ages, addresses, and occupations of most of those arrested in time for that information to be printed in the Saturday afternoon newspapers (see Figure 4). They kept them overnight. In the morning, they were charged with being “inmates of a disorderly house” and, in a few cases, “lewd and lascivious conduct” as well.

      After this raid, which became the stuff of local gay legend, the Chicago Daily News published the name, age, home address, and occupation of most of the 109 arrested. They ranged in age from 19 to 56; the median age was 27, eighteen patrons being 21 or 22 years old. The group included many students and teachers; office workers, clerks, salesmen, and a Teletype operator; a hair stylist and a beautician; and a laborer, a dock worker, and a trucker; an accountant, an insurance claim examiner, and a laboratory technician; and a 24-year-old office manager living at tony 3600 Lake Shore Drive. It was a predominantly suburban crowd: of the ninety-three whose addresses were published, thirty-four lived in the city of Chicago, thirty-three elsewhere in Cook County, eleven in Du Page County west of the city, and three in Kane County farther to the west. Six other Illinois counties were represented by one patron each.⁵⁸

      As in the purges of gay federal employees in the same era, job dismissals were the most feared outcome of such raids. Some of those arrested reportedly were terminated after what the Los Angeles–based gay magazine ONE called their “conviction by publicity.” At trial, defense attorneys objected to photographers’ presence in the courtroom, but they were overruled.⁵⁹ Ogilvie stressed that those arrested included two employees of the Chicago police department, as well as a county employee and school district officials. He drew particular attention to the presence of seven schoolteachers and one suburban school principal. Ogilvie effectively challenged other law-enforcement officials to conduct crackdowns of their own by sending letters to the districts that employed the arrested teachers, and by telling reporters, “School districts should keep an eye on people who maintain such close contact with youngsters in the community.” The superintendent of the Du Page County public schools suggested that state authorities revoke the licenses of the teachers.⁶⁰ In calling on public-sector employers to fire any of their employees who were arrested, Ogilvie implicitly sanctioned private-sector dismissals as well.⁶¹

      FIGURE 4. Chicago Daily News, April 25, 1964.

      Though the firing of gay teachers was widely praised, at least one school district departed from the pattern. A thirty-year-old schoolteacher living in Dundee, Illinois, and arrested during the raid, was allowed to keep his job, at least initially, as officials “said they were convinced he would be acquitted, and that he claimed all he knew was that he was going to a night club.”⁶² The Chicago Tribune also published a wry letter to the editor from one citizen who found the harassment hypocritical. The fact that “only teachers, as an occupational group, were singled out for attention,” observed Russell Doll of Chicago, apparently because of their “contact and assumed influence” with children, suggested “an importance to society” higher than that of other occupations. “It is, therefore, amusing that when it comes to paying teachers, this implied importance decreases,” he wrote.⁶³ But Doll’s apparent sympathy toward those arrested was shared by very few public commentators. A few days after the raid, a popular “bad boy” radio host told a Tribune interviewer that he was in favor of “sex”—then added, “but not those 109 wig wearers at the Fun Lounge.”⁶⁴ Even commentators otherwise sympathetic to the sexual revolution, in short, excluded the gay subculture from the circle of acceptable deviation.

      Politicians, police, journalists, and employers thus together cast a pall of fear over gay and lesbian life, while advancing their own careers and often extorting money from bar patrons and owners. The men and women caught up in the escalating harassment struggled to make their case to the judges they faced. Pleas for journalists СКАЧАТЬ