Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of organized crime—and from rumors that his own officers were linked to the very syndicate they were supposed to be rooting out. Remarkably, by the end of the year, both Richard Cain, who led the raid, and John Chaconas, the plainclothes officer who testified in court about what he had observed at the Fun Lounge, would be convicted and sentenced to one to three years in prison. Both were indicted as double agents for the very crime syndicate to which the club’s owner was thought to be connected.⁶⁵ “It is a little hard to tell who are the cops and who the robbers in this script,” observed the Tribune when the two men were sentenced.⁶⁶

      The Fun Lounge incident launched a wave of aggressive raids, and the Chicago police evidently did not want to be outdone by their counterparts in county employment.⁶⁷ Days later, Lieutenant Thomas Kernan of the Chicago police department’s vice division raided another “hangout for sex deviates,” telling reporters afterward, “[T]here has been an increase recently in night spot performances by female impersonators.”⁶⁸ A few weeks later, Chicago police arrested thirty-three men in the Lincoln Baths in Old Town. Kernan announced not only that “the bathhouse has been a national meeting place for perverts” but that “files of the bathhouse confiscated in the raid listed various meeting places for perverts throughout the United States.”⁶⁹ The spring 1964 crackdown in Chicago indeed reverberated across the country.

      The intense news coverage of the Fun Lounge raid attracted significant attention from ONE, the gay magazine published in Los Angeles. “I imagine that you have been receiving clippings on the Chicago raids,” a Milwaukee man wrote; he had heard from a friend in Chicago that “there are an awful lot of people looking for new jobs.”⁷⁰ The editor also explained that the raids justified one of the editorial policies: “[W]e have been often asked to print and distribute lists of gay bars, baths, and other places where homosexuals congregate so that our friends will know where to go when they visit strange towns.” However, he said, “We have never felt it would be wise to print such a list,” a stance he felt was justified given that the officers in the Fun Lounge raid “found a copy of such a guidebook” and now seemed to be investigating “the other bars listed in the publication.” In short, “Why should the homosexual always make it easy for the police? Why print a list that in the wrong hands can be used against us?” With a tone of gallows humor, he encouraged readers to seek out information by word of mouth instead: “Anyway, no self-respecting, enterprising homosexual should ever confess to the need for such a guide.” Most devastating, he suggested at the same time, “it probably would be advisable to have a copy of the March 1961 issue of ONE magazine if you happen to be unlucky enough to live in Chicago. The March ’61 issue contains the editorial telling you what to do in case of arrest.”⁷¹

      In the 1950s, police raids on gay bars had been sporadic; in the early 1960s, they had become systematic. The 1964 Fun Lounge raid, like the C & C Club raid three years earlier, angered gay citizens. “Illinois took a giant step forward two years ago,” wrote one gay man in a letter to ONE. “We up-dated our laws in this state at that time. But the two raids and attendant publicity recently here in Chicago was a black eye for us.” The writer primarily blamed the press: “The law has come a long way in Illinois. Now justice must catch up through responsible reporting that makes it impossible for publicity hungry public servants to destroy the innocent before trial.”⁷² These raids led a small group of gay Chicagoans to found a new organization of people like themselves, determined to act boldly to challenge the authorities.

       “A Transparent Curtain of Homosexuality”

      Daley’s breadwinner liberalism, however resonant in city hall, was increasingly difficult to square with the rising visibility of a cultural liberalism that allowed artistic and cultural experimentation, built on the urban bohemian subcultures that dated at least to the early twentieth century. By the late 1950s, the flourishing of a predominantly white bohemia in Chicago’s Old Town and Near North Side was unmistakable. The area had been a site of cultural ferment and dissidence and a magnet for artists and writers from across the Midwest since World War I, but it grew in the prosperous postwar years into a center of beatnik visibility. The celebrated comedy troupe Second City, founded there in 1955, included a pioneering skit on its 1963 program about a young gay man in Chicago who tries to hint to his family members visiting from downstate Illinois about his homosexuality.⁷³ The landscape was filled with places that catered to these locals. One man recalled an all-night diner on Clark Street, just south of Division, called Feast on a Bun, “just a counter, no tables, and a lot of street hustlers, street cruisers, drag queens—anybody who frequented that area…. And I think a lot of cops used the place, too.”⁷⁴

      The Daley machine reacted against the liberalization of intimate norms in the late 1950s and early 1960s, yet it gradually narrowed its target to focus increasingly on gay life. In his first term in office, Daley launched an ambitious “slum clearance” and redevelopment program, targeting the Loop and the Near North Side, a program that was all but overtly intended to remake downtown to appeal to whites. For Daley, however, not all whites were equally desirable. Rather, he specifically wanted to lure white families to live downtown and thus privileged their needs over those of single people. In his influential 1961 study of political power in Chicago, the political scientist Edward Banfield claimed that in 1959 Daley nixed a particular Near North development project, known as Fort Dearborn, precisely because “the residential part of the Project would have to be mainly high-rise ‘economy’ apartments for elderly people and childless couples.” For Banfield, the mayor’s decisive preoccupation with social reproduction was rooted in his Catholic background. “[H]e was against development of a kind that might discourage people from having children or interfere with family life,” he wrote.⁷⁵

      The redevelopment of the Near North Side may have been aided by the growth of bohemia, but it was primarily driven by downtown business interests. The alliance between the real-estate industry and Daley’s city hall was strengthened in 1958 when Daley released a downtown redevelopment plan, which was meant both to prevent black encroachment from residential neighborhoods to the south and to limit the visibility of gays and female prostitutes on the Near North Side. As whites fled to suburban areas to live and shop and the city’s black population grew, South Side blacks were increasingly visible as patrons of Loop establishments, where they could purchase goods and services unavailable in slums where commercial developers were unwilling to invest in retail stores. The developer Arthur Rubloff told a reporter that among the major concerns of downtown retailers was that the growing visibility of African Americans on the street was scaring away whites.⁷⁶

      Near Old Town, the city entered into a partnership in the early 1960s with a group of private investors to build a giant high-rise apartment complex, Sandburg Village, intended as an attractive urban alternative for affluent white families thinking of moving to the suburbs. The project required many existing buildings along Clark Street to be razed: “I think they were trying to clean up the neighborhood for Sandburg Village and get rid of the old businesses,” recalled William B. Kelley. Sam’s, the most popular gay bar in the area, closed, and other longtime bars followed suit.⁷⁷ Rent for apartments in the new buildings was out of reach for many of the area’s existing tenants. By the second half of the 1960s, the neighborhood’s bohemian history was increasingly being commodified.⁷⁸ Newspapers profiled white couples who had chosen to raise children in the revitalized Near North, such as Mrs. Herman Fell, who raised two young children while her husband was at work as a television producer. “It’s a nice neighborhood with nice kooky people who do a lot of different things,” Mrs. Fell said. The reporter for the Tribune explained, “Folk singers, actors, and newspaper persons are among their neighbors.”⁷⁹ Making the area safe for “squares,” however, entailed aggressive police action to shut down unwholesome establishments. Near North Side police rounded up women nightly on suspicion of engaging in sex work.⁸⁰

      Black insurgency increased after Daley’s reelection, early in 1963, in the aftermath of the high-profile civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, and the March СКАЧАТЬ