Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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СКАЧАТЬ massive daylong boycotts of the public school system to protest overcrowding in many all-black schools. Daley’s school policies reflected his loyalty to white working-class constituents who held supremacist ideals about the right of white residents to send their children to all-white neighborhood schools. African American activists drew attention in particular to the highly visible use of mobile classrooms outside overcrowded all-black schools. Black parents led a campaign to oust Benjamin Willis, Daley’s schools superintendent, who became a symbol of white resistance to integration. Daley, however, was intransigent and refused to fire Willis.⁸¹ The Defender drew more attention to police brutality, although the main focus of mobilization in these years remained the school system. The boycotts failed to oust Willis, but their boldness and their identification of city hall as the source of injustice in the neighborhoods marked a watershed for the black freedom struggle locally.⁸²

      In what became a turning point for the Daley machine’s approach to the censorship of sexual material, the Chicago city council rather suddenly became engulfed in the winter of 1964–65 in a lengthy debate over a proposal to prohibit James Baldwin’s novel Another Country from being used as required reading in an English course in a city-funded two-year college. This major controversy, which captured the attention of the news media locally and even nationally, revealed how central sexuality was to the volatile politics of race, class, and education. The sponsor of the ban was one of the few Republicans on the city council, Alderman John Hoellen of the Northwest Side’s 47th Ward. Hoellen objected to the book because, he said, it “extensively dwells upon homosexuality as though it had redeeming social value,” a phrase that alluded to the legal definition of obscenity promulgated by the Supreme Court in 1957 in Roth v. United States.⁸³

      Throughout the debate on the city-council floor—the city council’s most in-depth discussion of homosexuality in a half century—the assumption prevailed among most participants that gay visibility in the city signified moral decline.⁸⁴ The key problem with Another Country, according to its critics among local politicians, was that in its pages, as one columnist put it, “Boy gets girl, to be sure, but boy also gets boy.”⁸⁵ At its height, the controversy involved a seven-hour hearing attended by 200 people while some 30 student picketers weaved back and forth in front of city hall. “Objections to the book centered on charges that it makes interracial homosexuality appear to be a ‘joyous’ experience and that it is overloaded with sex and vulgarity,” wrote one reporter.⁸⁶ The spirited public debate over the novel touched on fundamental political questions of censorship, parenting, and state control over the educational system, and it generated commentary about the novel’s portrayal of interracial sex, illegal drug use, and obscenity.

      Many critics of the book asserted the right of parents to control their children’s educational materials, illustrating concern about social reproduction in a child-obsessed society. Wright Junior College, the institution where the controversy arose, was attended largely by working-class whites from the city’s nearly all-white bungalow districts. The Chicago man who first contacted Alderman Hoellen to complain about the assignment of the book had objected primarily to its homosexual content, explaining that his twenty-six-year-old daughter should not have been assigned the text because “this is a filthy book. I don’t think you have to know the details of how homosexuality is performed to be a whole person.”⁸⁷ The ensuing city-council debate reified the alignment of interracial with homosexual sex that pervaded much of the novel’s reception in white-owned newspapers. “The fine job you have done to keep our city streets clean to make Chicago a city to be proud of is to be commended,” testified Mrs. Kenneth Kantor before the aldermen. “Don’t allow the dirt and garbage to find it’s [sic] way into the classroom.” She argued that “accounts of deviates and degenerates’ activities” should be used “for medical study only” and not in English classes.⁸⁸ The Roman Catholic archdiocese editorialized against teachers who would “shove filth down the throats of students.”⁸⁹ A suburban Berwyn father of five wrote to the city council that he would not give up “my God-given right to keep a voice in how my children’s morals are to be influenced.”⁹⁰ Precisely because it would interfere with their control over the classroom, teachers’ unions opposed the measure.⁹¹

      The black-owned Chicago Defender, which had covered Baldwin’s meteoric rise to mainstream white acclaim as well as his Chicago appearances, condemned Hoellen’s resolution. The paper’s editorial board argued that “what these critics are objecting to, is not so much the moral content of the novel, but the free interracial association that is described with such skill and literary brilliance.”⁹² Indeed, there is ample evidence to support this claim. One Evanston woman, for example, wrote to Alderman Leon Despres, a Hyde Park liberal well known for supporting racial integration and civil rights, sarcastically expressing her gratitude for his vocally backing the book. “Thank you for advocating wide circulation of Baldwin’s book Another Country,” she wrote. “This book tells exactly and in detail just how negroes [sic] live, and it should be read by all white people everywhere.” This, she said, would help them become aware of the “many reasons” why they should oppose the integration of neighborhoods.⁹³

      Testimony by whites before the city council emphasized the idea that Another Country constituted smut. Even Despres, the leading defender of the book, shied away from dignifying its wide-ranging sexual content. He taunted Hoellen by asking, on the council floor “What exists in your mind that glorified homosexuality when you read the book[?]”⁹⁴ Despres in this sense more or less gay-baited his opponent. Perhaps because it allowed a respectable means for talking about race and sexual politics, local newspapers were consumed with the controversy. Defenders of the book typically labeled the resolution’s proponents as would-be censors. The liberal Daily News was lukewarm, editorializing that students who were “old enough to fight, or marry, or both” were adults and should know “what immorality and amorality are.”⁹⁵ Studs Terkel, the radio journalist, called the council hearing “an incredible charade,” defended the literary representation of homosexuality and even alluded to Baldwin’s own gayness: “Ulysses will be next on the list. Then Walt Whitman will be next because that great American poet was a homosexual.”⁹⁶

      The discussion of Another Country revealed that vice control involved not only the regulation of public space but also the relations and exchange between public and private spaces. The right-wing Tribune repudiated its own favorable review of the book, published two years earlier, calling the book “a compilation of perverted interracial sexual relationships” and comparing it to “a guest at a dinner party in your home who was so uncouth as to spout filth at the table and embarrass your other guests with accounts of sexual deviation.” Under such circumstances, “you would lose no time handing him his hat and coat, ushering him to the door, and returning to apologize to the company for such behavior.”⁹⁷ In a city riven by white racial violence against the presence of African Americans, even temporarily, in white neighborhoods, such a metaphor hinted at a segregationist impulse insofar as it conjured a scene of expulsion at the threshold of the home.

      The black press, too, associated homosexuality with social or sexual mixing across the color line, sometimes depicting it as a peril to be kept beyond the threshold of the home. In a column written in the early 1960s, and reprinted in the South Side’s New Crusader in 1964 after the writer’s death, Dan Burley—an influential black pianist, journalist, and editor of the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks—suggested that blacks might think twice about racial integration, on the ground that “white no-gooders, after being “chased out of respectable white neighborhoods, are only too happy to move into mixed communities and buildings.” As an example of “white no-gooders,” he conjures a scenario in which one’s neighbor, a “young assistant pastor” with a “chubby wife and brood,” is “called to the pulpit in a small town faraway” and is replaced by a man who hosts late-night interracial gay parties.⁹⁸ Burley’s storyline is based on the precariousness of middle-class black existence, in contrast to the Tribune’s implicit appeal to the white supremacist to patrol the boundaries СКАЧАТЬ