Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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СКАЧАТЬ black press faced a conundrum given the fact that Baldwin, the nation’s most celebrated black writer, was both widely known to be gay and also the author of the postwar era’s most prominent gay-themed novels. One strategy was to downplay his gayness. The Defender, a middle-class paper committed to keeping black life respectable, largely portrayed the queerness of Another Country as an incidental feature. The paper’s own editors offered a different interpretation, suggesting that “it was the interracial setting of the plot that aroused the ire of the critics. They hid that motive behind a transparent curtain of homosexuality.”⁹⁹ In calling homosexuality a red herring, the city’s daily black paper thus implied that the book’s critics had invoked it only for tactical reasons to conceal their racial prejudices. More explicit was a published letter to the editor from a reader who called the book “an affront to the Negro” for its depiction of “suicide, homosexuals, fornication, and adultery.”¹⁰⁰ Still, the wording suggests that in the era of the Civil Rights Act, an African American paper concerned with respectability nonetheless advanced a sense of racial solidarity that securely encompassed Baldwin, whose homosexuality was then widely known among blacks and some whites. Conservative white journalists were frustrated, in fact, by the failure of their black counterparts to line up to criticize the author. “It is a libel to depict Negroes as homosexuals,” declared an editorial in the conservative Tribune, which supported banning the book and complained bitterly about the failure of black aldermen to join the crusade.¹⁰¹

      But Daley quashed the measure. If Another Country seemed to the black press to contain one sort of public-relations problem, for the mayor it instead threatened to portray municipal government as out of step with modernity and churlishly censorious. Eventually, in the second half of January, Daley’s allies on the council killed the proposal.¹⁰² Although they did not give a reason publicly, one city hall reporter speculated that Daley did not want Chicago to acquire “a reputation as the new Boston in the book banning field.”¹⁰³ A city government that only five years earlier had successfully defended all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court its regime for strictly censoring movies now viewed too strong an association with censorship as potentially damaging.¹⁰⁴ The collapse of the effort to censor the book testified as well to the degree to which young people had begun to challenge long-standing sexual norms. As Professor Perrin Lowrey of the University of Chicago English department said of the novel, “It might shock parents, but I don’t think that it would shock their children.”¹⁰⁵ Indeed, the generational divide to which he gestured would only become more prominent in the second half of the 1960s.

      The racial politics of urban neighborhoods was charged in part because of the way the issue was suffused with sexual imagery and fears, as white Chicagoans repeatedly used violence and threats in the face of black residential encroachment on all-white neighborhoods. By the fall of 1965, the growth of Chicago’s Daughters of Bilitis chapter showed “no signs of slacking off,” according to its newsletter. “Obviously,” it continued, “it will no longer be feasible to meet at the homes of members, so we’ve begun shopping for an office.”¹⁰⁶ But the group had a very difficult time locating a suitable space. In a cartoon in the group’s February 1966 newsletter, one member poked fun at the issue, mocking homophobic landlords by comparing the difficulties of the group’s members to the concept of social equality then so often used as a bogeyman by white opponents of racial integration. A real-estate office is labeled “Elegant Realty Co.” and has a map on the wall labeled, “Blight Survey—Blockbust Map Co.,” with a cigar-smoking white real-estate agent and a sign saying, “Use the spittoon.” The caption says, “Now they want an office … next thing you know they’ll be wanting to marry our daughters.”¹⁰⁷ The turn of phrase alluded to the experience of many lesbians for whom taking on a lesbian identity had meant straining or ending a heterosexual marriage. But it also referred to, and made light of, the constrant refrain by segregationists that racial integration would lead to black men’s having sex with or even marrying white women.¹⁰⁸

       “The Airing of a Hush-Hush Subject”

      Even as the “war on vice” was heating up and politicians fought smut and immorality, and the press and politicians treated gay life as dangerous and deviant, homophile activists tried to cultivate more favorable press coverage. There were liberal reporters, too, after all, and homophile activists began to seek them out. The pioneer in this effort was the city’s Daughters of Bilitis chapter, especially its first president, Del Shearer, the first local activist to appear on television. In 1962, a producer for a popular local talk show, “Off the Cuff,” hosted by Norman Ross, had approached the group to inquire whether a representative might be willing to appear in a forum on homosexuality. At that time, Shearer considered the idea but decided she was unwilling to take on something so risky.¹⁰⁹ She very much liked the forum when it aired in February 1963, however. “The program in accomplishing one goal—the airing of a hush-hush subject—was tremendously successful,” stated the chapter’s meeting minutes. “Ross did an excellent job in rounding the presentation to include the many sides of the story.”¹¹⁰

      Later that year, when the same television producers again approached her, Shearer changed her mind about the costs and benefits of appearing on television, now that she trusted the producers. “My friends have advised me against this possible exposure to ridicule and similar types of aggravation,” she wrote in a letter to Meredith Grey, the Daughters of Bilitis national publicity director in San Francisco. But she had decided to reject the advice. “I must admit,” she wrote, “that I have reached a point in my life when I must show my belief in people and in myself.” She believed that “a presentation properly handled,” something she now knew she could expect from Ross’s show, would be less likely to harm her. She concluded, “I will not wear a mask,” which she meant figuratively and perhaps literally as well.¹¹¹

      During the televised forum, Shearer tried to convey to the show’s viewers what it felt like to be gay in a straight world. “So much public life has this heterosexual overtone,” she said, “so much heterosexuality surrounds homosexuals. If they are going to move in society and be a part of it, they have to be able to withstand the pressures of this heterosexual atmosphere.”¹¹² She disputed a psychiatrist’s claims that homosexuals are mentally arrested in adolescence and strenuously argued one could be both happy and homosexual. She bristled, however, at what she considered the outlandish claims of the two other homophile activists who appeared with her—Frank Kameny, visiting from Washington, and Randy Wicker, from New York. Wicker compared the gay movement to the African American civil rights movement, declaring that he, too, wanted his rights. The fourth participant, a liberal Episcopal priest named James G. Jones, had complained on the program, “We’ve got enough troubles now here in Chicago without equating the Negro problem with the homosexual problem!”¹¹³ Later, Shearer wrote to the host of the show, who apparently had found Wicker’s claims excessive or unpersuasive. “I agree,” he replied. “Our friends from New York and Washington dwelled so much on their crusade against being parts of a put-upon minority.”¹¹⁴ (The episode aired on April 4, 1964, just weeks before the Fun Lounge raid.)

      The black press, perhaps as a result of its tendency to view the police more critically, covered white homophile activism more sympathetically than did its white mainstream counterparts. When Shearer wrote letters to newspaper editors all over Chicago in the spring of 1964, “as a means of gaining publicity for DOB,” only the New Crusader, a militant African American paper, covered the issue. The story appeared under the remarkably sympathetic headline, “Local Lesbians Also Fight for Integration; Open Office Here.” The account of the Daughters of Bilitis’s activities stressed the lesbian activists’ interest in changing laws and police practices, including “integration of the penal code as it pertains to the homosexual” and the pursuit of “equitable handling of cases involving this minority group.” Shearer praised the article after it ran, in a letter to the Daughters of Bilitis national board, saying it “carried no detrimental slant,” but said that in her view “the term integration was somewhat over-played.” Indeed, before even local white gay activists had tried to get a public forum СКАЧАТЬ