Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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      Not all journalists were sympathetic. As Chicago’s gay nightlife, along with the war on vice and the ascendant political issue of street crime, received increasing media attention, some reporters even directly forwarded information about gay bars to the police, taking on a role more often played by the Crime Commission a decade earlier. For example, Robert Wiedrich of the Tribune discovered information that “the mobsters are muscling in on distressed tavern owners and converting their joints to deviate hangouts in exchange for a silent 50 per cent partnership.” Wiedrich then passed this information along to the municipal police prostitution unit, leading to a series of police raids. He subsequently reported on the resulting raid on “the headquarters of a near north side vice ring,” which, the paper reported, revealed “ledgers showing that one of 14 sex dens alone is grossing more than $150,000 annually.”¹¹⁶ Although the mob may have been increasing its control over gay life by “muscling in” during this period, Wiedrich had fashioned a narrative around the ledgers that his friends in the police department supplied him.

      The attitudes of journalists began to change, however, partly because liberal journalists adopted more tolerant approaches to their material than did Wiedrich. A breakthrough for gay visibility in the local news media came in mid-1966, when the Daily News published a series of four major articles on gay men in Chicago. “Our city editor at the time, Jim McCartney, had noticed a bunch of arrests for sex crimes,” recalls Lois Wille, who wrote the series. McCartney assigned Wille to the story but felt she should have a male escort. The colleague who accompanied her to the gay bars was a police reporter “dressed badly,” she says—and two “quite elegant” places they visited did not allow him in, so he had to wait for her outside on the street while she went inside to have a look. Wille had previously won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1962 series on the failures of local hospitals and clinics to provide birth control to poor women; perhaps, having brought prestige on her employer in this way, she had greater leeway than other reporters might have had to treat her material unconventionally.

      The series appeared on the newspaper’s front page on four successive days in late June 1966. In her first article, Wille said it was an “all-too-obvious and disturbing facet of life in Chicago” that “homosexuals—male deviates—are emerging openly in the city as never before.” Yet the body of the article treated the city’s male homosexual world with unprecedented sympathy, observing that “flagrant effeminates” are “only a small portion of a great unknown mass, most of them not ‘sissyish’ at all.”¹¹⁷ Though the article’s lede suggested that the increase in gay visibility was troubling, Wille nonetheless painted a clear picture of the intense hostility and discrimination that gay men faced. Her three subsequent articles highlighted the significance for gay Chicagoans of churches, the vice squad, and psychiatrists. As problematic as some of Wille’s language may seem today, that she quoted a gay activist’s opinions about police harassment in a front-page article alone reflected a more tolerant view of gay life than was the norm among reporters. And although she reported that homosexuality might be a changeable defect in the eyes of mainstream psychiatric science, she also noted the dissident voices that were increasingly suggesting otherwise.¹¹⁸

      Crucially, Wille recast gays as victims, rather than associates, of mobsters. Organized-crime syndicates, she suggested, exploited the need of gaybar patrons for protection from the police. “In the last four months … there has been increasing evidence that the crime syndicate is taking over some of the gay bars and bathhouses,” said James O’Grady, head of the prostitution and obscene-matter unit, who later became the superintendent of police. “Hoodlums,” Wille explained, would approach the owner of a struggling tavern, strike a deal to convert the establishment into a gay bar, raise drink prices “by as much as 50 per cent,” and “invite homosexuals to this new hangout” (in a sense ratifying what Wiedrich had reported earlier). She vividly portrayed the hostility and discrimination gay men faced, explicitly comparing these to the racial exclusions that would have been familiar to Daily News readers. In perhaps the series’ most inadvertently revealing passage, Wille quoted a police detective who told her, “They call us and say, ‘A pair of them moved in just across the hall.’… But the public is unaware … that you can’t arrest a homosexual just because he’s a homosexual.” If indeed some members of the public did believe that it was possible to ask for someone to be arrested “just because he’s a homosexual,” perhaps in Chicago in 1966 they could not be blamed for holding this impression, given the intensity of police harassment.

      Wille’s series, which was published at the height of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Chicago campaign, also used an analogy to compare the treatment of blacks and gays by hostile neighbors in apartment buildings and in dense urban neighborhoods. Wille wrote that in the Lakeview neighborhood, on the North Side, “residents in expensive apartments talk about the homosexual ‘move-in’ the way some white neighborhoods decry Negroes.” At that time, with King demanding that the Daley administration enact open-housing policies and drawing attention to antiblack violence in Chicago and suburban neighborhoods, the reference would have been instantly familiar to readers. Though the parallel was, of course, exaggerated, Wille’s language humanized gay men, casting them both as members of a persecuted minority and also as people with jobs, homes, and neighbors.¹¹⁹

      Unlike the crime reporters who typically penned journalistic representations of gays, Wille distinguished between the motives and the economic roles of gay bars’ syndicate bosses and their patrons, rather than treating them as undifferentiated denizens of an evil demimonde. What is more, she even reported on the skepticism of the gay activist she quoted—a member of Mattachine Midwest, founded in 1965 and independent of the San Francisco–based Mattachine Society that had maintained earlier chapters in Chicago—concerning police motives: “Aren’t [mobsters moving into bars] up and down Rush St. and other places around town? Why pick on the homosexual bars? I think it’s just an excuse for police harassment.” And she concluded with a suggestion that gays needed police protection from blackmailers and violent attackers, and that the police failed to provide it. She quoted the Mattachine leader’s view that police paid too little attention to the illegal activities of extortionists who blackmail homosexuals by threatening to “tattle to the man’s boss or wife.”¹²⁰ In suggesting not only the ways gay life was overpoliced but also the underpolicing of those who committed crimes against gay people, Wille’s series paved the way for more realistic and more complex public representations of gay life.

      * * *

      In tandem with the more frequent newspaper articles about gays, the notion that gays were increasing in visibility, and possibly also in numbers, became a staple of news coverage by mid-decade. By 1967, when the Illinois state senate voted in favor of funds for studying the problem of sex “deviation,” the Democratic state senator and Chicagoan Arthur Swanson declared, “I don’t think we have to worry about embarrassing any of these people. They are perfectly frank and open about their way of life. They even publish magazines devoted to the subject.”¹²¹ The bill’s downstate Republican sponsor “asserted that the problem concerning sex deviates is becoming acute in the state” and was quoted as calling it “a threat to the children in schools” and saying that “the problem is growing by leaps and bounds.”¹²² For gays and lesbians, increased publicity seemed double-edged.

      In the years between the Selma and Birmingham campaigns in the spring of 1963 and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in the spring of 1968, black and gay Chicagoans both bore the brunt of newly aggressive approaches to policing, at the same time that their expectations were raised by the successes of nonviolent mobilization in the face of police violence in the South. On a significant scale, African Americans and Latinos challenged long-standing forms of police harassment that the state had rarely recognized as such: Ordinary men and women publicized their grievances, and civil rights groups won important victories from the Supreme Court that circumscribed the powers of law enforcement. White gays and lesbians observed these developments, and some began to redefine their everyday fears of the police as an element of an unjust system. A few began to use homophile organizations to enter the public СКАЧАТЬ