Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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СКАЧАТЬ degenerates in the twilight zones of sex. They meet everywhere, but their principal point of congregation is around Drexel Avenue and 39th Street,” an intersection in the heart of Bronzeville’s entertainment district.¹⁴ For example, the multiracial Finnie’s Halloween Ball, an intensely competitive contest in female impersonation, was covered extensively in the early 1950s in Ebony and Jet, African American magazines produced by Chicago’s Johnson Publications and distributed nationwide. Glamorously dressed female impersonators competed for prizes. “More than 1,500 spectators milled around outside Chicago’s Pershing Ballroom,” said a 1953 article in Ebony, describing one such drag ball, “to get a glimpse of the bejeweled impersonators who arrived in limousines, taxis, Fords and even by streetcar.”¹⁵ Black queer life was thus visibly woven into the public culture of the black South Side.

      For black Chicagoans in the 1950s, the daily risk of encountering police harassment did not depend on one’s sexual inclinations. Life in the slums of the postwar urban North, and later in its segregated housing projects, was controlled by a police force drawn from all-white blue-collar neighborhoods. African Americans were accustomed to police brutality, and they had had little success in challenging it in the face of a dominant culture that held the police in high esteem. What little progress black activists made against police brutality in the 1950s occurred in the courts. Although the city’s mainstream newspapers often ignored crime in black neighborhoods, in the second half of the 1950s the African American press increasingly covered the brutal treatment of black citizens by white officers, even in the citizens’ own homes. The Defender had drawn attention to police brutality on the South Side in a high-profile series of articles in 1958. That year, for example, thirteen Chicago police officers broke into James Monroe’s house in the middle of the night based on a false tip in a murder investigation; woke him and his wife with flashlights; and struck, pushed, and kicked him and his six children. In a landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Monroe could sue the involved officers for civil damages under a federal statute originally meant to suppress the Ku Klux Klan in the post–Civil War South.¹⁶ Nevertheless, on the city’s South Side, police harassment remained a fact of life. Not until the second half of 1963 did a sustained campaign of protest against police brutality in Chicago’s black neighborhoods begin to take shape.

      For white gays and lesbians, police harassment increasingly constituted their most important point of contact with the state. African Americans in Chicago in the 1950s faced police harassment regardless of whether they were queer, and in this sense being gay made less of a difference for blacks than for whites—that is, it did not separate a black gay person as much from his or her black peers as it did a white gay person from his or her white peers. White gays and lesbians faced capricious punishment by the criminal-justice system more often than other whites did. Gay men were most often targeted for physical touching, for dancing, or for propositioning undercover officers; lesbians were most likely to be arrested in bar raids for violating sartorial laws—that is, for wearing men’s clothing.

      To have one’s name printed in the newspaper following a police raid was the quintessential punishment for being gay. In America’s postwar antigay witch hunts, the fact that “such a charge will probably be dismissed the following morning” did not alter the fact that “there is a name spread on a record that will not be lost” and that ultimately “the whole of this very common procedure will surely spell ‘pervert’ in blazing letters for anyone who cares to take the trouble.”¹⁷ Exposure as a homosexual—especially through an arrest—jeopardized one’s ties to friends and family and, especially, to one’s job. Having a good job, if you were gay, meant rigorously concealing your gay life, even from family members. For example, a working-class Chicago woman recalled that her first sexual experience took place around 1954, when she was seventeen years old. “I think we were in a car,” she recalled. Soon afterward, she and her new girlfriend “started going to the bars in Chicago quite a bit,” even though she still lived with her parents at home at the time. Thirteen years later, she had never discussed being gay with her parents. “I don’t see how they could not know it,” she remarked, “but nothing has ever been said.”¹⁸

      Police raids, portrayed in the press as a necessary means of protecting the city from “hoodlums,” reflected the linkage of gay life with criminality and the underworld. In Chicago, as in other large cities, organized crime syndicates wielded great power over gay nightlife because they possessed the means to buy protection by corrupting the police. Mob profiteering from cover charges, high prices, and diluted drinks provided funds for such protection. “It didn’t make us angry because it allowed us to be somewhere,” recalled Jim Darby, a patron of gay bars in Chicago in the 1950s. The police by contrast seemed only to make life dangerous. Gays and lesbians knew they could not expect authorities to treat antigay violence, extortion, and blackmail as serious crimes. Darby, for example, was on leave from the Navy, drinking in Sam’s, one of the North Side’s busiest gay bars, when it was raided in 1952. “I knew I was drunk already,” he recalled, “and I remember the jailer banging on his desk with his club, yelling, ‘God damn you fuckin’ queers, shut up and go to sleep!’” He recalls that, in sentencing him to a fine, the judge said it was a sad comment on the nation’s military that a sailor would frequent such a place.¹⁹

      Postwar American anxieties took the form of worries not only about communist subversion but also about crime. The perceptual link between crime and cities was tightened by a series of lurid congressional hearings on organized crime in 1950 and 1951, the first such hearings to receive a large national television audience. Chicago then remained strongly associated in the public mind with Al Capone, John Dillinger, and other legendary criminals of the Prohibition era; indeed, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who presided over the hearings, declared Chicago “perhaps the one most important center of criminal activities.”²⁰ Millions of Americans heard shocking testimony, which propagated the perception that big-city municipal governments were in fact still captive to the shadowy crime syndicates that had flourished during Prohibition.²¹ The Kefauver hearings stoked a lasting preoccupation on the part of the news media with what one historian called the “notion of a vast, hydra-headed crime syndicate,” and with Mafia infiltration of politics and business.²² The hearings also proved a boon to the politicians involved in sponsoring them.

      In this context, police scrutiny of gay life intensified in the first half of 1952, amid suggestions that Chicago was on the verge of returning to the lawlessness of the Prohibition era. In January of that year, Chicagoans learned that for two years they had been consuming millions of pounds of horse meat, disguised as ground beef, apparently as the result of mob profiteering.²³ In February, the acting Republican committeeman of the 31st Ward, known as an enemy of the so-called “West Side Bloc” of mob-linked politicians, was shot and killed; his murder was never solved.²⁴ A group of business-led civic reformers formed a Committee of Nineteen to investigate corruption. Austin L. Wyman, the chairman of the Chicago Crime Commission, charged that both Democrats and Republicans tolerated gangsters in their ranks locally. “Why have there been so few prosecutions of big-time hoodlums?” he asked U.S. Attorney Otto Kerner.²⁵

      The city’s business-oriented, Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite, through the Crime Commission, hired investigators to examine gay nightlife, gambling, and female prostitution. The revelations turned into a full-blown quest to identify scapegoats and clean up a city portrayed as corrupt and decaying. City officials sought advice from other cities about how best to eliminate crime and associated ills. For example, in 1953, a Washington correspondent for the Chicago Daily News sent his editor suggestions about how to intensify the public’s demand that the city be cleaned up. “It might be worth exploring,” he wrote, “whether the Miami Herald could suggest people, out of their cleanup experience there; the California Crime Commission, which the Kefauver committee showed was somewhat on the ball, could be helpful.” In advocating for the police to crack down on deviant behavior, Chicago journalists cited the experience of Miami and of cities in California as exemplary. Miami had passed a pioneering ordinance prohibiting female impersonator performances in 1952, and California state officials had established their state government СКАЧАТЬ