Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter

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СКАЧАТЬ advice and assistance, just as homophile activists would do, later, in 1954, when they first formed a Chicago chapter of the California-based Mattachine Society.

      Hoping to preempt calls for an independent civilian investigator, Mayor Martin Kennelly appointed nine aldermen to an “emergency crime committee”—known as the Big Nine—to investigate organized crime in Chicago. The crime committee hired a former Pittsburgh police detective, Robert Butzler, and heard his testimony about his investigation of “conditions” in the 35th Police District on the Near North Side. Butzler appears to have focused his investigation of gay life on a bar called Big Lou’s. “Approximately half the persons in this tavern were perverts, this being evident from their lewd suggestive conversation and actions,” wrote an investigator, likely Butzler, in December 1952. “Other patrons observed in the booth and at the bar while dancing in the place were also very lewd in their conduct.”²⁷ The following month, the same investigator noted that “the place continues to be a pervert hangout to both sexes but more emphasis being upon the lesbians. From the conduct of the female patrons,” he concluded, “it was very evident they were lesbians and their lovers.”²⁸ On January 26, the owner of Big Lou’s, Lucille Kinovsky, was arrested in a police raid, along with three patrons.

      A police raid on a gay establishment was at once a law enforcement action and a scripted ritual of exposure: a public event and a private crisis. Butzler’s testimony electrified the local press with his reports of gambling, prostitution, and elusive agents of organized crime families; in the words of the Tribune, he threw a “spotlight” on “a segment of Chicago and a cast of characters as strange and colorful as anything ever dreamed up for a Hollywood movie.”²⁹ Butzler also testified that one club, the Hollywood Bowl, was “full of male degenerates. They were sitting close and holding hands.”³⁰ But the Big Lou’s raid also reverberated through the social and domestic lives of those implicated. Lucille Kinovsky had grown up on the West Side of Chicago, the daughter of working-class immigrants from Bohemia. Her nephew, John Vandermeer, remembers her as an overweight, butch woman who played softball and had matching wedding rings with her partner Bernice. The nature of their relationship was never discussed, but Lou brought Bernice to family dinners on the West Side. Though family members did not speak of her explicitly as being a gay person, Lou was accepted—and even treated as one of the guys by Vandermeer’s father and uncles: “When she would be at one of the family get-togethers, it would be her and the men off playing pinochle, and the women would be off in the kitchen.” Kinovsky even hired Vandermeer’s father to work for her: “She was looking for a bartender and he was looking for a job, and so he tended bar.”³¹

      Even queers who had clout under this regime, then, were nonetheless highly vulnerable. Kinovsky had her business destroyed by the Big Nine. Called to testify before the emergency crime committee, “Miss Kinovsky denied that her tavern at 731 North av. is a resort for perverts, both men and women.” She acknowledged, however, that it had been raided twice in two years by police.³² In April, she was found guilty of being the keeper of a disorderly house, fined $200, and, unable to pay the fine, was sent to Bridewell (the municipal House of Correction) to “work out the fine.”³³“What they got her on was paying off the police,” Vandermeer recalled, “which she claimed to me personally—I remember this vividly—she claimed she never, ever did. But that’s what they got her on.” Vandermeer’s youthful understanding was that his aunt had been “run out of town.” After she was charged and convicted, she moved to Baltimore.³⁴

      Throughout the summer and fall of 1953, the Crime Commission hired more investigators and sent them to visit other gay establishments. The commission had two means of getting its way, partly by playing the police and the press off one another. First, “conditions” in a particular establishment would be reported to police in order to generate repressive action. Often, such direct requests for police raids were effective. One record shows, for example, “C.C.C. wrote letter to Commr. Of Police, June 2, 1953 advising that Lake Shore Lounge, 935 Rush Street was a pervert joint so packed that it was impossible to get to the bar or move around. Language filthy and obscene. Tribune June 6, 1953 stated 42 men were arrested at Lake Shore Lounge 935 Rush St.”³⁵ According to the commission’s executive director, if law enforcement did not respond, the next step was to leak stories about these conditions to the reporters.³⁶

      Raids did not always lead to the closure of the establishments where they took place, however—something that would change in the 1960s. In the 1950s, Chicago’s police force lacked the administrative means to revoke a gay bar’s liquor license after conducting a raid. In a fall of 1953 report on two gay bars, for example, an official of the Chicago Crime Commission noted his exasperation with downtown police district commanders: “We have already written reams of material on the Shoreline which has for years been a homo-sexual hangout and the Hague is the same type establishment.” And yet, he reported, “though both have been subject of several police investigations and raids[,] they carry on like ‘Father Time.’”³⁷ City officials had limited powers to keep a licensed establishment closed. The appeal commissions established by the state’s 1934 liquor control law often reversed local officials’ decision to revoke a tavern’s liquor license.³⁸

      Political connections and graft could enable a gay bar owner with sufficient clout to keep his place open over a relatively extended period. One bar owner, Chuck Renslow, who had operated a physique photography studio that also exposed him to police and post office harassment, recalled aspects of running a gay bar in this period with something akin to nostalgia: “The Gold Coast had a 2 o’clock license, which means that we had to close at 2 [or at 3 on Saturday nights]. One year, it was a Wednesday, and in the middle of the week it was New Year’s Eve. And the bar was packed! I called up the station and said, ‘We got a big business, how long can I stay open?’ He says, ‘Fifty dollars an hour, be sure you’re closed by 6 when people go to work.’ That doesn’t happen today.”³⁹ Renslow drew the conclusion that, as much as payoffs and raiding posed serious problems for bar owners, they also occasionally provided certain advantages not available under today’s reformed regime of liquor regulation. He recounted one evening when his downtown bar, the Gold Coast, was raided—but “they shouldn’t have raided it, ’cause we were paying off. So I went to the station, and I said, ‘Hey, why’d you raid?’ and he says, ‘Oh, my God, we made a mistake! Why didn’t you tell the guys not to be in there?’”⁴⁰ Many bars catering to queers enjoyed relative security from police harassment only at the price of Mafia control of their operations, or graft payments to police officers or politicians. This type of freedom was a precarious one indeed.

       “A City of Family Men”

      Chicago’s Democratic machine had bridged divisions of space and class in the decades after it was forged in the 1920s and cemented by the New Deal. In the aftermath of World War I, Mayor Anton Cermak united white Chicagoans, especially immigrant groups, into a powerful multiethnic coalition that survived his assassination in 1933. Politicians accepted and even celebrated some differences of nationality among whites—that is, among Irish, Poles, and Germans. Blacks were part of the machine, yet they had a distinctly subordinate political status. In the years after World War II, white ethnic neighborhood boundaries gave way to stark black-white divisions, as the city became increasingly segregated. The large swath of the South Side that Richard Wright called “an undissolved lump in the city’s melting pot” was overcrowded already at the close of the war and continued to swell in the 1950s.⁴¹ Chicago’s “black metropolis,” as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton called it in their famous sociological study published in 1945, was policed almost exclusively by white police officers. Time and again in the 1950s, when blacks moved beyond the edges of the ghetto, whites rioted. Black Chicagoans paid inflated prices for inferior housing and goods, and even middle-class blacks could find housing only on financially exploitative terms. Outside the South Side, police tolerated white violence against African Americans who tried to move into white neighborhoods.⁴²

      In the post–World War II era, СКАЧАТЬ