The city’s obsession with the Schuessler-Peterson murders sheds light on how race and class determined the political meanings of violence against children. Daley frequently repeated an offer of a $10,000 reward to anyone who helped solve the triple murder. After the Schuessler boys’ father died of a heart attack several weeks later, Daley even proposed that the city provide “some program of aid” to the grieving widow. It is instructive to compare Daley’s response to the triple murder with his handling of the case of another young Chicagoan slain in a widely publicized murder during Daley’s first year as mayor. Daley proposed no reward in the murder of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old Chicagoan killed two months earlier—albeit in Mississippi—in the twentieth century’s best-known lynching, and no municipal outlay to support his mother, the grieving Mamie Till Bradley, though she, too, was a single mother. (Daley did wire President Dwight Eisenhower, asking the federal government to become involved in the investigation.70) At least one letter published in the black-owned Chicago Defender invoked both crimes in a broad indictment of society’s treatment of children; Mrs. Bradley, the newspaper reported, sent her condolences to the mothers of the three murdered white boys.71
The perception of gays as predators profoundly shaped the response of law enforcement to crimes against children. This fact has been airbrushed out of accounts of the Schuessler-Peterson case, which was for decades among the nation’s best-known unsolved murders. Even the best book written about the murders, which was written from a law-enforcement perspective but generally avoids sensationalism, misrepresents profoundly the reasons for the investigation’s focus on gay men. “Single men living unconventional lifestyles and other persons unable to make a good accounting of their whereabouts on the nights in question fell under suspicion,” the authors acknowledge. But they portray police harassment of gays and lesbians in a more benign light than the evidence warrants: “A rumor that gained currency among the cops and reporters was that the slain boys and their schoolyard chums were in the habit of extorting money from known homosexuals—demanding cash in return for silence. For this reason, investigators took a hard look at the gay community.”72 In fact, however, gay men were targeted for investigation not only—indeed, not primarily—because they were victims of blackmail but rather because they were seen as possible predators.
These investigations could destroy careers quietly even if no charges were ever filed. One of those questioned and forced by the Chicago police to take a lie-detector test was Samuel Steward, a writer and English professor at DePaul University, a Catholic university on the North Side. In March 1956, Chicago police interviewed Steward at his home and then brought him to a police station to answer questions about his whereabouts the night of the murders. In order to give an alibi, he had had to explain that he was an English professor at DePaul University. Though he passed the lie-detector test, he wrote in his journal that day, “If word of this gets to DePaul … it would definitely end me there.” Steward later said in an interview that he was cleared of the murders “largely because I had no car” and did not know how to drive, and thus could not have dumped the bodies in the forest preserve. By the end of the same week, however, he had been called in to meet with the dean of the school and was told his contract would not be renewed. “I tried to get him to say why,” Steward wrote in his diary, “but all I could force out of him was ‘Shall we say for outside activities?’”73 Steward’s firing illustrates how easy it was for employers to accede to the pressure of press and police for the persecution of innocent gay citizens in the wake of a sex-crime panic. The lucky ones were those eased out of a job quietly.
Because the sex-crime panics normalized the idea that gay people did not enjoy ordinary procedural rights, the repeated investigations fostered a climate of fear. In December 1956, the disappearance of two young sisters, Barbara and Patricia Grimes, who had also gone to the movies, and the discovery of their bodies a month later, evoked a similar panic. “Chicago seems to have gone quite off its rocker about the Grimes case,” wrote one gay man that spring, describing its impact on gay men sought by the police.74 In July 1957 it was reported that a “limping blond youth” had been seen with Robert Peterson by the eye doctor who cared for his younger sister; dozens of citizens called and wrote the police with tips.75
In late 1959, eight detectives within the Chicago police department’s sex bureau were still assigned full time to the Schuessler-Peterson investigation.76 By the fifth anniversary of the murders, in the fall of 1960, the Tribune reported that 44,000 people had been interviewed and 6,500 reports and complaints investigated. Of 3,500 suspects questioned, 45 were indicted, and 40 convicted of various crimes, including crimes connected to “perversion.”77 Nearly two years later, a national gay magazine reported that the case “has led to continued police harassment of homosexuals (as alleged suspects) throughout the Midwest.” And new suspects were still being rounded up.78 It is difficult to overstate how powerfully the media-generated sex-crime panics of the 1950s—and the Schuessler-Peterson murder investigation in particular—struck fear into gay men.
Although the black press did not call for police crackdowns on deviates in the manner of the white-owned daily papers, black middle-class respectability politics increasingly shaped the coverage of queer life in the black media. The drag balls that had been a staple of Ebony and Jet received noticeably less coverage by the late 1950s, and as civil rights activism became more prominently featured, queer culture was less often portrayed in favorable ways. A Defender reader complained, “I saw in your paper some months ago some men dressed as women. Please don’t advertise the mess.”79 In 1960, a black reformer complained that “there seems to be almost a tacit acceptance that certain conditions can and will be tolerated in a Negro community that would not be tolerated in some other sections of the city.” He wrote that, along 63rd Street in the South Side’s Woodlawn neighborhood, “Prostitutes, male homosexuals and drug addicts arrogantly paraded along the street with the air that it was a badge of honor to be this sort of scum.”80 For black aspirants to middle-class status, social and sexual deviance increasingly seemed not simply offensive but a threat to racial uplift as well.
Inkblots and Individual Rights
In the midst of continuing police harassment and media-generated sex-crime panics, as well as a nascent national movement for African American civil rights, Chicago’s homophile movement took shape. By some twist of fate, Chicago had been the site of the nation’s earliest gay-rights organization yet uncovered, the Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 by Henry Gerber, a postal clerk and Great War veteran living on the city’s North Side. The group was quickly shut down by the police, its files confiscated, and Gerber let go by the post office. In 1940, a pen pal asked Gerber about forming an organization for homosexuals. “Let me tell you from experience,” he replied, “it does not pay to do anything for them. I once lost a good job in trying to bring them together.”81 Still, Gerber’s activism illustrates the transatlantic influence of Magnus Hirschfeld and other German sexologists, and it was a precursor to the American gay movement of the postwar period.
The homophile movement began decades later among white liberals, most of them men. Mobilizing around an individual-level trait not shared with family members, such as one’s homosexuality, often entails spatial and emotional distancing from one’s family and neighborhood of origin. For this reason, participating in such a movement was perhaps inevitably both less attractive to and less possible for black than for white Chicagoans. In the working-class queer city, to be sure, there was some crosstown traffic. An African American male-to-female transgender Chicagoan living on the South Side recalls that she “was always up on north side, in and out of there,” especially the mostly white, bohemian and queer enclave of Old Town, where she encountered a multiracial transgender social network—including other street queens who “introduced me to the doctor they were getting their hormones from.”82 But the racial segregation of Chicago’s neighborhoods and workplaces curtailed the possibility of interracial queer political mobilization.
To most gays and lesbians in the early Cold War era, the risks of forming an organization based on their sexual orientation collectively outweighed the potential benefits. In the late 1940s or early 1950s, Shirley Willer was a young nurse