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.
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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 square to articulate that notion.
White liberals became more conscious of racial inequality, and the federal civil rights apparatus expanded significantly. As in other cities in the North, Chicago’s Democratic machine had enthusiastically embraced and benefited from the New Deal, but it had a more complex relationship with the rights-based claims pressed by African Americans in the 1960s. White politicians readily incorporated demands for equal access to public accommodations, voting rights, and even fair employment practices legislation, but they balked at school desegregation, opening the bifurcated housing market, or dismantling the financial practices that enriched wealthy real-estate men at the expense of ordinary African Americans. They aggressively resisted Great Society redistributive programs that threatened to replace their own power with alternative bureaucracies or authorities. They also aggressively resisted sexual freedom, including gay visibility, and they increasingly tried to suppress it altogether rather than merely confining it to specific areas of the city.123
In April 1964, in his first appearance in Chicago since taking office following Kennedy’s assassination the previous November, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to Cook County Democrats to raise campaign funds. Highlighting his new poverty proposals, and pandering to his party’s urban base, he declared that although for the first time two-thirds of Americans now lived in metropolitan areas, “too few of those people really live the good life.”124 Johnson spoke the evening before the Fun Lounge raid. As he returned to Washington the next day, and gay men and lesbians commenced an evening of carousing, the county sheriff prepared to raid the Fun Lounge and then to hound a group of schoolteachers out of their jobs.
The intensified repression of the mid-1960s laid the groundwork for a new phase of the gay movement, as a smattering of gay activists went public with their complaints and others became resentful of the war on vice. “It is very strange indeed,” said one middle-aged gay man late in 1967, “that Chicago, since we have had the law, has become a much more difficult and dangerous city to live in,” a reference to the sodomy-law repeal. He explained, “There is no such thing as a safe bar in Chicago today.” Only a few years earlier, he said, bars were not only open, but “you might say roaring,” their atmosphere “convivial, lively, happy,” and “people felt that they had been sort of liberated … at least in regard to a full and happy night life, only to have this completely crushed in a very short time.” Nowadays, he said, when you go to a bar, “you may be placing yourself in a position that you’re not just going to a bar but you’re going to jail that night.”125 In response to this state repression, a more militant phase of the homophile movement emerged.
3
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Freaking Fag Revolutionaries
BETWEEN 1962 AND 1968, facing increasing police harassment, Chicago’s homophile movement coalesced. Gay Chicagoans created three organizations in the 1960s—a chapter of ONE, a chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, and Mattachine Midwest—each lasting longer than the three Mattachine chapters founded between 1955 and 1960. Each group held meetings, appointed officers, and sponsored parties. One or two members of the Daughters of Bilitis chapter, and a larger number of Mattachine Midwest participants, also differed from members of the previous groups in their willingness to shed their anonymity and appear in public. Although antiwar and civil liberties activism were important influences on the mobilization of gays, it was the challenge that black Chicagoans were posing to place-based forms of institutional racism that most significantly influenced the trajectory of the local gay movement in this period.
The Northern civil rights movement framed homophile activists’ analysis of the urban political landscape, shaping the movement’s growth and inspiring its greater militancy. Black activists in Chicago, as Mike Royko wrote in 1971, “began by coming downtown with picket signs and demanding better schools.”1 Many of Chicago’s white ethnic voters were drawn to a new politics of law and order, for which their mayor became an emblem. Where breadwinner liberals had called for positive state action to aid orderly households, law-and-order Democrats now called for negative state action to control disorderly individuals. Yet white gay activists instead began to borrow the language of black and New Left challenges to police brutality, using some of the same language and the same tools with which African Americans were challenging the ossified urban machine. Black and gay activists in the late