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Maximum Feasible Intimidation

IN THE 1960s, as breadwinner liberalism came to dominate American politics, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley insisted on interpreting its terms narrowly. As the Democratic Party’s most powerful boss, Daley was present at the creation of America’s eight years of liberal governance, playing a widely acknowledged role in the nomination of John F. Kennedy for president. Yet even as Chicago became the first major American city in which private, consensual homosexual acts were not a crime, police stepped up their war on gay nightlife. Though Daley did not protest when the Illinois legislature decriminalized same-sex acts, he lobbied that same year for changes to state liquor laws that helped shut down gay public life in his city. Gays and lesbians were no longer criminals, but for them to gather in an establishment serving alcohol became more dangerous.

Even as Daley became his party’s most powerful boss, his political agenda remained strikingly parochial. His reputation as the Democrats’ preeminent kingmaker was secured at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in July 1960, where he helped engineer the nomination of Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy for president, in part by unceremoniously dumping his own former mentor in state politics, the two-time failed presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Although no one can know precisely why Daley threw his support to Kennedy, the rewards he reaped went beyond the debt the young president later owed him. Having a Catholic at the top of the ticket—as well as a Protestant, Otto Kerner, running for governor—played on the enthusiasm of Catholics eager to cast a vote for the first Catholic president. Kennedy’s nomination thus helped Daley defeat the incumbent state’s attorney, Benjamin Adamowski, whose muckraking had exposed a police corruption scandal early in the year.¹ For Daley, a fellow Catholic at the top of the ticket would maximize the turnout of loyal white working-class voters in November, and thereby help take the pressure off corruption in his police department. As Norman Mailer would later put it, Daley “was not a national politician, but a clansman.”²

In the liberal era that he helped to launch, Daley of Chicago played a contradictory role. He united his city’s Catholic and black voters behind Kennedy in a bitterly fought election that pushed his party back into the White House in 1960.³ Under President Lyndon Johnson, Daley took full advantage of Great Society funds for urban redevelopment. Yet he fought tooth and nail, and successfully, for the right to keep Chicago schools largely segregated.⁴ He also exerted extraordinary pressure to circumvent the program’s requirement that those affected at the grassroots level be permitted “maximum feasible participation” in antipoverty programs. As a machine boss, Daley perceived the program as a threat to his power; brooking no rival, he cowed Johnson with his insistence that federal funds flow through city hall. Most famously, he outmaneuvered the campaign by Martin Luther King, Jr., to protest the isolation and poverty of the city’s African American ghettos during the Chicago Freedom Movement. The Chicago machine under Daley seemed to advance urban liberals without advancing urban liberalism.

Daley was deeply identified with the New Deal’s vision that blue-collar white men should be able to get jobs that would allow them to support a family. With respect to questions he understood as moral rather than economic, however, Daley’s vision of liberalism became more exclusionary. As urban life was increasingly sexualized, Daley did not incorporate the notion of sexual freedom into his parochial liberalism. In the neighborhoods stretching north from the Loop along the lakefront—especially along North Michigan Avenue, where offices, restaurants, and hotels began to boom in the early 1960s—the police increasingly sought not to corral and confine gay life, but to eliminate it.⁵

As city officials secured federal funds for urban renewal and highway construction and as they implemented the Daley administration’s ambitious 1958 plan for construction in the Loop and on the Near North Side, middle-class reformers demanded crackdowns on vice and on organized crime, while city policy makers worked to rebuild downtown in a way that would lure white families with children to live, shop, and play there. Though Chicago was the birthplace of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine and home to the famous Playboy Mansion, the city sued Hefner under obscenity laws and confiscated copies of the magazine after actress Jayne Mansfield appeared nude in the June 1963 issue.⁶ But the lawsuit was unsuccessful. Not only that, but beginning in 1965, gray-flannel-suited men visiting Chicago for conventions saw the Playboy moniker in illuminated white letters, nine feet tall, on top of what had formerly been the Palmolive Building. Three years later, Hefner was called “Chicago’s most spectacularly successful citizen.”⁷ As urban life was increasingly sexualized, Daley with limited success worked to contain sexual expression and material he saw as incompatible with family life.

In the 1960s, Chicago experienced the clash between urban liberalism—characterized by its opportunist mix of machine- and reform-oriented politics, its investment in the male-breadwinner household, and its continued strength among ethnic working-class whites—and the rising tide of rights-based movements among racial and sexual minorities. In a city increasingly bifurcated—between glass-and-steel towers and brick-and-concrete public-housing projects—black civil rights activists struggled to gain traction in challenging inequality in education and housing, and local homophile groups began to reach beyond their tiny discussion groups and into the public square. It was in this moment that Daley’s police department stepped up its harassment of both African Americans and queers.

“An Act Not Likely to Be Noted”

In 1961, the Illinois legislature passed two new laws affecting the policing of gay life. The first, which ostensibly liberalized the legal status of gay people, was the enactment of a criminal code reform that, among other things, decriminalized gay sex—the first successful such move in the country—by repealing the Illinois “crime against nature” statute. But the second law reform of 1961, which altered liquor regulations in a way that gave the city of Chicago more power to keep gay bars closed after a raid, had far more impact on gay life at the time. Chicago’s experience thus revealed that legalizing intimate acts was not enough to make gay people feel safe when they gathered.

By adopting a package of criminal law reforms based on the Model Penal Code proposed by the American Law Institute (ALI), the Illinois legislature repealed the long-standing statutory prohibition on private homosexual behavior between consenting adults.⁸ A joint committee of the state and Chicago bar associations had spent six years transforming the ALI’s model code into a new set of proposed criminal laws for Illinois. In so doing, the group left in place the ALI’s recommendation to repeal the “crime against nature” statute. These liberal lawyers, according to at least one participant, were heavily swayed by the arguments made against criminalizing sodomy by Indiana University sexologist Alfred Kinsey.⁹

Advocates for decriminalizing same-sex acts justified their position not by asserting that people had a right to engage in those acts but by arguing that their criminalization led to extortion and blackmail. Blackmail was in fact a real problem. In a sample of 458 nearly all-white gay men interviewed in Chicago in 1967, 9.4 percent said they had been blackmailed by someone concerning their homosexuality, most often by a casual sexual partner.¹⁰ Liberal social scientists cited blackmail in arguing that however reprehensible a citizen’s hidden, stigmatized, and victimless conduct might be, laws prohibiting such conduct nonetheless fostered other types of crimes. The lawyers hired to write the comments that accompanied the tentative draft of the new criminal code, circulated to the state legislators before they cast their votes, noted that criminalizing “an act not likely to be noted by parties other than those admittedly involved” would foster “a secretive situation extremely difficult of proof or disproof—and thus, lends itself … to the dangers of extortion and blackmail.”¹¹ The document referred to the acts that were to be legalized only as “sexual conduct between consenting adults.”¹² In short, such laws would create the conditions for an increase rather than a decrease in crime.

When the state criminal law reform was drafted, the principal players in the debate were the gun lobby, defense lawyers, and the Council of Catholic Churches.¹³ Participants in the homophile movement played no part—a testament to their marginality in 1961. And although insiders knew that the bill decriminalized sodomy, they dared not discuss the fact publicly for fear of threatening its passage, according to Dawn Clark Netsch, then a legal counsel to the governor.¹⁴ Press accounts of the criminal-code reform mentioned the sex provisions in language that appeared to be borrowed from the bar association’s committee and its spokesperson, Professor Charles Bowman of the University of Illinois College of Law. They labeled it the product of “a more mature attitude toward immoral conduct,”¹⁵ or of a need for sex offenses to be “spelled out more clearly.”¹⁶ A lawyer who wrote a synopsis of the code for the Illinois Bar Journal professed that, before the new code’s passage, there was “considerable litigation and confusion … as to the specific acts included in the crime against nature.”¹⁷ To the limited extent that a public case was made at that time for decriminalizing private consensual homosexual acts, it centered on clarity and modernization rather than sexual freedom or homosexual rights.

Though the repeal of the Illinois sodomy law was an early harbinger of the gay-rights revolution, even most members of Chicago’s homophile organizations were unaware of it at the time. “Most of the members present had no positive knowledge of the new deviant relations law until the meeting with Pearl Hart,” reported the president of the new Daughters of Bilitis Chicago chapter, the month after the change went into effect.¹⁸ The two national gay magazines of the era, both published in California, reported on the change. Del Martin, who had cofounded the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco in 1955, wrote in the group’s magazine, The Ladder, that “while the homophile movement has long expounded the need to change our sex laws to this effect, now that it has happened I can’t help wondering if there will be any appreciable difference in the attitude of law enforcement regarding the homosexual.”¹⁹ In Chicago, the sodomy-law reform had no discernible effect on the trajectory of gay mobilization in Chicago—nor, as we shall see, on policing. By September 1970, when members of Chicago Gay Liberation spoke at the plenary session of the Black Panther Party–sponsored Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, their statement declared, “Any homosexual from Chicago, where homosexuality is legal, will tell you that changing the law makes no difference.”²⁰

At Daley’s behest, the legislature also passed, in the very same session, a law that enabled Daley to keep taverns shut during license-revocation-appeal proceedings. This law’s impact on gay communal life was far more immediate and concrete than the theoretical benefit gays and lesbians might derive from the new criminal code. Because the statute dealt with liquor regulations, Daley could not enact this more significant measure municipally. Rather, it required an act of the state legislature, where downstate Republicans initially opposed it. Politicians from more rural parts of Illinois “contended enactment of the bill could lead to harassment of legitimate business men.”²¹ The Democratic Senate majority leader and a key Chicago machine politician, George W. Dunne, assured his colleagues otherwise: “This bill is not directed at the ma and pa taverns,” he said, “but at the dens of iniquity that are operating in Chicago.”²² Yet it was squeezed through the legislature by limiting its application to Chicago—a provision that would, nearly a decade later, lead the state’s high court to strike it down. (The final law was written so that it applied to cities with more than half a million residents, of which Illinois had only one.) This debate departed from the usual pattern of partisan conflict in Springfield, in which Chicago Democrats typically argued for, and downstate Republicans against, higher spending and taxes. In the padlock law, the machine fought for the power to crack down more harshly on nightlife, while Republicans prevented such power from being exercised outside Chicago’s city limits.²³

The new measure effectively strangled those best positioned to fight back against the war on gay sociability. By depriving bar owners of revenue while they appealed a liquor-license revocation, a process that could drag on for months or even years, the new measure added significantly to the financial risk involved in running a gay bar in Chicago. Daley portrayed the measure as a step against organized crime. One reporter said, referring to the mayor’s power before the new law’s passage, “When he closes a tavern for serious offenses, the operator can reopen for as long as two years while appealing the revocation.”²⁴ The presence of “deviates” was clearly among the “serious offenses” that politicians and journalists alike understood to be a legitimate ground for closing a tavern. For the mayor of Chicago, homosexuality became a political question almost exclusively in the context of the regulation of vice. So far were gays and lesbians from being deemed a political constituency that they lacked, in some sense, even the right to assemble.

War on Vice

Even more consequential for gay citizens than the sodomy-law repeal and the law allowing the padlocking of taverns appealing license revocation was still another transformation that occurred in 1960, unfolding in Chicago rather than Springfield: a churning of the cycle of scandal and reform in the police department. A major scandal broke in January 1960, in which a police station on the Northwest Side (on Foster Avenue just east of Damen Avenue) was revealed as the epicenter of a large-scale burglary ring. Though Daley had consolidated his authority yet further after his reelection to a second term in 1959, the so-called Summerdale scandal that erupted early in 1960—named for the police station at its center—seemed to confirm the harshest charges of the machine’s critics. Daley had in fact loosened the regulation of organized crime after taking office, adding to his vulnerability: As a favor to his backers in the organized-crime syndicate, he had abolished the police intelligence unit, known as “Scotland Yard,” in 1956.²⁵

FIGURE 3. New Chicago police superintendent O. W. Wilson being filmed by WGN-TV, 1960. Courtesy of Chicago History Museum.

The mayor managed not only to avoid being tarnished but even to benefit from the Summerdale affair through a politically brilliant step: He hired a new police superintendent, a reformer from outside, and authorized him to revamp the department from top to bottom. The choice of O. W. Wilson, a nationally prominent police reformer and the dean of the School of Criminology at the University of California, Berkeley, restored confidence in Daley and showed his commitment to professionalism (see Figure 3).²⁶ Arriving in the spring of 1960, Wilson was given wide authority to revamp the department. The Chicago job enabled him to implement his ideas about reorganizing big-city police departments, which involved a costly modernization of facilities and centralization of operations. The most up-to-date equipment was purchased, psychological profiling was adopted as a means of identifying officers for promotion, and a new intelligence division—the existence of which was widely publicized even as its actual operations were kept secret—was established.²⁷

Wilson was a strong believer in policing vice aggressively. At the same time as the State Department’s dismissals of “security risks” at the national level decreased overall by focusing more exclusively on homosexuals than it did in the 1950s, it was local political authorities who most directly organized antigay policing in the Windy City.²⁸ Newspapers spread the word that the new chief was cracking down on all manner of illicit activity, from horse betting to women’s being hired by bars to solicit drinks from male patrons.²⁹ This upstanding Protestant clashed with local traditions in a city in which the police force and public life were heavily Catholic. In his first weeks on the job, Wilson stopped the practice of routinely allowing Catholic churches and other charities to raise money by holding bingo games, because this was technically illegal gambling. It did not endear this former university administrator to many of his officers, or to the city council, who for more than a year afterward pursued the idea of legalizing bingo by state law or referendum.³⁰ Police confiscated bingo equipment in a raid at the Belgium-American Club.³¹ Slot machines were seized in Veterans of Foreign Wars halls.³² “There can be no compromise with vice any more than there can be compromise with other crime,” Wilson wrote in the second edition of his best-selling textbook Police Administration, which was released during his time at the helm in Chicago, following revisions made by his wife.³³

Highly attentive to public relations, Wilson was a masterful superintendent in an era of intense competition between local newspapers to cover crime and policing. In planning a department’s public-relations efforts, he wrote in his textbook, “One story each day is better than three stories every third day.”³⁴ The mainstream press, and many middle-class whites, credited Wilson with professionalizing the department, investing in technological improvements, and centralizing operations to reduce corruption. But the new chief’s need to justify budget increases, and his commitment to accurate and detailed crime statistics, generated pressure to increase arrests. He launched a phase of aggressive policing of black life that was invisible to most whites and with civil liberties implications that were ignored by the predominantly white media. Wilson believed that police officers should not simply respond to crime but should engage in aggressive, “preventive” action on the streets, and the brunt of this new style of policing fell on Chicago’s segregated black neighborhoods. The intelligence division that Wilson created in 1961 even included a special Gang Intelligence Unit, an early signal of the militarization of the department in the coming decade—as was the imposition of the 24-hour-clock military time system on police recordkeeping.³⁵

In the streets of Chicago, and in his textbook on police administration, Wilson was a proponent of using undercover officers extensively, and under his leadership the department expanded the contexts in which these were used. To control vice, he wrote, “undercover operators and funds are needed for the intensive investigation, which is essential for successful enforcement.”³⁶ Most controversially, he assigned—or at least told reporters that he was assigning—undercover police officers to the task of identifying officers willing to accept graft or bribes so that such officers could be prosecuted.³⁷ This policy was extremely unpopular with the rank and file and opposed by the Patrolmen’s Association and the department’s Catholic chaplain. Together with his new limits on officers’ outside employment and his firm opposition to graft and what he called “political interference” with crime-fighting, these policies led to what Wilson’s biographer called “a serious morale problem” at the grass roots.³⁸

Plainclothes cops and their swashbuckling antics, which appealed to a society obsessed with espionage and spying, became a staple of Wilson’s aggressive approach to public relations. Newspapers reported on cops “posing as conventioneers from New York” and hiring women from an escort service for sexual encounters at the Palmer House hotel in the Loop.³⁹ Crime reporters were invited to come along with undercover officers and chronicle their operations. The resulting “true crime” news articles became fodder for the intense competition for readers among the city’s four main daily papers. The stories covered the heroic feats, for example, of ten police officers “dressed in the tattered fashion of skid row” who prevented a robbery, or a pair of cops who witnessed and stopped a crime while “wearing shabby clothing and pretend[ing] to be intoxicated.”⁴⁰ The publicity-obsessed Wilson gave his blessing to a television program about one of the police plainclothes units, telling reporters at the preview that it would be a corrective to a society he believed was too “concerned about the rights of the criminal.”⁴¹

Wilson launched harsh and well-publicized crackdowns on predominantly white queer nightlife, using plainclothes officers in several ways. Gay men risked police action when plainclothes officers, who had been sent to monitor bars undercover, witnessed men dancing together, kissing, touching, or “soliciting” sex. When places that catered to women witnessed mass arrests, it was more often because lesbians, simply by being part of a subculture organized around the butch/femme subcultural forms of gender expression, were treated as violators of city laws.⁴² Narcotics charges were also frequently used against gay establishments—often, according to Valerie Taylor, using planted evidence. “A guy would go into the men’s room and leave a joint on the window sill,” she recalled. “Pretty soon another man, also in plain clothes, would go into the men’s room, come out with the joint, making little cries of happy surprise.”⁴³ The spike in plainclothes surveillance thus enlisted officers in a semiotics of disguise and disclosure that mirrored the architecture of the closet.

As he mounted a sweeping war on vice, Wilson accepted suggestions from unelected antivice reformers while ignoring pleas from aldermen who found the crackdowns excessive. In 1962, for example, Virgil Peterson, a business-backed reformer and longtime director of the Chicago Crime Commission, wrote to Wilson proposing a new ordinance tightening enforcement of a ban on “B-girls”—women employed by taverns to induce men to buy them drinks. The superintendent quickly proposed such an ordinance. Though it took two years for the city council to enact it, Wilson promptly embarked on an aggressively publicized “war” on B-girls.⁴⁴ Some South Side aldermen argued that this bill was bad for small businesses; “with Wilson as police boss, [2nd Ward alderman William H.] Harvey asserted, barmaids supporting families have lost their jobs.” In fact, at least one club owner thought launching a female impersonator show would make his business safer from the police: This Near North Side establishment, the Talk of the Town, reportedly “after a prostitution raid changed its entertainment policy to one featuring female impersonators.” The strategy apparently did not work, as the place was raided again within a year, this time with nine male dancers arrested and one charged with impersonating a female.⁴⁵

The intensified police harassment under Wilson was reflected in the activities of a new chapter of the Mattachine Society founded late in 1959. In the spring of 1960, the group held a dinner meeting at the La Salle hotel, at which Pearl Hart spoke to sixteen men, and plans were made to reissue the 1957 pamphlet “Your Legal Rights” in “a new pocket-sized edition,” though this plan does not seem to have come to fruition.⁴⁶ In a particularly large February 1961 raid on a blue-collar lesbian bar on the Northwest Side, the C & C Club, more than fifty women were arrested along with the bartender. The following month, the newsletter of the new Chicago chapter of the Mattachine Society linked antigay harassment to the bingo debacle, which had continued to attract ink: “Upon taking office as Chicago’s police commissioner several months ago, Orlando Wilson struck a mighty blow against crime and vice in Cook County by outlawing bingo. On February 18 the forces of law and order took another giant step by raiding one of the city’s more sedate gay bars and arresting more than fifty women, plus the bartender.” The article appeared under the headline “Civic Virtue Triumphs Again.”⁴⁷ At the police station, “those women wearing ‘fly fronts,’ regardless of whether they wore lipstick, long hair, or earrings, were made partially to undress in order to determine whether they wore jockey shorts,” according to the account of a woman named Del Shearer.⁴⁸ Although this newest Mattachine incarnation was, like its predecessors, unable to sustain itself beyond a small number of newsletter issues, the article’s tone anticipated the backlash that Wilson’s war on vice would stimulate by lesbians and gay men by mid-decade. As we will see, the C & C Club raid led Shearer to found a chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the San Francisco-based all-female homophile organization.

Policing was perhaps harshest on working-class queer teenagers. The municipal police and county sheriff were not the only agency involved in policing gays and lesbians; the Illinois Youth Commission incarcerated children deemed troublesome. Around 1960, a white sixteen-year-old teenager was taken to a Chicago police station by his parents, who were angry that he stayed out late at night and sneaked into gay bars. The police shuttled him to the youth commission, which deemed him “incorrigible” and sent him to the State Industrial School for Boys. There, “they immediately locked me up and kept me away from all the other boys. This is the way that they handle homosexuals: they lock them up and that’s it.” Released after two months, he said nearly all the other boys were kept for six. “It’s awfully strange some of the kids they have in there that shouldn’t be there,” he recalled several years later.⁴⁹ Working-class black queer teenagers were treated even more coercively. Thus, Ron Vernon, a “flamboyant” black teenager who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, recalls that when he began high school in the early 1960s, he was “sent to a counselor immediately … because of my overt femininity.”⁵⁰ Later, a family court judge asked the boy’s father during a hearing if he were “aware that your son is a homosexual?” The son recalled, “My father is a very honest man, and just said, ‘Yeah.’ So they said, ‘Well, we’re going to send him to Galesburg Mental Institution to try to correct his homosexuality.’” The boy, twelve or thirteen at the time of the hearing, would spend much of his adolescence in and out of the custody of the state of Illinois.⁵¹

In the first half of the 1960s, it became more common for newspapers to publish the names and addresses of all those arrested in a bar raid, a practice that peaked in the spring and summer of 1964 with a merciless series of raids. Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie, a Republican with aspirations to higher office, escalated the war on vice by orchestrating a huge raid on an outlying gay club, Louie’s Fun Lounge, on a barren stretch of road in an unincorporated area on the western edge of Cook County. Commercialized vice had flourished on Mannheim Road since the construction of O’Hare airport nearby was completed in 1955. The patrons referred to the place as “Louie Gage’s” or “Louie Gauger’s,” after the club’s proprietor, Louis Gauger. Like other owners of gay bars, Gauger had mob ties. He had angered the sheriff by refusing to testify against Mafia kingpin Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo when Ogilvie unsuccessfully prosecuted the latter in 1960 for income-tax fraud.

Not only journalists but also politicians competed to show they were tough on vice. Aggressive raids on gay establishments in the mid-1960s were partly a manifestation of the race for voters’ allegiances between the Cook County Democratic Organization—that is, the machine—and the Republican Party, which traditionally was powerful downstate but could also win elections in suburban areas both outside Cook County and just within its borders. In fact, a promise to escalate the war on vice in outlying parts of the county had been the cornerstone of Ogilvie’s campaign strategy in 1962: He promised to “raid and close the syndicate gambling casinos and vice dens which have flourished for decades.” He even singled out the Fun Lounge specifically for criticism, in a campaign that focused on which candidate was “best qualified to turn the heat on the mob.”⁵² In the first months of 1964, as Republican and Democratic candidates geared up for the April primary election, charges and countercharges flew, hinting that a crackdown on vice might be in the offing.⁵³ A Republican candidate for state’s attorney “accused Mayor Daley of ‘looking the other way’ instead of cleaning up syndicated crime in Cook County”⁵⁴ and promised to reopen the “Sex Bureau” of the state’s attorney’s office “because the streets of Chicago are not safe for our women.”⁵⁵

Ogilvie’s officers humiliated the bar patrons in a spectacular fashion. Early on the morning of Saturday, April 25, 1964, the sheriff blockaded the front and back doors of the Fun Lounge. Undercover sheriff’s police officer John Chaconas later testified that just before the raid he had seen “10 or 15 male couples dancing and half a dozen male couples embracing.”⁵⁶ “They just burst in the front door and lined up inside so no one could go out the front door,” recalled one gay man. “They had sent somebody around the back,” he said, noting that he escaped arrest by passing through the beer storage room into owner Louie Gauger’s own living space behind the club, where the man waited out the raid.⁵⁷ They arrested six women and 103 men; loaded them onto school buses; paraded them in front of news photographers while those arrested tried to cover their faces; and supplied reporters with the names, ages, addresses, and occupations of most of those arrested in time for that information to be printed in the Saturday afternoon newspapers (see Figure 4). They kept them overnight. In the morning, they were charged with being “inmates of a disorderly house” and, in a few cases, “lewd and lascivious conduct” as well.

After this raid, which became the stuff of local gay legend, the Chicago Daily News published the name, age, home address, and occupation of most of the 109 arrested. They ranged in age from 19 to 56; the median age was 27, eighteen patrons being 21 or 22 years old. The group included many students and teachers; office workers, clerks, salesmen, and a Teletype operator; a hair stylist and a beautician; and a laborer, a dock worker, and a trucker; an accountant, an insurance claim examiner, and a laboratory technician; and a 24-year-old office manager living at tony 3600 Lake Shore Drive. It was a predominantly suburban crowd: of the ninety-three whose addresses were published, thirty-four lived in the city of Chicago, thirty-three elsewhere in Cook County, eleven in Du Page County west of the city, and three in Kane County farther to the west. Six other Illinois counties were represented by one patron each.⁵⁸

As in the purges of gay federal employees in the same era, job dismissals were the most feared outcome of such raids. Some of those arrested reportedly were terminated after what the Los Angeles–based gay magazine ONE called their “conviction by publicity.” At trial, defense attorneys objected to photographers’ presence in the courtroom, but they were overruled.⁵⁹ Ogilvie stressed that those arrested included two employees of the Chicago police department, as well as a county employee and school district officials. He drew particular attention to the presence of seven schoolteachers and one suburban school principal. Ogilvie effectively challenged other law-enforcement officials to conduct crackdowns of their own by sending letters to the districts that employed the arrested teachers, and by telling reporters, “School districts should keep an eye on people who maintain such close contact with youngsters in the community.” The superintendent of the Du Page County public schools suggested that state authorities revoke the licenses of the teachers.⁶⁰ In calling on public-sector employers to fire any of their employees who were arrested, Ogilvie implicitly sanctioned private-sector dismissals as well.⁶¹

FIGURE 4. Chicago Daily News, April 25, 1964.

Though the firing of gay teachers was widely praised, at least one school district departed from the pattern. A thirty-year-old schoolteacher living in Dundee, Illinois, and arrested during the raid, was allowed to keep his job, at least initially, as officials “said they were convinced he would be acquitted, and that he claimed all he knew was that he was going to a night club.”⁶² The Chicago Tribune also published a wry letter to the editor from one citizen who found the harassment hypocritical. The fact that “only teachers, as an occupational group, were singled out for attention,” observed Russell Doll of Chicago, apparently because of their “contact and assumed influence” with children, suggested “an importance to society” higher than that of other occupations. “It is, therefore, amusing that when it comes to paying teachers, this implied importance decreases,” he wrote.⁶³ But Doll’s apparent sympathy toward those arrested was shared by very few public commentators. A few days after the raid, a popular “bad boy” radio host told a Tribune interviewer that he was in favor of “sex”—then added, “but not those 109 wig wearers at the Fun Lounge.”⁶⁴ Even commentators otherwise sympathetic to the sexual revolution, in short, excluded the gay subculture from the circle of acceptable deviation.

Politicians, police, journalists, and employers thus together cast a pall of fear over gay and lesbian life, while advancing their own careers and often extorting money from bar patrons and owners. The men and women caught up in the escalating harassment struggled to make their case to the judges they faced. Pleas for journalists to withhold the names of those arrested from publication were rejected. Splashy raids helped Ogilvie deflect attention from the persistence of organized crime—and from rumors that his own officers were linked to the very syndicate they were supposed to be rooting out. Remarkably, by the end of the year, both Richard Cain, who led the raid, and John Chaconas, the plainclothes officer who testified in court about what he had observed at the Fun Lounge, would be convicted and sentenced to one to three years in prison. Both were indicted as double agents for the very crime syndicate to which the club’s owner was thought to be connected.⁶⁵ “It is a little hard to tell who are the cops and who the robbers in this script,” observed the Tribune when the two men were sentenced.⁶⁶

The Fun Lounge incident launched a wave of aggressive raids, and the Chicago police evidently did not want to be outdone by their counterparts in county employment.⁶⁷ Days later, Lieutenant Thomas Kernan of the Chicago police department’s vice division raided another “hangout for sex deviates,” telling reporters afterward, “[T]here has been an increase recently in night spot performances by female impersonators.”⁶⁸ A few weeks later, Chicago police arrested thirty-three men in the Lincoln Baths in Old Town. Kernan announced not only that “the bathhouse has been a national meeting place for perverts” but that “files of the bathhouse confiscated in the raid listed various meeting places for perverts throughout the United States.”⁶⁹ The spring 1964 crackdown in Chicago indeed reverberated across the country.

The intense news coverage of the Fun Lounge raid attracted significant attention from ONE, the gay magazine published in Los Angeles. “I imagine that you have been receiving clippings on the Chicago raids,” a Milwaukee man wrote; he had heard from a friend in Chicago that “there are an awful lot of people looking for new jobs.”⁷⁰ The editor also explained that the raids justified one of the editorial policies: “[W]e have been often asked to print and distribute lists of gay bars, baths, and other places where homosexuals congregate so that our friends will know where to go when they visit strange towns.” However, he said, “We have never felt it would be wise to print such a list,” a stance he felt was justified given that the officers in the Fun Lounge raid “found a copy of such a guidebook” and now seemed to be investigating “the other bars listed in the publication.” In short, “Why should the homosexual always make it easy for the police? Why print a list that in the wrong hands can be used against us?” With a tone of gallows humor, he encouraged readers to seek out information by word of mouth instead: “Anyway, no self-respecting, enterprising homosexual should ever confess to the need for such a guide.” Most devastating, he suggested at the same time, “it probably would be advisable to have a copy of the March 1961 issue of ONE magazine if you happen to be unlucky enough to live in Chicago. The March ’61 issue contains the editorial telling you what to do in case of arrest.”⁷¹

In the 1950s, police raids on gay bars had been sporadic; in the early 1960s, they had become systematic. The 1964 Fun Lounge raid, like the C & C Club raid three years earlier, angered gay citizens. “Illinois took a giant step forward two years ago,” wrote one gay man in a letter to ONE. “We up-dated our laws in this state at that time. But the two raids and attendant publicity recently here in Chicago was a black eye for us.” The writer primarily blamed the press: “The law has come a long way in Illinois. Now justice must catch up through responsible reporting that makes it impossible for publicity hungry public servants to destroy the innocent before trial.”⁷² These raids led a small group of gay Chicagoans to found a new organization of people like themselves, determined to act boldly to challenge the authorities.

“A Transparent Curtain of Homosexuality”

Daley’s breadwinner liberalism, however resonant in city hall, was increasingly difficult to square with the rising visibility of a cultural liberalism that allowed artistic and cultural experimentation, built on the urban bohemian subcultures that dated at least to the early twentieth century. By the late 1950s, the flourishing of a predominantly white bohemia in Chicago’s Old Town and Near North Side was unmistakable. The area had been a site of cultural ferment and dissidence and a magnet for artists and writers from across the Midwest since World War I, but it grew in the prosperous postwar years into a center of beatnik visibility. The celebrated comedy troupe Second City, founded there in 1955, included a pioneering skit on its 1963 program about a young gay man in Chicago who tries to hint to his family members visiting from downstate Illinois about his homosexuality.⁷³ The landscape was filled with places that catered to these locals. One man recalled an all-night diner on Clark Street, just south of Division, called Feast on a Bun, “just a counter, no tables, and a lot of street hustlers, street cruisers, drag queens—anybody who frequented that area…. And I think a lot of cops used the place, too.”⁷⁴

The Daley machine reacted against the liberalization of intimate norms in the late 1950s and early 1960s, yet it gradually narrowed its target to focus increasingly on gay life. In his first term in office, Daley launched an ambitious “slum clearance” and redevelopment program, targeting the Loop and the Near North Side, a program that was all but overtly intended to remake downtown to appeal to whites. For Daley, however, not all whites were equally desirable. Rather, he specifically wanted to lure white families to live downtown and thus privileged their needs over those of single people. In his influential 1961 study of political power in Chicago, the political scientist Edward Banfield claimed that in 1959 Daley nixed a particular Near North development project, known as Fort Dearborn, precisely because “the residential part of the Project would have to be mainly high-rise ‘economy’ apartments for elderly people and childless couples.” For Banfield, the mayor’s decisive preoccupation with social reproduction was rooted in his Catholic background. “[H]e was against development of a kind that might discourage people from having children or interfere with family life,” he wrote.⁷⁵

The redevelopment of the Near North Side may have been aided by the growth of bohemia, but it was primarily driven by downtown business interests. The alliance between the real-estate industry and Daley’s city hall was strengthened in 1958 when Daley released a downtown redevelopment plan, which was meant both to prevent black encroachment from residential neighborhoods to the south and to limit the visibility of gays and female prostitutes on the Near North Side. As whites fled to suburban areas to live and shop and the city’s black population grew, South Side blacks were increasingly visible as patrons of Loop establishments, where they could purchase goods and services unavailable in slums where commercial developers were unwilling to invest in retail stores. The developer Arthur Rubloff told a reporter that among the major concerns of downtown retailers was that the growing visibility of African Americans on the street was scaring away whites.⁷⁶

Near Old Town, the city entered into a partnership in the early 1960s with a group of private investors to build a giant high-rise apartment complex, Sandburg Village, intended as an attractive urban alternative for affluent white families thinking of moving to the suburbs. The project required many existing buildings along Clark Street to be razed: “I think they were trying to clean up the neighborhood for Sandburg Village and get rid of the old businesses,” recalled William B. Kelley. Sam’s, the most popular gay bar in the area, closed, and other longtime bars followed suit.⁷⁷ Rent for apartments in the new buildings was out of reach for many of the area’s existing tenants. By the second half of the 1960s, the neighborhood’s bohemian history was increasingly being commodified.⁷⁸ Newspapers profiled white couples who had chosen to raise children in the revitalized Near North, such as Mrs. Herman Fell, who raised two young children while her husband was at work as a television producer. “It’s a nice neighborhood with nice kooky people who do a lot of different things,” Mrs. Fell said. The reporter for the Tribune explained, “Folk singers, actors, and newspaper persons are among their neighbors.”⁷⁹ Making the area safe for “squares,” however, entailed aggressive police action to shut down unwholesome establishments. Near North Side police rounded up women nightly on suspicion of engaging in sex work.⁸⁰

Black insurgency increased after Daley’s reelection, early in 1963, in the aftermath of the high-profile civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August. Protest centered on the dramatic racial inequalities in the Chicago public schools. That fall, African American parents staged two massive daylong boycotts of the public school system to protest overcrowding in many all-black schools. Daley’s school policies reflected his loyalty to white working-class constituents who held supremacist ideals about the right of white residents to send their children to all-white neighborhood schools. African American activists drew attention in particular to the highly visible use of mobile classrooms outside overcrowded all-black schools. Black parents led a campaign to oust Benjamin Willis, Daley’s schools superintendent, who became a symbol of white resistance to integration. Daley, however, was intransigent and refused to fire Willis.⁸¹ The Defender drew more attention to police brutality, although the main focus of mobilization in these years remained the school system. The boycotts failed to oust Willis, but their boldness and their identification of city hall as the source of injustice in the neighborhoods marked a watershed for the black freedom struggle locally.⁸²

In what became a turning point for the Daley machine’s approach to the censorship of sexual material, the Chicago city council rather suddenly became engulfed in the winter of 1964–65 in a lengthy debate over a proposal to prohibit James Baldwin’s novel Another Country from being used as required reading in an English course in a city-funded two-year college. This major controversy, which captured the attention of the news media locally and even nationally, revealed how central sexuality was to the volatile politics of race, class, and education. The sponsor of the ban was one of the few Republicans on the city council, Alderman John Hoellen of the Northwest Side’s 47th Ward. Hoellen objected to the book because, he said, it “extensively dwells upon homosexuality as though it had redeeming social value,” a phrase that alluded to the legal definition of obscenity promulgated by the Supreme Court in 1957 in Roth v. United States.⁸³

Throughout the debate on the city-council floor—the city council’s most in-depth discussion of homosexuality in a half century—the assumption prevailed among most participants that gay visibility in the city signified moral decline.⁸⁴ The key problem with Another Country, according to its critics among local politicians, was that in its pages, as one columnist put it, “Boy gets girl, to be sure, but boy also gets boy.”⁸⁵ At its height, the controversy involved a seven-hour hearing attended by 200 people while some 30 student picketers weaved back and forth in front of city hall. “Objections to the book centered on charges that it makes interracial homosexuality appear to be a ‘joyous’ experience and that it is overloaded with sex and vulgarity,” wrote one reporter.⁸⁶ The spirited public debate over the novel touched on fundamental political questions of censorship, parenting, and state control over the educational system, and it generated commentary about the novel’s portrayal of interracial sex, illegal drug use, and obscenity.

Many critics of the book asserted the right of parents to control their children’s educational materials, illustrating concern about social reproduction in a child-obsessed society. Wright Junior College, the institution where the controversy arose, was attended largely by working-class whites from the city’s nearly all-white bungalow districts. The Chicago man who first contacted Alderman Hoellen to complain about the assignment of the book had objected primarily to its homosexual content, explaining that his twenty-six-year-old daughter should not have been assigned the text because “this is a filthy book. I don’t think you have to know the details of how homosexuality is performed to be a whole person.”⁸⁷ The ensuing city-council debate reified the alignment of interracial with homosexual sex that pervaded much of the novel’s reception in white-owned newspapers. “The fine job you have done to keep our city streets clean to make Chicago a city to be proud of is to be commended,” testified Mrs. Kenneth Kantor before the aldermen. “Don’t allow the dirt and garbage to find it’s [sic] way into the classroom.” She argued that “accounts of deviates and degenerates’ activities” should be used “for medical study only” and not in English classes.⁸⁸ The Roman Catholic archdiocese editorialized against teachers who would “shove filth down the throats of students.”⁸⁹ A suburban Berwyn father of five wrote to the city council that he would not give up “my God-given right to keep a voice in how my children’s morals are to be influenced.”⁹⁰ Precisely because it would interfere with their control over the classroom, teachers’ unions opposed the measure.⁹¹

The black-owned Chicago Defender, which had covered Baldwin’s meteoric rise to mainstream white acclaim as well as his Chicago appearances, condemned Hoellen’s resolution. The paper’s editorial board argued that “what these critics are objecting to, is not so much the moral content of the novel, but the free interracial association that is described with such skill and literary brilliance.”⁹² Indeed, there is ample evidence to support this claim. One Evanston woman, for example, wrote to Alderman Leon Despres, a Hyde Park liberal well known for supporting racial integration and civil rights, sarcastically expressing her gratitude for his vocally backing the book. “Thank you for advocating wide circulation of Baldwin’s book Another Country,” she wrote. “This book tells exactly and in detail just how negroes [sic] live, and it should be read by all white people everywhere.” This, she said, would help them become aware of the “many reasons” why they should oppose the integration of neighborhoods.⁹³

Testimony by whites before the city council emphasized the idea that Another Country constituted smut. Even Despres, the leading defender of the book, shied away from dignifying its wide-ranging sexual content. He taunted Hoellen by asking, on the council floor “What exists in your mind that glorified homosexuality when you read the book[?]”⁹⁴ Despres in this sense more or less gay-baited his opponent. Perhaps because it allowed a respectable means for talking about race and sexual politics, local newspapers were consumed with the controversy. Defenders of the book typically labeled the resolution’s proponents as would-be censors. The liberal Daily News was lukewarm, editorializing that students who were “old enough to fight, or marry, or both” were adults and should know “what immorality and amorality are.”⁹⁵ Studs Terkel, the radio journalist, called the council hearing “an incredible charade,” defended the literary representation of homosexuality and even alluded to Baldwin’s own gayness: “Ulysses will be next on the list. Then Walt Whitman will be next because that great American poet was a homosexual.”⁹⁶

The discussion of Another Country revealed that vice control involved not only the regulation of public space but also the relations and exchange between public and private spaces. The right-wing Tribune repudiated its own favorable review of the book, published two years earlier, calling the book “a compilation of perverted interracial sexual relationships” and comparing it to “a guest at a dinner party in your home who was so uncouth as to spout filth at the table and embarrass your other guests with accounts of sexual deviation.” Under such circumstances, “you would lose no time handing him his hat and coat, ushering him to the door, and returning to apologize to the company for such behavior.”⁹⁷ In a city riven by white racial violence against the presence of African Americans, even temporarily, in white neighborhoods, such a metaphor hinted at a segregationist impulse insofar as it conjured a scene of expulsion at the threshold of the home.

The black press, too, associated homosexuality with social or sexual mixing across the color line, sometimes depicting it as a peril to be kept beyond the threshold of the home. In a column written in the early 1960s, and reprinted in the South Side’s New Crusader in 1964 after the writer’s death, Dan Burley—an influential black pianist, journalist, and editor of the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks—suggested that blacks might think twice about racial integration, on the ground that “white no-gooders, after being “chased out of respectable white neighborhoods, are only too happy to move into mixed communities and buildings.” As an example of “white no-gooders,” he conjures a scenario in which one’s neighbor, a “young assistant pastor” with a “chubby wife and brood,” is “called to the pulpit in a small town faraway” and is replaced by a man who hosts late-night interracial gay parties.⁹⁸ Burley’s storyline is based on the precariousness of middle-class black existence, in contrast to the Tribune’s implicit appeal to the white supremacist to patrol the boundaries of racial purity. Yet both discussions propose policing the boundary of the domestic sphere to exclude sexual deviance.

The black press faced a conundrum given the fact that Baldwin, the nation’s most celebrated black writer, was both widely known to be gay and also the author of the postwar era’s most prominent gay-themed novels. One strategy was to downplay his gayness. The Defender, a middle-class paper committed to keeping black life respectable, largely portrayed the queerness of Another Country as an incidental feature. The paper’s own editors offered a different interpretation, suggesting that “it was the interracial setting of the plot that aroused the ire of the critics. They hid that motive behind a transparent curtain of homosexuality.”⁹⁹ In calling homosexuality a red herring, the city’s daily black paper thus implied that the book’s critics had invoked it only for tactical reasons to conceal their racial prejudices. More explicit was a published letter to the editor from a reader who called the book “an affront to the Negro” for its depiction of “suicide, homosexuals, fornication, and adultery.”¹⁰⁰ Still, the wording suggests that in the era of the Civil Rights Act, an African American paper concerned with respectability nonetheless advanced a sense of racial solidarity that securely encompassed Baldwin, whose homosexuality was then widely known among blacks and some whites. Conservative white journalists were frustrated, in fact, by the failure of their black counterparts to line up to criticize the author. “It is a libel to depict Negroes as homosexuals,” declared an editorial in the conservative Tribune, which supported banning the book and complained bitterly about the failure of black aldermen to join the crusade.¹⁰¹

But Daley quashed the measure. If Another Country seemed to the black press to contain one sort of public-relations problem, for the mayor it instead threatened to portray municipal government as out of step with modernity and churlishly censorious. Eventually, in the second half of January, Daley’s allies on the council killed the proposal.¹⁰² Although they did not give a reason publicly, one city hall reporter speculated that Daley did not want Chicago to acquire “a reputation as the new Boston in the book banning field.”¹⁰³ A city government that only five years earlier had successfully defended all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court its regime for strictly censoring movies now viewed too strong an association with censorship as potentially damaging.¹⁰⁴ The collapse of the effort to censor the book testified as well to the degree to which young people had begun to challenge long-standing sexual norms. As Professor Perrin Lowrey of the University of Chicago English department said of the novel, “It might shock parents, but I don’t think that it would shock their children.”¹⁰⁵ Indeed, the generational divide to which he gestured would only become more prominent in the second half of the 1960s.

The racial politics of urban neighborhoods was charged in part because of the way the issue was suffused with sexual imagery and fears, as white Chicagoans repeatedly used violence and threats in the face of black residential encroachment on all-white neighborhoods. By the fall of 1965, the growth of Chicago’s Daughters of Bilitis chapter showed “no signs of slacking off,” according to its newsletter. “Obviously,” it continued, “it will no longer be feasible to meet at the homes of members, so we’ve begun shopping for an office.”¹⁰⁶ But the group had a very difficult time locating a suitable space. In a cartoon in the group’s February 1966 newsletter, one member poked fun at the issue, mocking homophobic landlords by comparing the difficulties of the group’s members to the concept of social equality then so often used as a bogeyman by white opponents of racial integration. A real-estate office is labeled “Elegant Realty Co.” and has a map on the wall labeled, “Blight Survey—Blockbust Map Co.,” with a cigar-smoking white real-estate agent and a sign saying, “Use the spittoon.” The caption says, “Now they want an office … next thing you know they’ll be wanting to marry our daughters.”¹⁰⁷ The turn of phrase alluded to the experience of many lesbians for whom taking on a lesbian identity had meant straining or ending a heterosexual marriage. But it also referred to, and made light of, the constrant refrain by segregationists that racial integration would lead to black men’s having sex with or even marrying white women.¹⁰⁸

“The Airing of a Hush-Hush Subject”

Even as the “war on vice” was heating up and politicians fought smut and immorality, and the press and politicians treated gay life as dangerous and deviant, homophile activists tried to cultivate more favorable press coverage. There were liberal reporters, too, after all, and homophile activists began to seek them out. The pioneer in this effort was the city’s Daughters of Bilitis chapter, especially its first president, Del Shearer, the first local activist to appear on television. In 1962, a producer for a popular local talk show, “Off the Cuff,” hosted by Norman Ross, had approached the group to inquire whether a representative might be willing to appear in a forum on homosexuality. At that time, Shearer considered the idea but decided she was unwilling to take on something so risky.¹⁰⁹ She very much liked the forum when it aired in February 1963, however. “The program in accomplishing one goal—the airing of a hush-hush subject—was tremendously successful,” stated the chapter’s meeting minutes. “Ross did an excellent job in rounding the presentation to include the many sides of the story.”¹¹⁰

Later that year, when the same television producers again approached her, Shearer changed her mind about the costs and benefits of appearing on television, now that she trusted the producers. “My friends have advised me against this possible exposure to ridicule and similar types of aggravation,” she wrote in a letter to Meredith Grey, the Daughters of Bilitis national publicity director in San Francisco. But she had decided to reject the advice. “I must admit,” she wrote, “that I have reached a point in my life when I must show my belief in people and in myself.” She believed that “a presentation properly handled,” something she now knew she could expect from Ross’s show, would be less likely to harm her. She concluded, “I will not wear a mask,” which she meant figuratively and perhaps literally as well.¹¹¹

During the televised forum, Shearer tried to convey to the show’s viewers what it felt like to be gay in a straight world. “So much public life has this heterosexual overtone,” she said, “so much heterosexuality surrounds homosexuals. If they are going to move in society and be a part of it, they have to be able to withstand the pressures of this heterosexual atmosphere.”¹¹² She disputed a psychiatrist’s claims that homosexuals are mentally arrested in adolescence and strenuously argued one could be both happy and homosexual. She bristled, however, at what she considered the outlandish claims of the two other homophile activists who appeared with her—Frank Kameny, visiting from Washington, and Randy Wicker, from New York. Wicker compared the gay movement to the African American civil rights movement, declaring that he, too, wanted his rights. The fourth participant, a liberal Episcopal priest named James G. Jones, had complained on the program, “We’ve got enough troubles now here in Chicago without equating the Negro problem with the homosexual problem!”¹¹³ Later, Shearer wrote to the host of the show, who apparently had found Wicker’s claims excessive or unpersuasive. “I agree,” he replied. “Our friends from New York and Washington dwelled so much on their crusade against being parts of a put-upon minority.”¹¹⁴ (The episode aired on April 4, 1964, just weeks before the Fun Lounge raid.)

The black press, perhaps as a result of its tendency to view the police more critically, covered white homophile activism more sympathetically than did its white mainstream counterparts. When Shearer wrote letters to newspaper editors all over Chicago in the spring of 1964, “as a means of gaining publicity for DOB,” only the New Crusader, a militant African American paper, covered the issue. The story appeared under the remarkably sympathetic headline, “Local Lesbians Also Fight for Integration; Open Office Here.” The account of the Daughters of Bilitis’s activities stressed the lesbian activists’ interest in changing laws and police practices, including “integration of the penal code as it pertains to the homosexual” and the pursuit of “equitable handling of cases involving this minority group.” Shearer praised the article after it ran, in a letter to the Daughters of Bilitis national board, saying it “carried no detrimental slant,” but said that in her view “the term integration was somewhat over-played.” Indeed, before even local white gay activists had tried to get a public forum to draw the analogy between black and gay activism—after all, Shearer didn’t even like the word “integration”—the black press articulated this connection.¹¹⁵

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 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.