Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
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by the path-breaking research of Evelyn Hooker, the psychologist and expert on gay men’s mental health, its members volunteered to take Rorschach inkblot tests for the cause. They also recruited their friends to participate in Hooker’s research. In retrospect, this may have been the chapter’s most important contribution to gay equality. The collaboration began in 1954 when Hooker stopped in Chicago on a cross-country trip to meet with chapter members. Her work was pioneering because, unlike previous scholarship, it did not rely on convenience samples made up solely of those gay men who sought a cure or had trouble with the law but instead recruited participants from homophile groups.94 After Hooker’s visit, the Mattachine group “offered its services in obtaining 37 volunteers” to take Rorschach inkblot tests for a Chicago doctor interested in studying “non-institutionalized homosexuals.”95 Hooker cited her conversations with Chicago Mattachine members, along with their counterparts in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, in her first published account of this research on gay men’s mental health, which she presented earlier at a 1956 conference in Chicago and published that same year in the Journal of Psychology.96
Despite such activities, the Chicago Mattachine group had trouble staying afloat. By mid-1956, San Francisco activist Hal Call visited Chicago and pronounced the chapter “practically dormant,” reporting a high level of fearfulness on the part of the gay Chicagoans he met, and no newsletters appear to survive from after the summer of 1955.97 During a brief revival in 1957, the Mattachine members managed little more than to publish a pamphlet—although a significant one—written by Pearl Hart, titled “Your Legal Rights.” The pamphlet might best be summarized as a description of what was likely to happen to a gay man or lesbian—though it referred only to “individuals,” not homosexuals—after being arrested.
The focus of the pamphlet was on laws used against gays. The main right emphasized was the right of an arrested person not to answer questions. “No police officer,” said the brochure, “has a right to question a person who has committed no offense, and the law does not require the person to answer indiscriminate questioning because the police happen to be making an investigation, or because there is a so-called ‘crime wave.’” The pamphlet also included a list of Illinois criminal offenses that “are frequently invoked against individuals,” including laws against public intoxication; patronizing or maintaining a disorderly house; “the infamous crime against nature”; the commission of lewd, lascivious, wanton, indecent, or lustful acts in public; and that broadest charge, “disorderly conduct.” The Mattachine Society’s Chicago Area Council, as it was known, offered the leaflet through the mail for 25 cents.98
“Your Legal Rights” drew heavily on patriotic rhetoric, claiming that the “founders …, wisely foreseeing the necessity for limiting the extent of the law and the methods of its enforcement, drafted the Bill of Rights.” The pamphlet, even while framing its topic as the rights of “individuals,” not homosexuals, gamely evoked the emotional tenor of bar raids and similar forms of police harassment: “the primary need for many arrested persons is to eliminate the feeling of fear which so many entertain because of lack of knowledge of legal procedures.” But the “rights” described in “Your Legal Rights” were in fact rather few, in this age before Miranda and other legal precedents that augmented the rights of criminal defendants. For several brief periods in the 1950s, Chicago’s gay men and women organized to give voice to their frustrations over police harassment and social and political marginalization. But it would take a national movement for civil rights to show them how to organize effectively.
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In the second half of the 1950s, periodic sex-crime panics continued to result in police harassment of gay men. When a fifteen-year-old girl’s body was found in Montrose Harbor in 1957, for example, the 44th Ward Republican committeeman, Robert Decker, railed against the leniency of judges in “loosing sex degenerates upon our streets,” while Democratic alderman Charles H. Weber from the neighboring 45th Ward added that “if we want to protect the youngsters, we’ll have to organize a campaign to get [them] off the streets after dark and go after the sex maniacs who make our streets dangerous.”99 After another gruesome murder on the North Side in 1960, a crime reporter said, “In the area, police know that a number of men with criminal sex records live and work,” adding that they had been questioned.100 “Chicago had quite a ‘heat wave’ this year,” wrote a columnist for the Los Angeles–based homophile magazine ONE in mid-1959, using a meteorological metaphor that both punned on a slang term for police and reflected an era when police repression seemed to many gays and lesbians like a force of nature.101
At the same time, even though Chicago was the scene of intense—and intensifying—policing, gay citizens could sometimes carve out space for themselves in a city where the establishment was well known for corruption and graft. Chicago’s Mattachine chapter struggled to attract more than a handful of members in the 1950s, but it offered a response to the increasingly systematic policing of gay life by local authorities and to the isolation and exclusion from mass society that gays and lesbians felt. Though marginal and lacking influence in the 1950s, the movement’s emergence paved the way for more ambitious mobilization in later years.
In the 1950s, moreover, gay bars only erratically enforced rules against intimate contact between patrons because vice control was relatively uncoordinated and decentralized. As late as 1961, a visitor describing the Front Page Lounge on Chicago’s Near North Side—one of the city’s most crowded and most popular gay bars—wrote, “Dancing is allowed. They say that no close dancing is allowed, but very seldom stick to the rule.”102 By the mid-1960s, however, as we will see in the next chapter, most bars would enforce a strict prohibition on same-sex dancing altogether, as the police department’s ability to suppress gay life had been dramatically increased. By the mid-1960s, gay citizens would come to feel more harassed by the Chicago police than by the military, psychiatrists, or the federal civil service, and they would think back to the 1950s as a time of relative freedom.
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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