Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
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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