Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
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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