Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
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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