Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
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“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,