Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
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movement.
Gay people most often came together to improve their lot by means other than formal political mobilization. In part because of public hostility, the mutual aid that lesbians and gay men provide one another tends to be informal, even invisible. In the late 1990s, a lifelong Chicagoan from the South Side, then in her seventies, recalled, “There was a girl who worked at Bell & Howell out in Lincolnwood, and she was black and gay, and she did the [job] interviewing.” In fact, she said, “There was almost a whole production line of cameras and projectors that were nothing but gay girls.… She made it her business to hire every gay girl on the South Side that she could hire. So a lot of us got in at Bell & Howell.”4 This individual’s quietly undertaken project—“her business”—is the reason both for its success and for its failure to leave an archival trace. Such networks emerged in every community, largely hidden from the straight majority, and they were especially crucial for women, African Americans, and others who, facing marginalization in multiple ways, were often less drawn than were white men to organize around their gay identity.
In the half century following the emergence of the American gay-rights movement, the story of gay politics was inseparable from that of big-city government in places such as Chicago. In America’s large cities, gay and lesbian citizens won an end to routine police raids on gay establishments, the right to parade annually through city streets in celebration of their community, and legal protection against antigay employment discrimination. Many lesbians joined the women’s movement and worked to expand protections for women living independently from men. Although the federal government legitimized the civil rights revolution in the 1960s, it was urban municipal government that expanded its scope to embrace gay men and women in the decades that followed.
Historians of queer politics have tended to emphasize the differences between the homophile organizations of the 1950s and 1960s, on the one hand, and the gay-liberation movement that flourished after the Stonewall uprising and developed into a far larger and more complex social movement, on the other. This book instead emphasizes the continuities between the 1960s and 1970s, as activists from both generations focused on challenging police brutality, entrapment, and street harassment, as well as raids on gay bars. Their concern with policing distinguished the homophile and gay-liberation movements from the movement organized around AIDS that arose later.5
Harassment by big-city police departments was the gay movement’s first policy focus; even an arrest for disorderly conduct, or another nebulously defined crime, in practice could mean losing control over who knew about one’s sexuality. This harassment was as harsh in Chicago as in any American city. In a 1967 police raid in which seven patrons were charged with indecency, eight plainclothes detectives had entered the bar separately in order to observe the activities there and establish the grounds for the charges. The next morning, a sociologist studying gay life, who heard about the raid and arranged to interview bar manager immediately, expressed surprise at the sheer number of police officers involved. “Right,” said the manager. “They do things big in Chicago.”6 The fear of arrest thus powerfully affected even the many gays and lesbians who were never themselves taken into custody. The decline of antigay police harassment—a story told here as it unfolded in one large city and which took place in some form in every large American city between the late 1960s and the late 1980s—has been almost totally neglected by historians.
Gay rights became a tool by which newly empowered African American elected officials could expand their appeal among an increasingly important segment of urban white voters. Chicago’s aldermen recognized that, given the small size of each city ward and the low voter turnout characteristic of local elections, a motivated segment of voters held the power to decide their futures. As an insurgent black progressive and a reformer, Harold Washington perceived white gays as whites who might vote for him in very close citywide races based on his support for gay rights. Washington was the first mayor of Chicago to welcome gay people to city hall—indeed, his staff warned him that the members of his gay advisory committee lacked political savvy and that most “have very little experience with politics and city government”—but he would not be the last.7 Identifiably gay voters were also important because as they became visible, they were concentrated along the North Side lakefront, in crucial swing wards in the city’s racially charged political battles of the 1980s. In addition, the relationship between black and gay politics was not unidirectional. For example, predominantly white gay voters in a key ward joined Latinos in gradually tipping the balance of power in the city council to Washington by mid-1987.
And this was not just in Chicago. Embracing gay rights helped a startling number of black mayors win election or reelection around the country: Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Coleman Young in Detroit, Marion Barry in Washington, Wilson Goode in Philadelphia, Maynard Jackson and Shirley Franklin in Atlanta, and David Dinkins in New York. Black politicians in the 1980s thus helped forge a coalition around a progressive politics of sexuality and gender, a coalition that would become even more visible nationally in the 1990s. One striking aspect of this story is that antigay black pastors were not an obstacle to the successful alliance between black and gay politicians. Indeed, Catholicism influenced council members not because of grassroots mobilization but because of institutional ties. Although few have argued that Roman Catholic antigay mobilization is “white” homophobia, at least in Chicago the Catholic archdiocese exercised far more influence on white politicians than socially conservative black pastors did on black politicians.
The urban character of gay politics sheds light on its radical roots, its growth in a neoliberal era, and its contradictory present. This book seeks to uncover the origins of gay politics as a remarkably effective challenge to the violence of state power at the local level. Influenced by the antiwar, women’s liberation, and black-freedom movements, gays and lesbians increasingly sought a place within the world of party politics in the late 1960s and 1970s. The gay-pride marches of the 1970s, through the insistence of gays and lesbians on coming out, helped create the conditions that allowed middle-class, identity-based urban gay communities to emerge—something previously impossible because, with very few exceptions, holding down “good” jobs required the careful concealment of one’s homosexuality. As the negative consequences associated with being identified as gay slowly lessened, an increasing number of middle-class urban gay communities became visible and even political.
It was in the 1970s that gays and lesbians made their most important early strides toward participating in local government as a recognized constituency. The movement for political reform that swept through much of American political culture in the 1970s had many effects on American life, but perhaps no community was more deeply affected than that of gays and lesbians. It was in this era that gays began to be a Democratic Party constituency. At a conference held in Chicago in February 1972, inspired by the Democratic Party’s new rules requiring that minority groups and women be proportionally represented among convention delegates, gay activists from across the country passed a resolution demanding that 10 percent of the party’s convention delegates be gay.8 Even this early, it seemed less likely that the Republican Party would be responsive to such requests for inclusion. That perception had hardened by the late 1970s, as GOP leaders began to align the party’s platform not with the feminist and gay-rights movements but rather with the developing religious conservative backlash against those movements’ gains and visibility.
In the 1980s and 1990s, urban America was increasingly constituted as a bastion of liberalism. Although the nation’s cities did not turn rightward as sharply or as quickly as the federal government did in the late twentieth century, the nation’s retreat from the redistributive welfare state and the latter’s supplantation by neoliberal institutions increasingly shaped big-city politics, eroding some of the dreams of radical and progressive gay activists. By the time militant AIDS activism emerged in the 1980s, the gay movement’s claims of police brutality centered almost exclusively on police behavior during arrests of activists engaged in civil disobedience, as well as on the frequent and medically unwarranted use of rubber gloves by police interacting with activists. In the late 1980s, gay activists confronted repressive legislation aimed at curbing the spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and AIDS, beating back many such proposals at the local, state, and federal levels, but they failed to block a new threat in the form of statutes criminalizing HIV transmission, laws that reinforced inequalities