Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
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black and gay activists and politicians forged important political ties in the 1970s and 1980s, the social basis for black–gay alliances began to break down. In a city legendary for its racial bifurcation, the geographic centering of gay politics on the white side of town hardened a perceptual link between gayness and whiteness. In Chicago, a city-sponsored, $3.2 million gay-themed streetscape renovation project completed in 1998 in the North Side’s East Lakeview district, whose commercial strip was by then known as “Boystown,” epitomized the symbolic use of public funds to promote tourism by a means that, like any public project, benefited lawyers and contractors working for the city. The uneven economic development of North Side and South Side neighborhoods brought about tensions over policing and programming, and the AIDS crisis worsened those tensions by overlaying them with conflicts about respectability. A more conservative generation of black clergy began to gain clout just as the gay movement turned its focus from policing and job discrimination, which many urban blacks readily understood as matters of civil rights, to the thornier and more symbolically charged issue of marriage equality.
Even as urban white gays shook off the burden of routine police harassment and worked with police officials to institute sensitivity training and to recruit gay officers, racial tensions developed between those white gays who increasingly wielded local political clout and the queers of color who remained subject to disproportionate incarceration. Gay activists even began at times to respond to antigay violence with calls for intensified policing, a move that black, Latino, and other activists of color have resisted.9 As recently as 1991, Chicago’s police department had had no openly gay officers.10 Breaking into law enforcement was a powerful and hard-fought alteration in the status of a group that remained a criminal class under sodomy laws in effect in more than a dozen states until 2003.11
The development of gay politics also shows how urban politics remained persistently gendered, as many more gay men than lesbians entered the clubby world of municipal politics. Relations between lesbians and gay men changed over time, but the struggle for gay rights always involved both. Lesbians suffered doubly from the economic discrimination of a gender-segregated metropolitan job market in which women earned far less than men. As gay-male and lesbian communities grew in the 1970s and the barriers to gay organizing fell, the two communities diverged politically on issues of consumption, sex, and objectification. A decade later, the devastating AIDS crisis paradoxically brought gay men and lesbians together. As late as the early 1970s, there were no female precinct captains in the legendary political machine over which Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley had presided since the mid-1950s. Some women gained access to the levers of power; indeed, Chicago’s Jane Byrne became in 1979 the first female mayor of an American metropolis. Many gay organizations adopted policies to ensure gender parity. Yet men still had far greater access to the pinstripe patronage and campaign money that were increasingly important to local politics. “Boystown” became the center of Midwestern queer political culture in the 1990s, suggesting that the fundamentally masculine character of urban politics was reproduced in its gay variant rather than displaced altogether.
Because of its urban beginnings, the gay movement was more radical in its origins than historians have yet recognized. But as it became embedded in American public life, it reflected the contradictory character of the society in which it emerged: a society increasingly tolerant of sexual and gender diversity and willing to guarantee the civil rights of people with disabilities, gays and lesbians, and other emerging constituencies, and yet also marked by deepening economic inequality and a shrinking social safety net. Urban politics allocated clout to some gay men, and to a smaller number of lesbians, even while it marginalized many other gay and transgender citizens. Gay politics reflects neoliberalism and budgetary austerity not because of the gay-rights movement’s intrinsic conservatism—indeed, radical and left-liberal figures were among the most important catalysts in legitimizing the gay movement—but because of the historical and geographic context in which it matured. In Chicago, gay political activism began to shape aldermanic races in a string of wards along the North Side lakefront. Some elected officials—even those outside these wards and seeking citywide office—began to take notice of their behavior. But their ascent to power remained tentative until the 1990s. Indeed, as recently as 2004, when many states enacted constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage and when an antigay president won election to a second term, the gay-rights movement seemed to many to be losing ground.
Gays and lesbians have rapidly consolidated their political influence over the past two decades. Not long ago, however, the political marginality of gays and lesbians even in urban America seemed to confirm the definition of homosexuals offered by the character Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America as “men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council,” who have “zero clout.”12 That Kushner’s Cohn cited the long battle to ban antigay discrimination in New York City—finally successful in 1986—is telling. Gay rights were won in the cities.
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This book combines the two leading methods that have characterized gay and lesbian history: the community study, which describes the first generation of scholarship on both movement activism and everyday life, and the more recent emergence of political histories, which typically center on the federal government and examine the negative effects of state power on gays and lesbians, not the dynamics of the gay movement at the national, state, or local levels.13 By casting gay political empowerment as an aspect of urban liberalism, this book explains the roots of the movement’s subsequent successes during the past decade at the federal level. The urban character of gay politics cannot be understood without taking seriously the crucial role that local and state governments played in the political reorientation by which social issues, such as sexuality and gender, moved from the margins to the center of American politics.
Queer Clout remedies a dearth of archive-based studies of gay politics after 1970. Monographs on social-movement history have fleshed out aspects of the homophile, gay-liberation, and women’s liberation movements.14 Partly because there are so few historical studies of gay politics after 1970, however, postwar historians generally have interpreted the growing electoral significance of social issues almost exclusively for its role in consolidating political conservatism.15 One factor contributing to this problem is that until 2003 nearly all of the gay movement’s successes took place at the state and local levels, out of sight of political historians who strongly emphasized the centrality of the federal government in American life since the New Deal era.
Although many scholars have examined the influence of the black-freedom struggle on subsequent mobilization by other groups, this book offers one of the first accounts to extend that approach to the gay movement—tracing the arc of that influence and taking stock of its complicated effects and dynamics.16 Unpacking what happened on the ground in a particular city is a method well suited to examining this problem.17 It also builds on works that examine the police and law enforcement in relation to gay life and politics,18 as well as on the scholarship tracing the intertwined histories of race and sexuality, bringing this approach to bear for the first time on the critical setting of urban politics in the post–civil rights period.19 Informed by the empirical work of Cathy J. Cohen and Russell K. Robinson, it extends the queer-of-color critique in sexuality studies by providing the perspective of an archive-based political history.20
Because gay politics until recently was urban politics, its emergence comes into clearest focus through a case study of a single city. Chicago is a major regional transportation hub and one of the nation’s largest cities, and it drew gay migrants from across the Midwest. As a major battleground of the civil rights struggle in the urban North, moreover, Chicago offers a chance to examine closely the gay-rights movement’s changing relationship to the black freedom struggle. In part because so little has been written on gay political history, the exceptional stories of New York and San Francisco—notably, the Stonewall rebellion in New York and the election of Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco—have inflated the national significance of events that were in many respects local.21 There were turning points in the history of Chicago’s gay politics, but such exceptional stories as the Stonewall uprising and the election of Harvey Milk, were not among them. This book focuses, instead, on