Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
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The nature of their relationship was never discussed, but Lou brought Bernice to family dinners on the West Side. Though family members did not speak of her explicitly as being a gay person, Lou was accepted—and even treated as one of the guys by Vandermeer’s father and uncles: “When she would be at one of the family get-togethers, it would be her and the men off playing pinochle, and the women would be off in the kitchen.” Kinovsky even hired Vandermeer’s father to work for her: “She was looking for a bartender and he was looking for a job, and so he tended bar.”31
Even queers who had clout under this regime, then, were nonetheless highly vulnerable. Kinovsky had her business destroyed by the Big Nine. Called to testify before the emergency crime committee, “Miss Kinovsky denied that her tavern at 731 North av. is a resort for perverts, both men and women.” She acknowledged, however, that it had been raided twice in two years by police.32 In April, she was found guilty of being the keeper of a disorderly house, fined $200, and, unable to pay the fine, was sent to Bridewell (the municipal House of Correction) to “work out the fine.”33“What they got her on was paying off the police,” Vandermeer recalled, “which she claimed to me personally—I remember this vividly—she claimed she never, ever did. But that’s what they got her on.” Vandermeer’s youthful understanding was that his aunt had been “run out of town.” After she was charged and convicted, she moved to Baltimore.34
Throughout the summer and fall of 1953, the Crime Commission hired more investigators and sent them to visit other gay establishments. The commission had two means of getting its way, partly by playing the police and the press off one another. First, “conditions” in a particular establishment would be reported to police in order to generate repressive action. Often, such direct requests for police raids were effective. One record shows, for example, “C.C.C. wrote letter to Commr. Of Police, June 2, 1953 advising that Lake Shore Lounge, 935 Rush Street was a pervert joint so packed that it was impossible to get to the bar or move around. Language filthy and obscene. Tribune June 6, 1953 stated 42 men were arrested at Lake Shore Lounge 935 Rush St.”35 According to the commission’s executive director, if law enforcement did not respond, the next step was to leak stories about these conditions to the reporters.36
Raids did not always lead to the closure of the establishments where they took place, however—something that would change in the 1960s. In the 1950s, Chicago’s police force lacked the administrative means to revoke a gay bar’s liquor license after conducting a raid. In a fall of 1953 report on two gay bars, for example, an official of the Chicago Crime Commission noted his exasperation with downtown police district commanders: “We have already written reams of material on the Shoreline which has for years been a homo-sexual hangout and the Hague is the same type establishment.” And yet, he reported, “though both have been subject of several police investigations and raids[,] they carry on like ‘Father Time.’”37 City officials had limited powers to keep a licensed establishment closed. The appeal commissions established by the state’s 1934 liquor control law often reversed local officials’ decision to revoke a tavern’s liquor license.38
Political connections and graft could enable a gay bar owner with sufficient clout to keep his place open over a relatively extended period. One bar owner, Chuck Renslow, who had operated a physique photography studio that also exposed him to police and post office harassment, recalled aspects of running a gay bar in this period with something akin to nostalgia: “The Gold Coast had a 2 o’clock license, which means that we had to close at 2 [or at 3 on Saturday nights]. One year, it was a Wednesday, and in the middle of the week it was New Year’s Eve. And the bar was packed! I called up the station and said, ‘We got a big business, how long can I stay open?’ He says, ‘Fifty dollars an hour, be sure you’re closed by 6 when people go to work.’ That doesn’t happen today.”39 Renslow drew the conclusion that, as much as payoffs and raiding posed serious problems for bar owners, they also occasionally provided certain advantages not available under today’s reformed regime of liquor regulation. He recounted one evening when his downtown bar, the Gold Coast, was raided—but “they shouldn’t have raided it, ’cause we were paying off. So I went to the station, and I said, ‘Hey, why’d you raid?’ and he says, ‘Oh, my God, we made a mistake! Why didn’t you tell the guys not to be in there?’”40 Many bars catering to queers enjoyed relative security from police harassment only at the price of Mafia control of their operations, or graft payments to police officers or politicians. This type of freedom was a precarious one indeed.
“A City of Family Men”
Chicago’s Democratic machine had bridged divisions of space and class in the decades after it was forged in the 1920s and cemented by the New Deal. In the aftermath of World War I, Mayor Anton Cermak united white Chicagoans, especially immigrant groups, into a powerful multiethnic coalition that survived his assassination in 1933. Politicians accepted and even celebrated some differences of nationality among whites—that is, among Irish, Poles, and Germans. Blacks were part of the machine, yet they had a distinctly subordinate political status. In the years after World War II, white ethnic neighborhood boundaries gave way to stark black-white divisions, as the city became increasingly segregated. The large swath of the South Side that Richard Wright called “an undissolved lump in the city’s melting pot” was overcrowded already at the close of the war and continued to swell in the 1950s.41 Chicago’s “black metropolis,” as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton called it in their famous sociological study published in 1945, was policed almost exclusively by white police officers. Time and again in the 1950s, when blacks moved beyond the edges of the ghetto, whites rioted. Black Chicagoans paid inflated prices for inferior housing and goods, and even middle-class blacks could find housing only on financially exploitative terms. Outside the South Side, police tolerated white violence against African Americans who tried to move into white neighborhoods.42
In the post–World War II era, Chicago politics involved a constant, always imbalanced struggle between the machine and good-government reformers. Commentators increasingly spoke of “reform” and “machine” Democrats, even though these were not neatly separable camps.43 Except for a few diehard “goo-goos” who wielded little power, nearly all Chicago politicians accepted that the lifeblood of urban governance was the exchange of patronage for votes.44 Most, too, at various moments in their political careers, found it advantageous to advocate reforms or to wrap themselves in reform’s mantle. Precisely to tamp down the perception that his election in 1955 meant a triumph of machine patronage, for example, Daley quickly centralized the former aldermanic control over driveway permits—an especially lucrative form of graft—and other favors that city council members could do for their constituents.45 Tacking back and forth between the politics of the machine and of reform was a well-worn path to success.
In Chicago at midcentury, the New Deal coalition embodied the aspirations of sons and daughters of the Depression for material prosperity, combined with the expectation for men to labor remuneratively outside the home and women to labor inside the home to create a comfortable home and rear children. Ordinary men in the 1950s wanted and were expected to become family men. A young man from a middle-class, predominantly white North Side neighborhood wrote that at his age, “Most Lake View guys are married, have a few kids, know a good trade and have a car.”46 A few miles to the west, social-service workers who engaged with poor and working-class young black and Latino men were making similar observations: “It is okay to remain single until around age twenty-eight, but if you have not married and settled down by that time, the male is considered ‘queer.’”47 Women were expected to marry at an even younger age.
Gays and lesbians in postwar America lived at least partly outside this framework, which the historian Robert Self has labeled “breadwinner liberalism.”48 At once provincial and self-consciously modern, the powerful men who ran Chicago’s political machine embraced a welfare state whose provisions were as generous as they were narrowly premised on a white, straight, nuclear-family formation. The high tide of Daley’s mayoral administration coincided with the peak of breadwinner liberalism’s status in American politics. Advertisements for his first campaign, in 1955, featured his wife and seven children; “Let’s elect a Family Man