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Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
Читать онлайн.Название Queer Clout
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780812292459
Автор произведения Timothy Stewart-Winter
Серия Politics and Culture in Modern America
Издательство Ingram
After this raid, which became the stuff of local gay legend, the Chicago Daily News published the name, age, home address, and occupation of most of the 109 arrested. They ranged in age from 19 to 56; the median age was 27, eighteen patrons being 21 or 22 years old. The group included many students and teachers; office workers, clerks, salesmen, and a Teletype operator; a hair stylist and a beautician; and a laborer, a dock worker, and a trucker; an accountant, an insurance claim examiner, and a laboratory technician; and a 24-year-old office manager living at tony 3600 Lake Shore Drive. It was a predominantly suburban crowd: of the ninety-three whose addresses were published, thirty-four lived in the city of Chicago, thirty-three elsewhere in Cook County, eleven in Du Page County west of the city, and three in Kane County farther to the west. Six other Illinois counties were represented by one patron each.58
As in the purges of gay federal employees in the same era, job dismissals were the most feared outcome of such raids. Some of those arrested reportedly were terminated after what the Los Angeles–based gay magazine ONE called their “conviction by publicity.” At trial, defense attorneys objected to photographers’ presence in the courtroom, but they were overruled.59 Ogilvie stressed that those arrested included two employees of the Chicago police department, as well as a county employee and school district officials. He drew particular attention to the presence of seven schoolteachers and one suburban school principal. Ogilvie effectively challenged other law-enforcement officials to conduct crackdowns of their own by sending letters to the districts that employed the arrested teachers, and by telling reporters, “School districts should keep an eye on people who maintain such close contact with youngsters in the community.” The superintendent of the Du Page County public schools suggested that state authorities revoke the licenses of the teachers.60 In calling on public-sector employers to fire any of their employees who were arrested, Ogilvie implicitly sanctioned private-sector dismissals as well.61
FIGURE 4. Chicago Daily News, April 25, 1964.
Though the firing of gay teachers was widely praised, at least one school district departed from the pattern. A thirty-year-old schoolteacher living in Dundee, Illinois, and arrested during the raid, was allowed to keep his job, at least initially, as officials “said they were convinced he would be acquitted, and that he claimed all he knew was that he was going to a night club.”62 The Chicago Tribune also published a wry letter to the editor from one citizen who found the harassment hypocritical. The fact that “only teachers, as an occupational group, were singled out for attention,” observed Russell Doll of Chicago, apparently because of their “contact and assumed influence” with children, suggested “an importance to society” higher than that of other occupations. “It is, therefore, amusing that when it comes to paying teachers, this implied importance decreases,” he wrote.63 But Doll’s apparent sympathy toward those arrested was shared by very few public commentators. A few days after the raid, a popular “bad boy” radio host told a Tribune interviewer that he was in favor of “sex”—then added, “but not those 109 wig wearers at the Fun Lounge.”64 Even commentators otherwise sympathetic to the sexual revolution, in short, excluded the gay subculture from the circle of acceptable deviation.
Politicians, police, journalists, and employers thus together cast a pall of fear over gay and lesbian life, while advancing their own careers and often extorting money from bar patrons and owners. The men and women caught up in the escalating harassment struggled to make their case to the judges they faced. Pleas for journalists to withhold the names of those arrested from publication were rejected. Splashy raids helped Ogilvie deflect attention from the persistence of organized crime—and from rumors that his own officers were linked to the very syndicate they were supposed to be rooting out. Remarkably, by the end of the year, both Richard Cain, who led the raid, and John Chaconas, the plainclothes officer who testified in court about what he had observed at the Fun Lounge, would be convicted and sentenced to one to three years in prison. Both were indicted as double agents for the very crime syndicate to which the club’s owner was thought to be connected.65 “It is a little hard to tell who are the cops and who the robbers in this script,” observed the Tribune when the two men were sentenced.66
The Fun Lounge incident launched a wave of aggressive raids, and the Chicago police evidently did not want to be outdone by their counterparts in county employment.67 Days later, Lieutenant Thomas Kernan of the Chicago police department’s vice division raided another “hangout for sex deviates,” telling reporters afterward, “[T]here has been an increase recently in night spot performances by female impersonators.”68 A few weeks later, Chicago police arrested thirty-three men in the Lincoln Baths in Old Town. Kernan announced not only that “the bathhouse has been a national meeting place for perverts” but that “files of the bathhouse confiscated in the raid listed various meeting places for perverts throughout the United States.”69 The spring 1964 crackdown in Chicago indeed reverberated across the country.
The intense news coverage of the Fun Lounge raid attracted significant attention from ONE, the gay magazine published in Los Angeles. “I imagine that you have been receiving clippings on the Chicago raids,” a Milwaukee man wrote; he had heard from a friend in Chicago that “there are an awful lot of people looking for new jobs.”70 The editor also explained that the raids justified one of the editorial policies: “[W]e have been often asked to print and distribute lists of gay bars, baths, and other places where homosexuals congregate so that our friends will know where to go when they visit strange towns.” However, he said, “We have never felt it would be wise to print such a list,” a stance he felt was justified given that the officers in the Fun Lounge raid “found a copy of such a guidebook” and now seemed to be investigating “the other bars listed in the publication.” In short, “Why should the homosexual always make it easy for the police? Why print a list that in the wrong hands can be used against us?” With a tone of gallows humor, he encouraged readers to seek out information by word of mouth instead: “Anyway, no self-respecting, enterprising homosexual should ever confess to the need for such a guide.” Most devastating, he suggested at the same time, “it probably would be advisable to have a copy of the March 1961 issue of ONE magazine if you happen to be unlucky enough to live in Chicago. The March ’61 issue contains the editorial telling you what to do in case of arrest.”71
In the 1950s, police raids on gay bars had been sporadic; in the early 1960s, they had become systematic. The 1964 Fun Lounge raid, like the C & C Club raid three years earlier, angered gay citizens. “Illinois took a giant step forward two years ago,” wrote one gay man in a letter to ONE. “We up-dated our laws in this state at that time. But the two raids and attendant publicity recently here in Chicago was a black eye for us.” The writer primarily blamed the press: “The law has come a long way in Illinois. Now justice must catch up through responsible reporting that makes it impossible for publicity hungry public servants to destroy the innocent before trial.”72 These raids led a small group of gay Chicagoans to found a new organization of people like themselves, determined to act boldly to challenge the authorities.
“A Transparent Curtain of Homosexuality”
Daley’s breadwinner