LITMIR.BIZ

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originally meant to suppress the Ku Klux Klan in the post–Civil War South.¹⁶ Nevertheless, on the city’s South Side, police harassment remained a fact of life. Not until the second half of 1963 did a sustained campaign of protest against police brutality in Chicago’s black neighborhoods begin to take shape.

      For white gays and lesbians, police harassment increasingly constituted their most important point of contact with the state. African Americans in Chicago in the 1950s faced police harassment regardless of whether they were queer, and in this sense being gay made less of a difference for blacks than for whites—that is, it did not separate a black gay person as much from his or her black peers as it did a white gay person from his or her white peers. White gays and lesbians faced capricious punishment by the criminal-justice system more often than other whites did. Gay men were most often targeted for physical touching, for dancing, or for propositioning undercover officers; lesbians were most likely to be arrested in bar raids for violating sartorial laws—that is, for wearing men’s clothing.

      To have one’s name printed in the newspaper following a police raid was the quintessential punishment for being gay. In America’s postwar antigay witch hunts, the fact that “such a charge will probably be dismissed the following morning” did not alter the fact that “there is a name spread on a record that will not be lost” and that ultimately “the whole of this very common procedure will surely spell ‘pervert’ in blazing letters for anyone who cares to take the trouble.”¹⁷ Exposure as a homosexual—especially through an arrest—jeopardized one’s ties to friends and family and, especially, to one’s job. Having a good job, if you were gay, meant rigorously concealing your gay life, even from family members. For example, a working-class Chicago woman recalled that her first sexual experience took place around 1954, when she was seventeen years old. “I think we were in a car,” she recalled. Soon afterward, she and her new girlfriend “started going to the bars in Chicago quite a bit,” even though she still lived with her parents at home at the time. Thirteen years later, she had never discussed being gay with her parents. “I don’t see how they could not know it,” she remarked, “but nothing has ever been said.”¹⁸

      Police raids, portrayed in the press as a necessary means of protecting the city from “hoodlums,” reflected the linkage of gay life with criminality and the underworld. In Chicago, as in other large cities, organized crime syndicates wielded great power over gay nightlife because they possessed the means to buy protection by corrupting the police. Mob profiteering from cover charges, high prices, and diluted drinks provided funds for such protection. “It didn’t make us angry because it allowed us to be somewhere,” recalled Jim Darby, a patron of gay bars in Chicago in the 1950s. The police by contrast seemed only to make life dangerous. Gays and lesbians knew they could not expect authorities to treat antigay violence, extortion, and blackmail as serious crimes. Darby, for example, was on leave from the Navy, drinking in Sam’s, one of the North Side’s busiest gay bars, when it was raided in 1952. “I knew I was drunk already,” he recalled, “and I remember the jailer banging on his desk with his club, yelling, ‘God damn you fuckin’ queers, shut up and go to sleep!’” He recalls that, in sentencing him to a fine, the judge said it was a sad comment on the nation’s military that a sailor would frequent such a place.¹⁹

      Postwar American anxieties took the form of worries not only about communist subversion but also about crime. The perceptual link between crime and cities was tightened by a series of lurid congressional hearings on organized crime in 1950 and 1951, the first such hearings to receive a large national television audience. Chicago then remained strongly associated in the public mind with Al Capone, John Dillinger, and other legendary criminals of the Prohibition era; indeed, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, who presided over the hearings, declared Chicago “perhaps the one most important center of criminal activities.”²⁰ Millions of Americans heard shocking testimony, which propagated the perception that big-city municipal governments were in fact still captive to the shadowy crime syndicates that had flourished during Prohibition.²¹ The Kefauver hearings stoked a lasting preoccupation on the part of the news media with what one historian called the “notion of a vast, hydra-headed crime syndicate,” and with Mafia infiltration of politics and business.²² The hearings also proved a boon to the politicians involved in sponsoring them.

      In this context, police scrutiny of gay life intensified in the first half of 1952, amid suggestions that Chicago was on the verge of returning to the lawlessness of the Prohibition era. In January of that year, Chicagoans learned that for two years they had been consuming millions of pounds of horse meat, disguised as ground beef, apparently as the result of mob profiteering.²³ In February, the acting Republican committeeman of the 31st Ward, known as an enemy of the so-called “West Side Bloc” of mob-linked politicians, was shot and killed; his murder was never solved.²⁴ A group of business-led civic reformers formed a Committee of Nineteen to investigate corruption. Austin L. Wyman, the chairman of the Chicago Crime Commission, charged that both Democrats and Republicans tolerated gangsters in their ranks locally. “Why have there been so few prosecutions of big-time hoodlums?” he asked U.S. Attorney Otto Kerner.²⁵

      The city’s business-oriented, Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite, through the Crime Commission, hired investigators to examine gay nightlife, gambling, and female prostitution. The revelations turned into a full-blown quest to identify scapegoats and clean up a city portrayed as corrupt and decaying. City officials sought advice from other cities about how best to eliminate crime and associated ills. For example, in 1953, a Washington correspondent for the Chicago Daily News sent his editor suggestions about how to intensify the public’s demand that the city be cleaned up. “It might be worth exploring,” he wrote, “whether the Miami Herald could suggest people, out of their cleanup experience there; the California Crime Commission, which the Kefauver committee showed was somewhat on the ball, could be helpful.” In advocating for the police to crack down on deviant behavior, Chicago journalists cited the experience of Miami and of cities in California as exemplary. Miami had passed a pioneering ordinance prohibiting female impersonator performances in 1952, and California state officials had established their state government as the leading edge of the nation’s postwar antigay crackdown.²⁶ Those lobbying for a crackdown on gay life in Chicago thus turned to counterparts in other large cities for advice and assistance, just as homophile activists would do, later, in 1954, when they first formed a Chicago chapter of the California-based Mattachine Society.

      Hoping to preempt calls for an independent civilian investigator, Mayor Martin Kennelly appointed nine aldermen to an “emergency crime committee”—known as the Big Nine—to investigate organized crime in Chicago. The crime committee hired a former Pittsburgh police detective, Robert Butzler, and heard his testimony about his investigation of “conditions” in the 35th Police District on the Near North Side. Butzler appears to have focused his investigation of gay life on a bar called Big Lou’s. “Approximately half the persons in this tavern were perverts, this being evident from their lewd suggestive conversation and actions,” wrote an investigator, likely Butzler, in December 1952. “Other patrons observed in the booth and at the bar while dancing in the place were also very lewd in their conduct.”²⁷ The following month, the same investigator noted that “the place continues to be a pervert hangout to both sexes but more emphasis being upon the lesbians. From the conduct of the female patrons,” he concluded, “it was very evident they were lesbians and their lovers.”²⁸ On January 26, the owner of Big Lou’s, Lucille Kinovsky, was arrested in a police raid, along with three patrons.

      A police raid on a gay establishment was at once a law enforcement action and a scripted ritual of exposure: a public event and a private crisis. Butzler’s testimony electrified the local press with his reports of gambling, prostitution, and elusive agents of organized crime families; in the words of the Tribune, he threw a “spotlight” on “a segment of Chicago and a cast of characters as strange and colorful as anything ever dreamed up for a Hollywood movie.”²⁹ Butzler also testified that one club, the Hollywood Bowl, was “full of male degenerates. They were sitting close and holding hands.”³⁰ But the Big Lou’s raid also reverberated through the social and domestic lives of those implicated. Lucille Kinovsky had grown up on the West Side of Chicago, the daughter of working-class

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