Windy City Times and Center on Halsted's Lavender University ended its 2014 scholastic year with the last in a nine-month lecture series that has featured top LGBTQ academics and activists who discussed topics ranging from "Finding Love Amongst the Religious Right" to "Black Women, Violence and America's Prison Nation."
Timothy Stewart-Winter—an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey—presented his lecture, "From Civil Rights to Gay Rights in Chicago," to an engaged audience at the Center in Halsted on May 3. It was centered on the rise of the gay movement in Chicago—the birthplace of U.S. gay activism beginning with Henry Gerber's Society for Human Rights—and the inspiration, parallels and lessons it took from the Black civil-rights movement.
"As a number of historians have shown—until the late 1950s—gay life was more strongly associated with the African-American South Side than with any other part of Chicago," Stewart-Winter said. "As late as 1970, Jet Magazine covered a Black lesbian couple who held a wedding ceremony at a south side gay bar."
In chronicling the decades during which gays and lesbians in US Cities "went from pariahs to being an important voting block in local elections," Stewart-Winter noted that the movement drew upon templates created in the Black fight against discrimination and segregation and the denial of constitutional rights.
In the 1950s, the civil liberties of gays and lesbians were "particularly and viciously violated," Stewart-Winter said. "Gay men were likeliest to be arrested for dancing together in bars. Lesbians if they challenged the city's sartorial laws which stated that women had to wear clothing appropriate to their sex."
The era of Mayor Richard J. Daley brought with it aggressive policing and a war on gay night-life in the 1960's. "Chicago's war on 'vice' ironically escalated even after the state's sodomy law was repealed," Stewart-Winter said. "Daley pushed through a bill that gave him the power to keep a bar or nightclub padlocked. This had the effect of strangling those who were in the best position to fight back."
Fifty years ago this past April, then Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie raided Louis Gager's Fun Lounge after a campaign pledge to eradicate vice. More than 100 people were arrested in the largest and—according to Stewart-Winter—best publicized gay bar raid in Chicago history. On April 26, 1964, the Chicago Sun Times carried the headline "Area Teachers among 109 seized in Vice Den". The names and occupations of those arrested were listed. The raid was one of the catalysts in the organization of the gay and lesbian movement in Chicago. "Gay activists borrowed from the playbook of African-American activists who increasingly challenged police brutality through protests and lawsuits," Stewart-Winter noted. "Police raids on gay bars brought about petition drives, direct action protests and—in a couple of cases—civil damages in the late 1980s awarded by juries to plaintiffs who pursued legal action against the City of Chicago."
He added that—as more gay people came out and were given no recourse if they were fired from their jobs or discriminated against in any way—it was the African-American civil-rights model that provided the kind of legislation that would ultimately protect them.
"Gay and lesbian empowerment depended upon and indeed exemplified the distinctive qualities of urban politics in the post Civil Rights period," Stewart-Winter said. "Liberal politicians gained power and cobbled together multi-racial coalitions in the face of a nationwide conservative resurgence after the 1970's. The gay movement took—from the Black freedom struggle—not only inspiration but also political opportunities to gain visibility and influence at the municipal level as Black and white liberals rejected customary forms of privilege and deference."
Stewart-Winter argued that gay politics in Chicago drew on local events and demographic shifts. "Among its critical turning points were the crisis of the Democratic National Convention here in 1968 and the election of Harold Washington as the city's first Black mayor in 1983," he said.
"Today America's largest cities, even in so-called red states, all have openly gay elected officials and anti-discrimination laws against gays and lesbians and a growing number cover transgender citizens as well," Stewart-Winter noted. "Cities where African-Americans gained a measure of political control were the first jurisdictions in the United States to pass gay rights laws between the 1970's and the 1990's"
Stewart-Winter will shortly be publishing a book detailing his research on the rise of gay politics in Chicago. He left the audience with the thought that the dominant narrative that Blacks are straight and gays are white has led to a chasm that may be unbridgeable in the future because it has no past. "My alternative narrative instead casts Black gay activists at the intersection of two social movements that became central to a left liberal electoral coalition," he asserted.
"When we write queer history, we need to take more seriously the notion that we are everywhere," he continued. "We need to tell stories of—not only of who is finding sex, love work and freedom in Boystown—but who is being asked to show extra IDs at the door. When we write Black history, we need to think—not only about who is going to work, but whose gender nonconformity makes finding work nearly impossible. Not just who's going to church but who's listening to the preacher in silent terror in the back pew slipping out afterward to change out of a choir robe and into a club outfit."
Video:
Windy City Times: Timothy Stewart-Winter at Lavender University Part 1 of 1: www.youtube.com/watch .
