Queer Clout. Timothy Stewart-Winter
A suburban Berwyn father of five wrote to the city council that he would not give up “my God-given right to keep a voice in how my children’s morals are to be influenced.”90 Precisely because it would interfere with their control over the classroom, teachers’ unions opposed the measure.91
The black-owned Chicago Defender, which had covered Baldwin’s meteoric rise to mainstream white acclaim as well as his Chicago appearances, condemned Hoellen’s resolution. The paper’s editorial board argued that “what these critics are objecting to, is not so much the moral content of the novel, but the free interracial association that is described with such skill and literary brilliance.”92 Indeed, there is ample evidence to support this claim. One Evanston woman, for example, wrote to Alderman Leon Despres, a Hyde Park liberal well known for supporting racial integration and civil rights, sarcastically expressing her gratitude for his vocally backing the book. “Thank you for advocating wide circulation of Baldwin’s book Another Country,” she wrote. “This book tells exactly and in detail just how negroes [sic] live, and it should be read by all white people everywhere.” This, she said, would help them become aware of the “many reasons” why they should oppose the integration of neighborhoods.93
Testimony by whites before the city council emphasized the idea that Another Country constituted smut. Even Despres, the leading defender of the book, shied away from dignifying its wide-ranging sexual content. He taunted Hoellen by asking, on the council floor “What exists in your mind that glorified homosexuality when you read the book[?]”94 Despres in this sense more or less gay-baited his opponent. Perhaps because it allowed a respectable means for talking about race and sexual politics, local newspapers were consumed with the controversy. Defenders of the book typically labeled the resolution’s proponents as would-be censors. The liberal Daily News was lukewarm, editorializing that students who were “old enough to fight, or marry, or both” were adults and should know “what immorality and amorality are.”95 Studs Terkel, the radio journalist, called the council hearing “an incredible charade,” defended the literary representation of homosexuality and even alluded to Baldwin’s own gayness: “Ulysses will be next on the list. Then Walt Whitman will be next because that great American poet was a homosexual.”96
The discussion of Another Country revealed that vice control involved not only the regulation of public space but also the relations and exchange between public and private spaces. The right-wing Tribune repudiated its own favorable review of the book, published two years earlier, calling the book “a compilation of perverted interracial sexual relationships” and comparing it to “a guest at a dinner party in your home who was so uncouth as to spout filth at the table and embarrass your other guests with accounts of sexual deviation.” Under such circumstances, “you would lose no time handing him his hat and coat, ushering him to the door, and returning to apologize to the company for such behavior.”97 In a city riven by white racial violence against the presence of African Americans, even temporarily, in white neighborhoods, such a metaphor hinted at a segregationist impulse insofar as it conjured a scene of expulsion at the threshold of the home.
The black press, too, associated homosexuality with social or sexual mixing across the color line, sometimes depicting it as a peril to be kept beyond the threshold of the home. In a column written in the early 1960s, and reprinted in the South Side’s New Crusader in 1964 after the writer’s death, Dan Burley—an influential black pianist, journalist, and editor of the Nation of Islam newspaper Muhammad Speaks—suggested that blacks might think twice about racial integration, on the ground that “white no-gooders, after being “chased out of respectable white neighborhoods, are only too happy to move into mixed communities and buildings.” As an example of “white no-gooders,” he conjures a scenario in which one’s neighbor, a “young assistant pastor” with a “chubby wife and brood,” is “called to the pulpit in a small town faraway” and is replaced by a man who hosts late-night interracial gay parties.98 Burley’s storyline is based on the precariousness of middle-class black existence, in contrast to the Tribune’s implicit appeal to the white supremacist to patrol the boundaries of racial purity. Yet both discussions propose policing the boundary of the domestic sphere to exclude sexual deviance.
The black press faced a conundrum given the fact that Baldwin, the nation’s most celebrated black writer, was both widely known to be gay and also the author of the postwar era’s most prominent gay-themed novels. One strategy was to downplay his gayness. The Defender, a middle-class paper committed to keeping black life respectable, largely portrayed the queerness of Another Country as an incidental feature. The paper’s own editors offered a different interpretation, suggesting that “it was the interracial setting of the plot that aroused the ire of the critics. They hid that motive behind a transparent curtain of homosexuality.”99 In calling homosexuality a red herring, the city’s daily black paper thus implied that the book’s critics had invoked it only for tactical reasons to conceal their racial prejudices. More explicit was a published letter to the editor from a reader who called the book “an affront to the Negro” for its depiction of “suicide, homosexuals, fornication, and adultery.”100 Still, the wording suggests that in the era of the Civil Rights Act, an African American paper concerned with respectability nonetheless advanced a sense of racial solidarity that securely encompassed Baldwin, whose homosexuality was then widely known among blacks and some whites. Conservative white journalists were frustrated, in fact, by the failure of their black counterparts to line up to criticize the author. “It is a libel to depict Negroes as homosexuals,” declared an editorial in the conservative Tribune, which supported banning the book and complained bitterly about the failure of black aldermen to join the crusade.101
But Daley quashed the measure. If Another Country seemed to the black press to contain one sort of public-relations problem, for the mayor it instead threatened to portray municipal government as out of step with modernity and churlishly censorious. Eventually, in the second half of January, Daley’s allies on the council killed the proposal.102 Although they did not give a reason publicly, one city hall reporter speculated that Daley did not want Chicago to acquire “a reputation as the new Boston in the book banning field.”103 A city government that only five years earlier had successfully defended all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court its regime for strictly censoring movies now viewed too strong an association with censorship as potentially damaging.104 The collapse of the effort to censor the book testified as well to the degree to which young people had begun to challenge long-standing sexual norms. As Professor Perrin Lowrey of the University of Chicago English department said of the novel, “It might shock parents, but I don’t think that it would shock their children.”105 Indeed, the generational divide to which he gestured would only become more prominent in the second half of the 1960s.
The racial politics of urban neighborhoods was charged in part because of the way the issue was suffused with sexual imagery and fears, as white Chicagoans repeatedly used violence and threats in the face of black residential encroachment on all-white neighborhoods. By the fall of 1965, the growth of Chicago’s Daughters of Bilitis chapter showed “no signs of slacking off,” according to its newsletter. “Obviously,” it continued, “it will no longer be feasible to meet at the homes of members, so we’ve begun shopping for an office.”106 But the group had a very difficult time locating a suitable space. In a cartoon in the group’s February 1966 newsletter, one member poked fun at the issue, mocking homophobic landlords by comparing the difficulties of the group’s members to the concept of social equality then so often used as a bogeyman by white opponents of racial integration. A real-estate office is labeled “Elegant Realty Co.” and has a map on the wall labeled, “Blight Survey—Blockbust Map Co.,” with a cigar-smoking white real-estate agent and a sign saying, “Use the spittoon.” The caption says, “Now they want an office … next thing you know they’ll be wanting to marry our daughters.”107 The turn of phrase alluded to the experience of many lesbians for whom taking on a lesbian identity had meant straining or ending a heterosexual marriage. But it also referred to, and made light of, the constrant refrain by segregationists that racial integration would lead to black men’s having sex with or even