Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics

Politics and Culture in Modern America

by Timothy Stewart-Winter

In postwar America, the path to political power for gays and lesbians led through city hall. By the late 1980s, politicians and elected officials, who had originally sought political advantage from raiding gay bars and carting their patrons off to jail, were pursuing gays and lesbians aggressively as a voting bloc—not least by campaigning in those same bars. Gays had acquired power and influence. They had clout.

Tracing the gay movement's trajectory since the 1950s from the closet to the corridors of power, Queer Clout is the first book to weave together activism and electoral politics, shifting the story from the coastal gay meccas to the nation's great inland metropolis. Timothy Stewart-Winter challenges the traditional division between the homophile and gay liberation movements, and stresses gay people's and African Americans' shared focus on police harassment. He highlights the crucial role of black civil rights activists and political leaders in offering white gays and lesbians not only a model for protest but also an opening to join an emerging liberal coalition in city hall. The book draws on diverse oral histories and archival records spanning half a century, including those of undercover vice and police red squad investigators, previously unexamined interviews by midcentury social scientists studying gay life, and newly available papers of activists, politicians, and city agencies.

As the first history of gay politics in the post-Stonewall era grounded in archival research, Queer Clout sheds new light on the politics of race, religion, and the AIDS crisis, and it shows how big-city politics paved the way for the gay movement's unprecedented successes under the nation's first African American president.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, LGBT, Queer, Politics, Gender and Sexuality

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2015

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really wonderful book. Here is my review. Or you can read it at: http://www.glreview.org/article/short...
Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics
by Timothy Stewart-Winter

In 1924, a Chicago postal clerk, Henry Gerber, founded the Society for Human Rights, one of the nation’s first gay rights organizations. Predictably, it was swiftly shut down. In the early 1950s, a Chicago nurse, Shirley Willer, created a sanctuary network for LGBT people. “We took in young women and sometimes young men who had been thrown out of their homes.” In 1964, the City Council debated banning James Baldwin’s novel Another Country from a city-funded college course, exposing “how central sexuality was to the volatile politics of race, class, and education.” Thus do we learn that, in addition to being “hog butcher for the world,” jazz hub, and hotspot for Prohibition battles, Chicago has a fascinating history of LGBT culture and struggle, which Timothy Stewart-Winter has enjoyably presented in this book. The approach is egalitarian, including the role of lesbians, with an emphasis on blacks’ and queers’ “shared focus on police brutality.” As Chicago inched towards inclusivity, “politicians, especially black and white liberals, increasingly saw political advantage in backing gay rights.” Did someone mention queer clout? The book offers a blueprint for enacting change that paid off in one major U.S. city.
 

[Peter Lyon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Queer Clout is a fascinating chronicle of queer political power in Chicago and a vital tome on the city's queer history. Starting with early movers like Henry Gerber and Pearl Hart (namesakes for the wonderful Gerber Hart Library & Archive up in Rogers Park) and the bar raids/struggles against the carceral state that dominated the 50's & 60's and ending with an exploration of the expanding queer political power that emerged in the 90's and 2000's with political victories like Tom Chiola and Tom Tunney, Stewart-Winter carefully and brilliantly details the people, places, and events at the heart of this history. In between those two sections, Stewart-Winter focuses on the coalition building between Black activists and queer activists rooted in their organizing against police violence (and the subsequent return to a "law and order" stance by the mostly white gay and lesbian politicians of the 90's/20's), the role Harold Washington played in the political reality for queer people in Chicago, and the impact of AIDS on the goals of queer organizers and on city politics. I will continue to recommend this book to anyone looking to better understanding Chicago's queer history.

[Michael Boyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well done history of a broad topic, spanning the early Mattachine era all the way through gay liberation, the Harold Washington coalition, and the commercialization of North Halsted and Boystown. The book would have benefited from more personal narrative, but adeptly handled the various struggles around race and gender within the queer movement.

[University of Chicago Magazine]

Timothy Stewart-Winter, AM’03, PhD’09
Author

From Dialogo Spring/Summer 2016: "Called “original, important, and unfailingly smart” (Robert Self, Brown University), Queer Clout traces the political mobilization of Chicago’s LGBT community, from the postwar era to the present, and its alliance with the city’s African American activists. Weaving together activism and electoral politics, Stewart-Winter uses oral histories and archival records, including those of undercover police officers and newly available papers of activists, politicians, and city agencies. He is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, in Newark."

[willowdog · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is well-documented early history of the state of gays and lesbians in Chicago. Mostly it is the history of the political behavior of the straight politicians rather than the gay activists. I thought that the weakness of it lies in the late 80’s and 90’s.

[Liz Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

gay chicago history fucks