World War II brought many changes —mostly from the sheer influx of people, not just workers in defense plants. By the middle of the war, 50,000 to 100,000 military service people descended on Chicago for weekend leave. Parts of the Auditorium Building were taken over by the USO, and the acoustically perfect theater turned into a bowling alley. The red-light districts around the train stations flourished. Penny arcades, tattoo parlors, and burlesque joints crowded the south end of the Loop. The military police were kept hopping. Military bases issued lists of clubs that were off-limits to servicemen, who used the lists to find the kind of action they were seeking.
Novelist and memoirist Sam Steward was told of locker clubs near the bases where uniforms were changed for civvies, and the soldiers and sailors were off to the city without regard to military sanctions. Steward said you could usually identify the guys regardless of their clothes because of their haircuts and GI shoes.
The military ban on homosexuals in uniform did not go into effect until January 1943. The circumstances surrounding the ban are but a few of the details in Allan Bérubé's 1990 book, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two. Bérubé also spoke at the Chicago Historical Society in January 1992 as part of its “Chicago Goes to War” exhibit. He read excerpts of postwar letters in which writers remembered gay ushers at Orchestra Hall, or a successfully culminated evening of cruising the Chicago Theatre.
George Buse ( 1924—2000 ) was featured in the gay documentary Before Stonewall and Studs Terkel's The Good War. Buse was a gay man who served in the Marines in WWII and often wrote about his experiences and spoke out against the gay ban. Another gay WWII veteran, Edward Zasadil ( born 1924 ) , has been active in Chicago gay veteran causes in the 2000s, and has carried the American flag at tribute events. He and his partner Larry Simpson ( 1939— ) have been together since 1962.
Finnie's in the Pershing Hotel had been the site of drag balls in 1939. In the early 1950s, Ebony magazine described traffic backed up for three blocks as drag versions of Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday and Lena Horne made it through the crowds. During the war years the Pershing Hotel was the official billet for Black troops on R & R. ( As the war dragged on, troops who had seen active duty or a certain length of service were given a block of leave for “rest and relaxation.” )
As in other major cities, the overcrowded conditions allowed soldiers and sailors to double up in hotel beds. A subtle system of signals developed to see if your bedmate was receptive or straight. The swankier hotel bars, three deep by late evening, became cruising places. Sources recollect the Dome at the Hotel Sherman and the Town and Country at the Palmer House as well as some of the classier gay lounges: the Haig and the 12 o'Clock Club. Gays frequented the Lincoln, Terminal, Wacker and Wabash bathhouses during this period.
In 1942 and '43 the military began anti-vice crusades that impacted every city. The Chicago City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting women from drinking in bars and especially targeted women employees in nightspots. The effect of the legislation was to encourage gay activity by all those off-duty men with no women around. In December 1942, the city fathers thought better of it and revised the law to permit escorted women back in the bars.
The war earned a certain amount of freedom for women. They could go about unescorted without censure. Women seen dancing together, going bowling or to films were commonplace. Slacks were the order of the day for factory work. Economic freedom for those who worked outside the home, particularly at jobs formerly held by men, would not be lightly relinquished at war's end. The new freedom felt throughout the country would be reflected in the desires of nascent gay “communities.”
With the war winding down, “homosexual discharges” increased. As soldiers and sailors were mustered out and defense plants disbanded, many small-town men and women who had discovered their sexual orientation remained in the cities. Some of these would become the nucleus of the rights-oriented groups that would form in the 1950s and, in Illinois, succeed in urging the passage of legislation that in 1961 made ours the first state to decriminalize gay acts.
The ensuing years in Chicago would not be easy—McCarthyism was on the horizon, and machine politics were more firmly entrenched than ever. Roaring '20s —style mobsters were replaced by a more subtle underground that would extend its control into gay clubs, bars and bathhouses. But for most of us the war ended on a note of hope. We may have been different, but now we knew we were not alone.
Copyright 2008 by Marie J. Kuda
From Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City's Gay Community, edited by Tracy Baim, Surrey Books, 2008.
