GAY POWER!
by John D'Emilio



“Mattachine” is not exactly a house-hold word. It most often registers as “Oh, yeah, those are the people who tried to do something in the years before the Stonewall riots started the real gay liberation movement.” The name itself has the ring of another era—another planet even. In those days, even the activists couldn't say “gay” or “lesbian.” They came up with names like the Mattachine Society or the Daughters of Bilitis, and they called themselves the “homophile movement.”

Imagine my surprise, then, when I came upon the phrase “Gay Power” in a 1966 newsletter of Mattachine Midwest. Sitting in one of the carrels at the Gerber/Hart Library, I was startled. Almost three years before Stonewall, this band of supposedly conservative, cautious activists in Chicago was using a phrase I associated with the most militant and radical queer activists. What was going on here?

Some of what was going on was the times. A spirit of rebellion was all around. In June 1966, Stokely Carmichael, a civil rights activist working in Mississippi, had used the phrase “Black Power!” in a protest march across the state. The words captured the anger, frustration and determination of many African-Americans who had experienced too much white violence and too many denials of basic human rights for way too long. Black power symbolized an unwillingness to go slow. It stood for a belief that abuses of power had to be met with at least an equal and opposite force.

These sentiments and experiences weren't confined to Mississippi. In the summer of 1966, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had come to Chicago to assist in efforts to open up the housing market in the city's segregated neighborhoods. Marchers, including many priests and nuns, were met by the ugly violence of white mobs. It drove home the message that peaceful protest and efforts to negotiate reasonably weren't going to do the trick.

That year, 1966, was a particularly bad one for the city's gay men. Issue after issue of the Mattachine Midwest Newsletter reported on the latest police outrage. Chicago's police force seemed out of control. “Enticement, Entrapment, and Harassment face the homosexual every time he steps into the street,” the newsletter declared.

Illinois had repealed its sodomy law in 1961, becoming the first state to decriminalize sexual behavior between consenting adults in private. In response, police stepped up their tactics against “public” sexual activity. Reports came to Mattachine of all sorts of aggressive police practices. Cops were exposing themselves in public restrooms in an effort to make lewd-conduct arrests. Plainclothes officers in “obviously seductive attire” walked the streets that gay men cruised. They'd strike up a conversation and then, when the unsuspecting target invited the officer home, arrest him for solicitation for prostitution. Or, police would hang out in gay bars and listen to the conversations around them. When they heard a pickup line, it was all they thought they needed to arrest bartenders for running “a disorderly house” and cart off patrons for being “inmates” of the house.

Early in 1966, newspapers in Chicago revealed that the police had a “stop-and-quiz” policy. If cops didn't like the look of someone—if they suspected a person even in the absence of evidence of any crime—they would stop the person; demand a name, address and place of employment; require identification; and grill them for an explanation of their presence on the street. Black men in white neighborhoods, women alone at night wearing clothes that seemed too sexy, queeny-looking guys: All faced stop-and-quiz procedures.

These were police-state tactics, but refusing to cooperate was a tricky matter. It could lead to an arrest for disorderly conduct or loitering. At least one gay man who didn't provide information on his place of employment was arrested on charges of “no visible means of support.” The list of potential dangers was a long one.

Mattachine Midwest tried, again and again, to set up meetings with police to discuss the department's policies. Every time, the police declined the invitation. Meanwhile, as spring and summer wore on, Mattachine's newsletter reported a continuing series of raids on gay bars and bathhouses. It also reported the “sadistic” public exposure in the Chicago Tribune of the names of those arrested.

The anger of Mattachine members came through in the newsletter. “As children, we were told that the policeman was there to protect and help us,” the editor wrote. “To the homosexual citizen such thoughts are pure nonsense.” As the year wore on, Mattachine's rhetoric grew more and more heated: “‘Lawless police' is a phrase which still aptly describes Chicago's cops ... the entrapments, shakedowns, brutality, and corruption continue ... no one is immune.” “Quit buying the right-wing line about crime in the streets and wake up to YOUR rights. Crime is as much rampant inside the police department as elsewhere.”

An unmistakable sense that folks were fed up, that they'd had enough, jumps from the newsletter's pages each month. “It's time things were changed,” the newsletter told its readers. “It's time to stop running.” Mattachine urged gay men to “ [ h ] old your heads up high. Be proud of your individuality. Spend your energy fighting for equality.” Finally, as the year ended, almost in exasperation Mattachine's president, Jim Bradford, burst out: “Maybe we need to form a ‘Gay Power' bloc!”

Bradford's declaration is a good reminder that rebellion was in the air here in Chicago more than 40 years ago. It was percolating from the ground up, on the streets and in the bars and in the parks, wherever queers found themselves in confrontation with the law. Stonewall was one expression of that, but it didn't need to be imported to Chicago from New York to rile people up. There were more than enough homegrown grievances to start the talk about “Gay Power.”

Copyright 2008 by John D'Emilio

From Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City's Gay Community, edited by Tracy Baim, Surrey Books, 2008.

Chicago Gay History
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