2015/06/01 by Timothy Stewart‐Winter · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Psychology · #European history and politics #LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy #African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues #Law #Newspaper #Politics #Police brutality #Caucus #State (computer science) #Transgender #Criminology #Lesbian #Convict #Sociology #Political science #History #Gender studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/jahist/jav283
openalex publication_date 2015/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In November 1970, after a lengthy foot chase, two Chicago police officers apprehended James Clay Jr., a twenty-four-year-old African American man, and fired eight shots into his back, killing him. Clay, who was wearing women's clothing when police encountered him, had a long arrest record that included charges for impersonating the opposite sex and solicitation to commit prostitution. The killing was covered by the local Chicago newspapers, including the Sun-Times, the countercultural biweekly Seed, and on the front page of the black-owned Defender. The Chicago Gay Alliance, founded a few months earlier, demanded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation look into whether Clay's rights had been violated. The officers have never been brought to trial. At the time of Clay's shooting, Chicagoans had been mobilizing for nearly a year, since the police killing of the Illinois Black Panther party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, to protest surveillance and infiltration of the black power movement. On the first anniversary of Clay's death, Ortez Alderson, a twenty-year-old black man raised on the city's South Side and the co-founder of the Black Caucus of Chicago Gay Liberation, organized a memorial march on the city's Eighteenth District police station in his memory. Clay's death led to the formation in 1971 of the Transvestites Legal Committee, Chicago's first transgender political organization.1 The protests against Clay's death offer a window onto the neglected intersection of the histories of sexuality and the carceral state by highlighting a missing link in the trajectory of gay politics: black-gay coalitions against police harassment. The rise of the gay rights movement and the emergence of the carceral state coexist uneasily in the historiography of the late twentieth-century United States. In the 1970s, as the nation embarked upon its unprecedented experiment in tightened drug enforcement and racialized mass incarceration, half the states repealed their sodomy laws, yet historians have only just begun to examine this seeming contradiction. What happens if we view the history of the lesbian and gay rights movement in terms of its relationship to the criminal justice system? How might queer lives illuminate unknown dimensions of policing and punishment? While historians have developed an extensive body of work on the gay rights movement and the black freedom struggle, the two are rarely considered in concert. Yet in cities such as Chicago, where gay mobilization was weaker and antigay policing persisted longer than in the vanguard cities of San Francisco and New York, they were two key constituents in a coalition against police harassment. Examining the two together offers a new vantage point for understanding the origins and scope of the carceral state that would arise in the wake of the 1960s. Gay activists succeeded in combating police brutality and in instituting reforms that sharply curtailed the antigay tactics of big-city police departments. The gay rights movement was more successful in ending routine harassment of lesbians and gays in civic spaces, and this would have important consequences for the future of the nation. In short, as the gay rights movement saw victory—as gay bars with predominantly white, middle-class patrons came under less scrutiny and suffered much less harassment—its activists largely withdrew from the fight against the growing police state. The targeted policing of black and Latino communities was made possible by mobilized social conservatives and by the evaporation of organized support from white liberals—including gays—for reining in police. In ways that few scholars have appreciated, the collapse of once-promising black-gay coalition efforts against excessive policing had serious yet initially hidden consequences for the gay rights movement. Although those activists had won a major battle against the unwanted attentions of the police in the 1970s and into the 1980s, they had by no means won the war. Indeed, as the organized gay community lost interest in criminal justice–related matters, a massive carceral state was being erected in this country. That carceral state began to disproportionately imprison African Americans and would soon criminalize gays of color in unexpected and devastating ways. Policing and punishment occupy a curious place in the historiography of sexuality. The dynamics of police harassment were central to the first wave of urban gay community histories and are understood to be involved in the rise of the homophile and gay liberation movements. Scholars have traced the association of gays and lesbians with crime in the 1950s, but far less has been written about how antigay policing changed in the 1960s and 1970s, as big-city police departments adopted a more aggressive approach to black insurgency. Police tactics and the criminal justice system have also been somewhat marginal to the growing body of scholarship on the political and legal history of sexuality. In part, this is for good reason: scholars have not focused on state and local levels of governance, instead illuminating previously neglected reasons for growth in the federal government's hostility toward the gay community by the mid-twentieth century.2 Regina Kunzel has documented the resistance of prison sexual subcultures to the purported ascent by the mid-twentieth century of a binary opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality. She has also demonstrated that gay liberationists in the 1970s were quite concerned with the fate of gays and lesbians in prison. Christina Hanhardt's book on gay antiviolence organizing since the 1970s reveals the embeddedness of such activity in the ascendant politics of gentrification and crime, while Christopher Lowen Agee has shown the remarkable ability of gay-bar owners in San Francisco to align themselves with political reformers by challenging police graft. Scholars in other disciplines have examined how the sexual politics and romantic economy of black communities were shaped by the incarceration of extraordinary numbers of young men.3 Missing, however, is an approach to gay political history that foregrounds the movement's evolving critique of law enforcement and criminal justice. In an era when many white city dwellers were drawn to a new politics of “law and order,” white gay activists found themselves among those suspicious of it. Gay migration to cities in the postwar era—what Kath Weston has called the “great gay migration”—represented a countervailing trend to white flight. White gay men and lesbians diverged from the pattern of white suburbanization by remaining childless and by preferring to live in the city. While historians have emphasized differences between the homophile movement and the gay liberation movement that quickly overtook it after the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, the movements' shared focus on police excesses was an important similarity. For all their differences, both movements took a more radical stance on criminal justice than did the nationally cohesive gay rights movement that developed in the late 1970s.4 America's gay rights movement began as a response to criminalization and escalating police harassment after World War II. Reformers and urban political bureaucrats for decades had sought to devise ways of confining, suppressing, or reforming illegal “vice” activities associated with particular spaces and populations. Police raids were the most important point of contact between gays and lesbians and the state, and the practices of local law enforcement were the crucial targets of activism for most of the movement's first half century. Gay men most often risked police action when plainclothes officers, who had been sent to monitor bars undercover, witnessed men dancing together, kissing, touching, or “soliciting” sex. Places that catered to women endured mass arrests more often because lesbians—simply by being part of a subculture organized around “butch” and “femme” forms of gender expression—were treated as violators of local and state laws. Disorderly conduct laws and other catchall violations allowed the police to shut down establishments on the basis of plainclothes officers' casual observations.5 For “butch” lesbians, drag queens, and others whose gender presentation was non-normative, police harassment in the postwar decades was bolstered by local laws that criminalized cross-dressing. At a New York City drag ball attended by some 2,000 people in October 1962, forty-four attendees who were dressed in drag were arrested and charged with impersonation. Courtesy Associated Press. White gays and lesbians faced capricious punishment by the criminal justice system more often than other whites did. To have one's name printed in the newspaper following a police raid was the quintessential punishment for being gay. In America's postwar antigay witch-hunts, even though “such a charge will probably be dismissed the following morning,” “there is a name spread on a record that will not be lost” and ultimately “the whole of this very common procedure will surely spell ‘pervert’ in blazing letters for anyone who cares to take the trouble.” Exposure as a homosexual—especially via an arrest—jeopardized one's ties to friends and family, and especially threatened access to employment.6 Even before the Stonewall uprising created a radical gay liberation movement centered in cities and university towns, Americans perceived the issue of gay visibility as part and parcel of a breakdown of law and order. A war on vice burgeoned during the Cold War era, built on the earlier law enforcement response to organized crime during Prohibition. Urban policy makers responded to periodic police corruption scandals and calls for reform by demanding that criminal vice activities—not least those, such as gay nightlife, that were controlled by organized crime—be rooted out. Widely publicized crimes against children in the 1950s fueled panicked calls for police to “round up every known sex offender and moron.” Politicians made law enforcement agencies bigger and tougher, sustained partly through calls to defend family life against the perceived threats of juvenile delinquency and violent criminality.7 The state tended to punish working-class African American lesbians and gay men most harshly, funneling some into a youth correctional system that snatched children deemed troublesome away from their parents. Thus, Ron Vernon, a “flamboyant” black teenager who grew up on Chicago's South Side, recalls that when he began high school in the early 1960s, he was “sent to a counselor immediately,” “because of my overt femininity.” Later, a family court judge asked the boy's father during a hearing if he was “aware that your son is a homosexual?” The man recalled, “My father is a very honest man, and just said, ‘Yeah.’ So they said, ‘Well, we're going to send him to Galesburg Mental Institution to try to correct his homosexuality.’” The young Vernon, twelve or thirteen years old at the time of the hearing, would spend much of his adolescence in and out of the custody of the state of Illinois.8 As their first, and too regular, contact with the criminal justice system, police officers were the source of tremendous fear among ordinary lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. White gay people simply had more negative experiences with the police than did similarly situated heterosexuals. In a February 1961 raid on the C&C Club, a blue-collar lesbian bar in Chicago, more than fifty women were arrested along with the bartender. At the police station, “those women wearing ‘fly fronts,’ regardless of whether they wore lipstick, long hair, or earrings, were made partially to undress in order to determine whether they wore jockey shorts,” according to one account. The raid prompted Del Shearer to establish, later that year, Chicago's first chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the nation's first lesbian organization, based in California. Even political meetings in private homes were not immune from concern. 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