The coalition that made possible the decline of gay bar raids in Chicago included both a left-liberal alliance focused on challenging police brutality, and also a series of police corruption trials in which a Republican prosecutor, hoping to damage the Daley machine’s Democratic stranglehold on local government, granted bartenders, including gay ones, immunity to testify that cops had shaken them down for cash bribes. In Chicago, the first lawsuit successfully challenging police harassment was only filed in 1968-despite the fact that Illinois had repealed its sodomy law in 1961-but police raids persisted considerably longer. Partly as a result, police and liquor regulators in San Francisco and New York significantly reduced the frequency of routine police raids by the turn of the 1970s, though they still occurred from time to time. In New York and San Francisco, bar owners filed lawsuits in defense of their right to operate a gay establishment earlier than their Chicago counterparts did. In a petition labeled “Forgotten Citizens Unite,” they declared, “Every time there is an election or a political convention, the bars frequented by homosexuals are raided,” because officials “deem it a crime” for gay people to congregate. Gay activists took an unprecedented step: They held a press conference denouncing the raids.
At both locations, in a style familiar to local activists, plainclothes police infiltrated the bars long enough to be “propositioned” by patrons, then brought in uniformed colleagues to shut the place down and make arrests. Just before the convention, Chicago cops raided Sam’s and the Annex, two of the city’s largest and busiest gay bars. In a year when assassinations and rioting rocked America’s cities and many felt the nation was becoming unglued, liberal Americans were troubled by spectacular police brutality directed at mostly white, peaceful demonstrators who came to Chicago to protest the Vietnam War.
And, of course, the Black Muslims knew a thing or two about how to deal with the police.īy making it easier to challenge the police, the 1968 convention pushed Chicago’s gay movement toward more militant activism. The gay liberationists’ young attorney, Renee Hanover, who had once been kicked out of law school in 1964 for being in a lesbian relationship, had defended members of the Blackstone Rangers and other militant black power activists against trumped-up criminal charges.
The Liberation Dance took place just five months after the police assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, leaders of the Black Panther Party of Illinois-an incident that unleashed a passionate response among Chicagoans of all races who recognized that police harassment and infiltration of radical groups simply had to be resisted. They also found themselves depending on the same local community of radical attorneys because they shared a common enemy: the police. After all, in those days the Nation of Islam, under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, was known for propagating strictly defined roles for men and women-the very roles that gay liberationists were committed to defying.īut as I dug further, I realized the two groups were linked by more than an insurance agent. In my work as an historian of gay American life, nothing I had read about gay liberation prepared me for this story.