By the early 1970s, a significant strand of gay activism moved in a more moderate direction toward electoral power this organizing also modeled itself on black and other “ethnic” mobilization, but was more likely to pose black and gay communities as distinct rather than overlapping. He further highlights the police killing of James Clay Jr., a black gay man whose death inspired the creation of the Transvestites Legal Committee and the people of color group Third World Gay Revolution. When analyzing the 1960s, he shows that black activism held the single greatest influence on the early Chicago gay movement, and that gay liberationists were radicalized by police violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the police murders of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
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Importantly, Stewart-Winter tracks continuity as interwoven with change: while his early examples center on multi-issue radicalism, he argues that later and more single-issue gay politics also drew a model from black liberalism. This shift was also driven by geography, as the 1970s redevelopment of the Near North Side grounded a privileged gay “establishment” that assimilated itself into the Daley-style “machine.” 9).Īgainst dominant narratives of LGBTQ history, Stewart-Winter argues that the central cleavage in Chicago gay activism occurred not between the homophile and gay liberation eras (that is, in the 1960s), but two decades later as the focus on policing gave way to AIDS. Equally clearly, he states that contemporary LGBT gains in electoral politics have been won amid “neoliberalism and budgetary austerity” (p. He describes Chicago as a leader and exemplar of these alliances and offers compelling evidence of how they were realized in both word and deed. Stewart-Winter holds that black-gay alliances “clarify the gay movement’s radical roots” (p. Such alliances “ultimately foundered” as policing became harsher in black neighborhoods but eased in white gay enclaves, and as urban government shrank and segregation increased (p. In Queer Clout, Stewart-Winter explains how gay and lesbian people-principally, though not exclusively, gay white men-won power in Chicago by organizing a voting bloc within its political “machine.” Moving from the 1960s through the 1990s, Stewart-Winter argues that gay activists won “clout” by joining “progressive, black-led electoral coalitions” initially forged against shared experiences of police brutality (p. Timothy Stewart-Winter and Jim Downs shed light on these topics through two very different books: the first a richly archival piece of scholarship, the second an uneven synthesis. Over the past several years, historians have turned increasing attention to the queer past, to the 1970s and 1980s, and to the interaction between social movements previously imagined to stand at odds.