[Correction: The dates for the author's two appearances have been corrected in the online edition.]
When Rutgers University Assistant Professor of History Timothy Stewart-Winter—also the author of the new book Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics—returns to Chicago for appearances at the University of Chicago's Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture on Feb. 23 and Andersonville's Women and Children First on Feb. 24, the city will be as familiar to him as it is brand-new.
For the recipient of accolades such as the Jacob J. Javits, ACLS/Mellon, James C. Hormel Fellowships and early enthusiastic reviews of Queer Clout, life is one of ceaseless discovery whether academic or personal.
Either way, he embraces it and it is this enthusiasm which pervades Queer Clout—a book that intertwines a study of the city's LGBTQ community and Chicago political history and examine the synergy between them as it traces "the gay movement's trajectory since the 1950s from the closet to the corridors of power" and "challenges the traditional division between the homophile and gay liberation movements, and stresses gay people's and African Americans' shared focus on police harassment."
"Compared to the better known stories of San Francisco and New York, the story of gay empowerment in Chicago was in many ways representative of the dozens of other regional magnets for gay migration," Stewart-Winter writes. "This book introduces the reader to women and men who created a social movement far from social meccas."
Born in Boston in 1979 and raised in Michigan from the age of 8, Stewart-Winter's own introduction to the LGBTQ community occurred during his first semester as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
"I'm someone who went from being not out to anyone, including myself, to being out to pretty much everyone in my life in a very short period of time," he told Windy City Times. "I identified as both gay and queer and being around LGBTQ people who were my age shaped my self-understanding. It was the pretty visible contingent of queer activist students and out faculty that made the difference for me."
During post-graduate work at the University of Chicago, Stewart-Winter was inspired to create his dissertation around an urban history project but at first he vacillated as to where to focus it upon. That changed as he came to know the city.
Emblematic for a man preparing for a life dedicated to academia, with observation came questions.
"Early in my time in Chicago, I was in a long distance relationship with someone in the San Francisco Bay area," he explained. "For a while I planned to write the dissertation on neighborhoods in San Francisco but, as I got to know Chicago and got more involved in Chicago's sources, I really believed that looking at a city that isn't famous all over world for being queer but draws queer migrants from all over the middle of the country lets us ask questions that are harder to ask about coastal cities."
Some of those questions surrounded the way the Chicago community was structured.
"I perceived Chicago's queer life as very segregated racially because it is bifurcated in nature and has such a sharp boundary between the South and North sides," Stewart-Winter said. "I always wondered why all visible gay institutions were concentrated on the North Side and that became a question I wanted to learn more about."
Stewart-Winter cautiously acknowledges that such boundaries are changing and so there is an increase in social services. While all of this is happening in concert with an exponentially growing visibility in the media and politics, there is a downside.
"At a time when fewer people were out and visible, those who were tended to be brave and gutsy folks," he said. "That is still true. People have always found different ways of being trans, gender nonconforming, lesbian gay or bi. I do worry that with the increased visibility of the left, there is also an installation of a particular model as the only path. Those that have been mainstreamed try to speak for the community as a whole. But there are multiple, overlapping communities that are diverse and made up of people who don't necessarily identify with the subculture."
Yet there are many experiences that unite the community generationally—high among them are the attitudes of law enforcement towards it and abusive treatment that was as rife in the earliest days of the movement as it is now towards particularly trans people of color.
Policing was one of the questions to which Stewart-Winter was drawn. It formed the genesis of Queer Clout.
"I think it's where queer people encounter State power in its most intimate and violent forms," he said. "There's a degree in which fear of the police and law enforcement shaped LGBT mobilization from the '50s and '60s and well into the '70s and '80s. In part, that is the story that I wanted to tell."
As the book begins by charting gay and lesbian life in 1950s Chicago, Stewart-Winter writes that "friends and lovers faced the risk of becoming enmeshed in the dangerous clutches of policeman, with money and influence offering the only means of escape."
"There is the emergence of progressive and Left Liberal coalitions in Chicago politics and the ways that they challenged and questioned the machine, " Stewart-Winter acknowledged. "I always knew that I wanted to look at both movement organizations and electoral politics at City Hall in the same study. They kept pulling me towards the make-up of Queer Clout. Unpacking policing and how and why the police stopped raiding gay bars as a form of social control has to do with gay activism but there are some aspects of the story that are random and unexpected."
Whereas aggressive policing became a catalyst for coalition building that occurred in a relatively short span of time, following successes like marriage equality and an increase of anti-discrimination laws, the movement seems to be fracturing.
"The coalitions that were possible became more difficult later especially with the turn to marriage, which has been very much perceived as a white, middle-class preoccupation," Stewart-Winter said. "It is an issue that people who are more focused on survival are less likely to be engaged with. We can tell a story that is rosy—about everyone getting along—or we can tell a story that is nothing but conflict and white, gay racism but what I tried to do is tell a story that looks at how things really played out on the ground and shows that there were always both tensions and alliances."
"Things don't always get better," he added. "Linear progressive narratives are something I try to resist. Nothing ever plays out exactly the way the movement plans but, at the same time, the movement creates the conditions that enable change to happen."
Queer Clout is as replete with lessons that can be drawn from history as it is with the questions it inspires—ones that Stewart-Winter will continue to ask even as he moves on to his next project, which delves into Sex and Drugs in the AIDS Crisis.
For more information about Queer Clout, visit www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15524.html .
Timothy Stewart-Winter's lecture is scheduled for Tue Feb 23,4:30pm at University of Chicago, Classics building room 110, 1010 E. 59th St. and his reading/signing for Wed Feb 24, 7:30pm at Women and Children First, 5233 N. Clark St.
