In a recent column I listed a few events in Chicago gay history from the year 1970. One protest I wrote about occurred April 24 & 25: 'Members of Chicago Gay Liberation (CGL) picketed the Normandy bar on North Rush Street to get the bar to allow dancing. CGL members felt that the community should be allowed to dance in public without harassment. Within a month, the Normandy secured a dance license.'
Another was about a murder July 1, 1970: 'Howard 'Bud' Tanner, an early leader in Mattachine Midwest, was fatally stabbed in his apartment at 1117 N. Dearborn. The killer was described as a white male, 30-40 years of age, six feet tall, 180-200 lbs, with large biceps, broad shoulders, dark thinning hair, a flat nose, small eyes, bad teeth and a sun-burned complexion. He had described himself as a truck driver from California.'
E-mail from long-time
gay activist Bill Kelley.
'Your roundup of 1970 news rang a lot of bells, of course, but two in particular:
'The Normandy picket was a little more complicated than your summary might suggest. Yes, we picketed the Normandy to get it to allow dancing, but it was really to get the Normandy to get the police to let it allow dancing. The Normandy ... was one of the most popular bars in town. The real villains were the police, who forbade same-sex dancing in Chicago long after it was allowed elsewhere—including Smokey's Den in Springfield, which closed last month after many years in business. We knew that the Normandy's owners and their 'friends' had more influence with the police than we did, and that if we picketed the Normandy we would affect its business and force the owners to come to an arrangement with the police. That's exactly what happened: People wouldn't cross the picket lines, either out of support or out of fear of being caught in a tense situation, and the bar's business dropped precipitously. I always regarded it as a kind of activist judo—using the Normandy as a fulcrum for leverage against the police. After that, same-sex dancing in Chicago bars was routinely permitted—a sharp contrast to the arrests with which such attempts had previously met.
'As for Bud Tanner, to the best of my knowledge his shocking murder was never solved. He was a bartender, a very likeable bear of a man, and a mainstay of Mattachine Midwest while he lived. In recent years we've seen eventual arrests in other long-unsolved crimes, even from the 1950s. It would be good if Tanner's killer were finally caught.'
My e-mail back to Bill Kelley: What's the story behind you joining Mattachine Midwest in the mid-'60s? From what little I know, you were the odd one out i.e. You were very young and the rest of the leaders seemed much older. I find this amazing for pre-Stonewall. One expects the older gay intellectuals to be active, but not for someone so young to be involved before Gay Lib, which was youth-inspired.
Bill replied: 'You ask a good question. Not all the other Mattachine Midwest leaders were much older, but the top ones and perhaps most of the others were. What can I say? I was precocious.
'I was 23 when I joined MM. Apart from being gay, I was attuned to civil rights aspirations because of my younger experiences. I grew up in segregated Southeast Missouri in the 1950s and read books about civil rights and civil liberties during high school. These made me aware of racial injustice and McCarthyism, to the point that I wrote unpopular letters to editors about segregation and wrote to Communist countries for their propaganda. This earned me one visit from the FBI while a teenager on the farm, one or two pieces of hate mail, and notices from the Post Office Department (as it was then called) that pieces of overseas mail had been held up as propaganda and that I would have to request its delivery specifically before it would be delivered. While in high school, I also realized my gayness and its disfavored legal and social status. I made the connections.
'While exploring the gay social scene after coming to college in Chicago in 1959, I recognized police repression for what it was, and I was indignant though I felt powerless. I also read the pseudonymous Donald Webster Cory's The Homosexual in America—kept in the Rare Book Room of Harper Library, apparently because it was in danger of being stolen otherwise—and at some point wrote to the Mattachine Society of New York (MSNY) for information about the group, which Cory's book had mentioned. When the wave of highly publicized 1964 raids made front-page headlines, I was thrilled to read some small word of protest by such lawyers as Pearl Hart and Paul Goldman and wished I could meet them. Then, when MM organizers sought help from MSNY, my name was supplied to them from MSNY's list of Chicago contacts, and I received my first invitation to attend an MM meeting, held in the ballroom at the Midland Hotel. I went, began to meet those lawyers and others, immediately joined MM, and took it from there.'
E-mail sukiedelacroix@ozhasspoken.com
