Out gay historian and professor John D'Emilio recently presented a talk on his prospective new book. The event, titled "Love and Sex, Pleasures and Dangers in the Windy City," took place at the Institute for the Humanities of the University of Illinois at Chicago March 2.
Speaking to an room overflowing with attendees, D'Emilio began by noting that this project is a significant departure for him because his previous work has focused on social movements (Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America) or activists with a global reach (Lost Prophet: Bayard Rustin and the Quest for Peace and Justice in America), whereas this one will take up a very local topic by focusing on Chicago. He said that he was drawn to this project while trying to come up with a short survey text for students four years ago and looking for material from which to draw examples of Chicago history to illustrate larger points about the gay and lesbian movement in the United States.
Instead, he said he "kept seeing things about gay and lesbian history in Chicago that looked different from what people were writing when they wrote about San Francisco or New York or L.A. I kept finding things beyond 1950-2000 [the time period he had limited himself to] that were too fascinating to ignore." For instance, he found that Chicago declared war against syphilis in 1937. He also discovered a trove of material in the pages of the historically Black newspaper, The Chicago Defender, about female impersonators on the South Side in the 1930s. To his surprise, he said, their stories were not presented as those of "exotic, underground, illicit phenomenon," as might be expected given the time period. Instead, the paper reported on these men as figures of which the larger community could be proud.
Such initial research prompted D'Emilio to abandon his idea of the survey text and instead focus on a different and longer work based on Chicago and sexuality in the 20th century. D'Emilio presented an outline of the book and discussed 10 potential chapters, including one each on the South Side impersonators and the war on syphilis.
He emphasized that this would not be a conventional and comprehensive queer history of Chicago. Rather, he said, "[i]t will move through time but there will be a shift in focus as one moves through time, in terms of issues." One emphasis would be on the populations affected by the issues, another on locations; the book will move through various areas of the city. The aim, he said, was "to organize chapters in such a way that the person or the event I'm talking about really teaches us something larger about the subject of the chapter, so that you the reader will have experienced something and seen and grasped something about Chicago and urban America but through the lens of sexuality. Many of these episodes spoke to something that was more than just about sex."
As an example, he returned to the chapter on the war on syphilis in 1937-38. While it had sex and sexuality at its core, it involved various constituencies in the city and was enabled by the Social Security Act of 1935, which "made public health funding available to localities from the national government."
Two questions that animate the project, said D'Emilio, were "Can one write the history of Chicago and the history of urban America through the history of sexuality? Can the history of sexuality be a window through which the history of the U.S. in the 20th century is illuminated?"
Describing the chapters, he said that the first one would be about Jane Addams, titled, "The House on Halsted Street," in which he plans to provide a look at an "urban, industrial America ... through the eyes of a proper Victorian lady" who came from a background vastly different than the worlds she moved in for her work. Speaking of "her capacity to do the work of social justice in the context of her private love and passion [notably her long-term relationship with Ellen Gates Starr]," D'Emilio suggested that it was in fact the strict boundaries of propriety around her that focused her passion for social justice because "she could have a life filled with love and passion that sustained her every day."
A chapter on the infamous early 20th-century red-light district of Chicago will look at the moral reformers who targeted "the young working-class men and women" who worked in and frequented these establishments. According to D'Emilio, while these campaigns have been mostly written about as moments of moral panic, they were in fact about targeting immigrants and "opened the door to immigrant restrictions." Another chapter, titled "What's happening to our women?," will be about cross-dressers and "knee-pushers"—the latter a term referring to the "'bad women' who steal the innocence of our boys by pushing their knees" while sitting next to them in bars.
There will also be a chapter on Alfred Kinsey, who produced the landmark post-war reports on male and female sexuality. These works, in fact, took shape on the streets of Chicago, after the sexologist was told by a research subject in Indiana to come here and talk to more people. As a result, said D'Emilio, Kinsey's numerous conversations with teachers, gay men and women, prostitutes and others in Chicago "allowed him to imagine the books" by giving him a wealth of material to work from.
In a chapter titled "The homosexual menace," D'Emilio will examine the 1950s campaign against "sexual perversion" through the reportage of the Tribune. Here, D'Emilio will take up the curious fact that while the Tribune was caught up in detailing the extent of the "homosexual menace," Chicago became the home of Hugh Hefner and the Playboy magazine which pioneered "a new kind of sexual commerce." He said that he was intrigued by how "a culturally conservative ethnic political machine [under mayor Richard Daley] and the frontier of a new explicity commercialized sexuality" could flourish at the same time. The book will end with chapters on the 1960s era of gay liberation and the battle around AIDS in the 1980s.
