Midwestern History Is Out of the Closet

The emergence of what was once known as "gay liberation"—today, LGBT or queer rights—is indelibly tied with coastal cities: think of the Stonewall riots in New York or Harvey Milk's political triumphs in San Francisco. So powerful is the role of coastal urbanism in the rise of modern gay identity that scholars have coined a term for it: "metronormative" (a clever play on "heteronormative," the ideology that defines queer sexuality as deviant and unnatural). In the "metronormative" framing, the Midwest figures as an "unnatural" environment, positioned somewhere between irrelevance and antagonism for queer people. However, as a sudden abundance of new studies makes clear, all sorts of LGBT people have long made the Midwest home, often (according to many accounts throughout these new studies) by choice. In fact, even after the supposed urbanization of LGBT life in the 1960s and 1970s, queer people have not only continued to live in midwestern places such as Iowa and Kansas, but they have also actively worked for political recognition and social inclusion in those places. This presence and activism, note the editors of the journal GLQ, "open up possibilities for dispelling and unraveling the [normative] idea of the heartland." ¹

The new bounty of LGBT studies is distinguished by the unusually varied intellectual backgrounds and multiple purposes of its authors. Nevertheless, these scholars tend to follow a few key approaches. First, many authors analyze the political awakenings and legal struggles of LGBT people. While queer people may have existed in all times and places across human history, the emergence of queerness as a distinct social identity—"LGBT" as a social group with defined political interests and cultural values—is very much a phenomenon of recent decades. Of the works that engage this political history, Timothy Stewart-Winter's Queer Cloutis the closest to traditional academic history. This book is heavy on archival sources, meticulously arranged in a disciplined chronology, and driven by an admirably clear (even relentless) thesis.

Stewart-Winter explains how a powerful gay voting bloc emerged in late twentieth-century Chicago. Key to his argument is the galvanizing role of police harassment in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, the Illinois legislature decriminalized consensual gay sex (not because its members thought people had a right to such acts, but to prevent blackmail). It simultaneously altered liquor laws, giving police and prosecutors more power over gay nightlife. "In the 1950s," Stewart-Winter tells us, "police raids on gay bars had been sporadic; in the early 1960s," following these legal changes, "they had become systematic." A turning point arrived in 1964, when a raid at the Fun Lounge "became the stuff of local gay legend": 103 men were arrested, loaded onto school buses, and paraded in front of news photographers, with the explicit purpose of getting gay people fired from their jobs. ²

As it...