Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall

14. World War II and the 1940s

160 14 World War II and the 1940s Chicago goes to war with Rosie the Riveter cross­dressing factory girls, and gay bars like Benny the Bums and the vice joints on South State Street are out of bounds to military personnel. Homosexual cruising centers on hotel bars, where piano players like Jacqui O’Shea kept the gay boys in check. Less salubrious were dives like the Primrose Path and its “risqué songs,” and the Windup Lounge, the latter raided in 1949 in a crackdown on vice. World War II had a dramatic affect on the lives of Chicagoans, a story documented in the book We’ve Got a Job to Do: Chicagoans and World War II (1992) by Perry Duis and Scott La France. Because Chicago is a railway hub the city would always profit from wars, and World War II brought an economic boom that benefited rich and poor alike. New factories sprang up, and skilled and unskilled workers arrived from all over the country. The upheaval of the war also muddied the tranquil waters of “traditional marriage”; the preordained path of a husband working to feed his family and a wife keeping house was disrupted. As Duis and La France sum it up in their book: “There was a violation of the family model.” After Pearl Harbor, Chicago witnessed an increase in marriages as men were drafted and sent off to war, leaving an unsettling pall over a generation of women left behind. Wives were left to fend for themselves. In 1943, 43 percent of World War II and the 1940s 161 Chicago women were working, many taking jobs in factories to support the war; no doubt many were inspired by Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter poster, which later became a lesbian icon. Although women were required to “cross-dress” in overalls and “practical clothing,” men-in-government were mindful of blurring the gender line and zealously protected femininity; in 1943 the government restricted the manufacture of luxury goods, except for lipstick—it was important for factory women to remain feminine and sexually attractive to men. In Chicago, working women embraced the newfound freedom and independence , earning their own money and interacting with women from all walks of life. Amid the workplace camaraderie in the all-female factories it’s hardly surprising latent homosexual desires were sometimes laid bare. With the prospect of the draft and the unpredictability of war marriages, young Chicagoans adopted a philosophy of “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” A sharp rise in VD cases resulted in the federal government opening the Chicago Venereal Disease Hospital in 1942, the nation’s first facility of its kind. Chicago was chosen to spearhead the antiVD effort to safeguard the health of recruits in the surrounding military training centers: Fort Sheridan processed 417,000 recruits during the war, Great Lakes Naval Training Center housed between 50,000 and 70,000 men at one time, and at the Curtiss-Wright Airport 1,000 cadets were trained every three months. Young men and women from small towns poured into Chicago, and far from the scrutiny of family, neighbors, and church ministers, they discovered a city where vice was carved into the political and social landscape . In Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (1990) Allan Bérubé notes upwards of fifty thousand soldiers and sailors converged on Chicago’s Loop area every weekend. The city was “wide open”; the mob controlled vice, including the lucrative gay bars, and the payoffs to corrupt police and politicians guaranteed business as usual throughout the war. Although the military blacklisted gay bars, some enterprising Chicago tavern owners posted “Off Limits” signs above the door to inform gay military personnel where to go. On South State Street in the Loop, among the seedy brothels and burlesque and peep shows, locker clubs sprang up where military personnel left their uniforms and rented civvies to escape World War II and the 1940s 162 detection from MPs patrolling the gay bars. One popular bar was Benny the Bums at 549 North Clark Street. It was always crowded on weekends and held up to 450 people. It was owned and managed by a Jewish couple, Si and Mollie Ginsberg; Si’s brother, Sol, worked at the bar and was the business brains behind the enterprise. Chicagoan LeRoi remembers Benny the Bums: “It...