The Vault

Chicagoans Push For Gay Rights In The 1980s

After 15 Years Of Wrangling, Anti-Discrimination Ordinance Approved In 1988

CHICAGO (CBS) ― On June 29, 2008, an estimated 450,000 people converged on the East Lakeview neighborhood for the festivities of the Chicago Pride Parade, an increase of about 25,000 compared with a year before with many turning out to celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage in California.

The modern-day Pride Parade is much more a community festival than a political event or protest.

A spectator along Halsted Street, Broadway or Diversey Parkway will see a procession of colorful and festive floats, flamboyant female impersonators and body builders, along with elected officials, political candidates, and members of the media. People in the crowd – and even police officers controlling it – wait for beads to be thrown in their direction.

Streets are packed with spectators from all over the city, suburbs, country and world, and bars fill up fast – not just LGBT-oriented establishments such as Roscoe's or Sidetrack, but also neighborhood taverns and pubs like Friar Tuck and Duffy's.

Finding a time when this was not the case does not require going back very far in history. Before 1988, there was no law forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation in the city, and after 15 years of debating on such an ordinance, a coalition finally came together in the City Council to pass one.


Chicago And The Gay Rights Movement
Greenwich Village and Chelsea in New York and the Castro in San Francisco may be the best known focal points of achievement in the American gay rights movement. But Chicago has also been home to a number of milestones, most notably the creation of the first ever gay rights organization in the country.

In 1924, German immigrant Henry Gerber founded the Society for Human Rights, which served a goal to teach others about the gay community and attempting to change laws that made homosexuality illegal.

The organization only lasted a short time before authorities shut it down, but gay and lesbian Chicagoans were visible in the 1920s and enjoyed acceptance among the artists, poets and bohemians of Towertown, an area of the Near North Side just east of the Magnificent Mile. Lectures and discussions on homosexuality were found on the agenda in salons and speakeasies, and female impersonator shows were popular, the Encyclopedia of Chicago tells us.

Around the same time on the Near South Side, a substantial African-American gay and lesbian community also formed, frequenting the cabarets in Bronzeville, according to the encyclopedia.

By the second half of the 20th century, gay communities were established on the Near North Side, Old Town, Hyde Park, and a part of the Lakeview neighborhood centered at Clark Street, Diversey Parkway and Broadway known as New Town. Illinois became the first state to decriminalize "sodomy" in 1961.

But none of the gay communities at the time resembled modern-day North Halsted Street with its rainbow pylons. And as late as the 1960s, being openly gay in Chicago brought challenges hard to imagine today.

As the gay and lesbian population grew in number, so did the frequency of police raids on gay bars, which resulted in arrests for being "inmates of disorderly houses," or breaking a law against cross-dressing, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Newspapers would publish the names of everyone arrested in the raids, and political activists were motivated to campaign for change.

The Mattachine Midwest Society was one such organization, which helped with the defense of those arrested in the raids and set up a 24-hour hotline for gays and lesbians, according to the encyclopedia. They also attempted to meet with police to discuss the raids, but such plans never succeeded, according to the Windy City Times.

In 1970, another organization, University of Chicago-based Chicago Gay Liberation, challenged laws forbidding on same-sex dancing by organizing a dance at the Coliseum, the stadium formerly at 16th Street and Wabash Avenue, the Windy City Times reported.

Also that year, the first Gay Pride Parade was held in Chicago to commemorate the three-day Stonewall Riots in New York City. The first parade was held between Bughouse Square at Walton and Dearborn streets, and what is now known as Daley Plaza. It was largely a political march, and attracted only about 150 people.

In 1971, the parade moved to the area near Clark and Diversey, and festivity began to supplant political activism as the theme. And now, political activism went all the way to the City Council.

Chicago's Human Rights Ordinance
Ald. Clifford P. Kelley proposed the original version of the Human Rights Ordinance, which was intended to ensure that Chicagoans could not be fired or suffer discrimination in housing based on sexual orientation in July 1973. The bill made little headway at the time, although the city made advances toward recognition of the gay and lesbian community.

Mayor Jane Byrne became the first Chicago mayor officially to recognize the LGBT community, and her successor, Mayor Harold Washington, was the first mayor to headline a gay rights rally and began the city's first Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues.

Washington also supported the non-discrimination ordinance, and its backers attempted several times to pass various versions of it, all of them unsuccessful. By October 1987, Chicago was the only major city remaining in the country without a gay rights bill.

Ald. Bernard Hansen, then of the 44th Ward, said a bill making it illegal to discriminate against gays and lesbians, as well as African-Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities and ex-convicts was necessary to ensure justice for all.

"The new ordinance makes sure that if they are discriminated against, they will have an opportunity to voice their complaint and have it adjudicated," Hansen said on Oct. 12, 1987.

Mayor Washington died on Nov. 25, 1987. Public pressure against the bill continued, with some religious groups calling it a request for special rights. Joseph Cardinal Bernardin said it suggested an acceptance of homosexuality that violated the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. The Moody Church also fought the ordinance, saying it "puts homosexual behavior on par with heterosexual behavior," according to the book Rogues, Rebels and Rubber Stamps by political scientist Dick Simpson.

But the new acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer leaned on his colleagues in the City Council to pass it, and several prominent organizations got behind it. Operation PUSH – the predecessor to the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition – endorsed the bill, as did the American Civil Liberties Union, the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precincts Organization, and the United Methodist Church, Simpson wrote.

Still, some aldermen wanted nothing to do with the ordinance.

"When the day comes that I vote for an ordinance that supersedes the word of the Lord, I want to be dead," said Ald. George Hagopian, quoted in Simpson's book.

"If a man wants to lay down with a man, let him lay down, Mr. Mayor, who cares," Ald. Ernest Jones said during debate on the ordinance shortly before it passed. "But for God's sake, who has a right to sit up and say what is right or wrong."

But ultimately, the ordinance passed with a vote of 28-17 in December 1988. Sawyer was hailed as a hero in the gay community. Part of the credit also went to Richard M. Daley, who was campaigning against Sawyer in a special mayoral race.

When Mayor Daley took office the following year, he became the first mayor to take part in a Gay Pride Parade. The 1989 parade attracted about 100,000 people from Illinois and neighboring states, many of them cheering Mayor Daley and thanking him for his support for the ordinance.

"It's a great honor for me to be here, so it's not just a political expression – also it's a personal expression, dealing with the gay and lesbian community; what they have given to the City of Chicago," Mayor Daley said at the 1989 parade.

At the time, the AIDS crisis was devastating Chicago's LGBT community, and many people were furious at the lack of attention it had received from the federal government. Meanwhile, the Gay Pride Parade remained an effort to develop political strength, which many still found elusive.

"We'll be politically recognized when it's possible to live in this country without the 7,500 incidents of anti-gay violence that took place this year," said the late activist Ferd Eggan.

"We're queer and we're here, and we're never going to go away," said the late activist Daniel Sotomayor. "We're your brothers, we're your sisters, we're your sons, your fathers. We're everywhere."

In 1993, Cook County passed a law that forbade discrimination based on sexual orientation, and a statewide law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2006.

In the time since the Chicago ordinance passed, Thomas Chiola was elected the first openly gay elected official when he was elected to a judgeship in 1994. Two years later, Larry McKeon became the first openly gay state legislator in Illinois, and in 2003, Tom Tunney became the city's first openly gay alderman.

Political battles remain, with same sex marriage having now at center stage. While it is now legal in Massachusetts and California, many states have recently passed constitutional amendments outlawing it.

In Illinois, a bill is pending in the state House of Representatives for the state to recognize civil unions. Meanwhile, some religious groups are pushing an amendment banning same-sex marriage, although such attempts have been unsuccessful so far.

And today, the Gay Pride Parade attracts people of every sexual orientation, both as participants and spectators, and has become one of the most popular summer events in the city.

Politicians from both sides of the aisles appear in the parade – in 2006, both Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his Republican opponent, Judy Baar Topinka, participated. And a handful of demonstrators still hold a protest at the parade on religious grounds, but mainstream acceptance has reached the point where Free Press columnist Paul Varnell has even questioned whether the notion of gay "pride" is out of date.

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