In June 1970, when about 100 men and women marched in downtown Chicago to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the closest they got to City Hall was across the street. There, in the Civic Center plaza, they shouted gay pride slogans, defiantly hugged and kissed (same-sex displays of affection were routinely cause for arrest), and joined hands for a joyous dance around the Picasso statue. They were, for the most part, homosexuals, protesting police harassment of gay bars under Mayor Richard J. Daley and celebrating the “gay liberation” born the year before in a weekend of street resistance to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a New York gay bar. But liberated or not, there was no question they were still outsiders.
“We don’t need symbolic gestures from this administration. We have more of that than we need. What we need is action on our issues.”
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When advisory council member Linda Rodgers, owner of the lesbian bar Paris Dance, heard Dombkowski’s idea, it struck a chord. “There’s an old saying that the way to rob a community of its future is to deprive it of its past. Historically, gays and lesbians don’t have any access to their history. The military refuses to admit it has homosexuals so we have no military heroes. The politicians are afraid they won’t be elected so we don’t have any great political leaders. We don’t have any great educators. We’ve been deprived of our leaders. It doesn’t take very long after you die for you to go away. Unless we begin to recognize people who have been involved, we wouldn’t have a history to pass down to the next generation.”
The problem with that, Dombkowski feels, is that a City Hall event de-emphasizes the intended historical thrust. “There was a political taint,” he says, “because Daley was giving his party for political reasons, obviously. . . . We were disappointed it could not be a separate affair. We would have liked autonomy over the guest list; I submitted a 350-person list that included staff and board members of gay and lesbian organizations–I wanted it to be more than the same usually visible group. . . . Ten thousand dollars to me is not a lot of money as far as what the city spends on things. If they can’t find that kind of money for a major celebration, that does say something about their priorities–versus the amount of money they’re going to spend on their Bulls celebration, for example.” But the joint reception was the only way to get city funding. “We were adamant on getting city sponsorship because of the air of legitimacy it would bring.”
Still, whether or not a nominee was openly homosexual was a prime consideration–which is why the list doesn’t include some of the most prominent men and women in the city’s corporate, philanthropic, religious, political, media, and arts arenas. “I had this great dream of outing half a dozen people who’ve made wonderful contributions to society who are in the closet,” Dombkowski says. The openness factor also may have discouraged posthumous nominations, which required extraordinary public documentation. “Renee Hanover and I agreed that we ourselves would have liked to nominate several [dead] people,” says Bill Kelley, “but we recognized the impossibility of assembling the biographical data in the time available–which wasn’t much.” (One notable omission is Henry Gerber, the Chicago postal worker who in 1924 started the Society for Individual Rights, the first gay organization in the U.S.)
