Autobiography of a Good Catholic Chicago Boy:
How Black Civil Rights Ignited the Stonewall Rebellion
and Made Me a Gay Writer
As a closeted gay man very aware of my own unspoken civil rights in 1963 Chicago, I wrote a magazine article titled “The Church Mid-Decade and the Negro” to document my identity and feelings insofar as Black culture upended my bourgeois view of my self and opened up my queer view of my self. I might never have become a gay activist in the late 1960s if I had not been a progressive Catholic activist for civil rights in the early 1960s. What happened to me living inside the African-American community in Chicago, and what happened to me tutored by the Reverend Martin O’Farrell and the legendary father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), changed me forever.
I was among sixteen young Catholic seminarians from the Pontifical College Josephinum who in the summers of 1962 and 1963 worked with The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) out of Holy Cross Parish on the South Side of Chicago near the El stop at 63rd and Cottage Grove. This was essentially the same neighborhood worked in the same way by Barack Obama in his own youth twenty-five years later. Obama and we seminarians shared the same mentor in the great Saul Alinsky. I was an impressionable age 23 and 24 those summers I volunteered to help make a census of Blacks newly arrived in Chicago. At that time of the Vatican Council, the Catholic Church under Pope John XXIII was wide open to change, and the ideal—my personal ideal—was that of the French Worker priests who lived among their people, had jobs, supported themselves, and did not live in a parish house with servants.
Wearing the proper “civil-rights uniform” of the time (black chinos, short-sleeved white shirt, button-down collar and tie), we smiling white boys went door to door in every tenement on every floor of every high-rise and carved-up house through the vast urban blocks of Holy Cross parish. To minimize hostility at our “white invasion,” we met with the Blackstone Rangers who were the indigenous street gang looking out for the good of their neighborhood. By 1968, the Blackstone Rangers worked with us against the infamous political machine of the right-wing Mayor Richard J. Daley (1902-1976), which, of course, was one more straw that made him so angry that he unleashed his Chicago Police in the famous police riot at the Democratic Convention in 1968. In a way, the Blackstone Rangers were one of the many resistance fighters who were models for gay resistance at the Stonewall Riot in Greenwich Village.
In the 1960s whirl of those wild days in civil rights, we seminarians literally marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. for a sit-in at the office of Mayor Daley who ordered us all carried out bodily by cops. I wasn’t “out” yet, but, ah, those hot cops! Perhaps this first-person feature essay from another time is the best way to illustrate the kind of street credentials I took from 1960s civil rights into 1970s gay liberation. Civil rights activism was one of the experiences that I brought to the table when good luck made me the founding San Francisco editor in chief of Drummer magazine (1975-1999). When gayfolk tell me about their own work in Black civil rights in the 1960s, it proves that the Gay Pride crusade for our own civil rights found its learning curve in the thousands of GLBT persons who worked for the upside of Black Power within the African-American community.
In all the drama of the civil rights battle, there was humor. Around our supper table one hot summer evening in the Catholic parish house, the Jewish Saul Alinsky was holding his regular court, beguiling us boys with his tactics and stories of his radical “Back of the Yards” movement. He was very droll in telling us about his first encounters with Catholics. He said he was shocked when the first convent of nuns he organized gave him a novena card that offered up to God, in Saul’s name, “300 Masses, 1,200 rosaries, and 20,000 ejaculations.” He laughed remembering the face of the no-nonsense nun who explained that in Catholicism an ejaculation means a very short prayer such as “Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy.” Into our virgin-pure adolescent ears, he was pouring his glistening subversive humor.
I loved Saul Alinsky as a brain who liberated me from everything I was before I met him.
The worst mistake the Catholic Church ever made was sending us innocent boys off into such worldly, cynical, and saintly company. Hardly more than one of the sixteen of us seminarians was later ordained a priest. Alinsky and the civil rights experience itself taught us the truth in the words “social justice” and in the lyrics of that summer’s hit song, “Moon River.” There’s “such a lot of world to see.” My experience in Chicago caused me to leave the Josephinum seminary in Ohio in December 1963.
I refused to become a priest.
I rushed back to Chicago.
Race had taught me about sex.
Black Power taught me about Gay Power.
In memory, it’s like a movie how I lived at 63rd and Cottage Grove, and came out in Grant Park and in the back row of the Bryn Mawr movie theater. In fact, it’s the plot of my Chicago coming-out novel What They Did to the Kid: Confessions of an Altar Boy. I realized that civil rights covered Blacks and gays equally. Without guilt, I exited the Catholic sex closet full of wonder. No priest ever touched me, but if the child molestation scandals are anything, they are a wake-up call for the Church to update its theology of sexuality into the 21st century.
When I wrote this feature article in the summer of 1963, I was clueless that within six months I’d be returning to Chicago to start my career as a graduate student, cruising the streets and bars, earning my doctorate at Loyola University (1967). The force of two big events swept me into the future: the church-changing death of the progressive Good Pope John XXIII on June 3, 1963, and the assassination of my dream-lover John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The briefly liberal world of the Vatican Council and of JFK’s Camelot exploded. What happened on November 22 was worse than 9/11. Flat-world right-wing fundamentalists took over the Catholic Church and the American government. I could not breathe. I kicked open my closet doors. In a decade of burning inner cities, unjust war, and political assassinations, we young revolutionaries ran into the streets waving James Baldwin’s brand-new book The Fire Next Time, and shouting, “Fire! Fire! America is on fire!”
“Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” James Baldwin asked.
“Do I really want to live a life that is not free?” I asked.
As I headed forward to teach on riot-torn university campuses beginning in 1965, I also carried Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, because he mixed questions of race and sex in a way that intrigued me personally as the gay liberation of the 1960s sparked into flame, and we “homophiles” seemed finally, free at last, to call ourselves gay. During the riot at that Democratic Convention in August 1968, we shouted into the live TV cameras: “The whole world is watching.” That resistance against the cops inspired the Stonewall Rebellion ten months later in June 1969. Empowered, I came out as a writer and a gay man in Chicago, and migrated in the 1970s to the new gay capital of San Francisco to begin a lifelong writing career in the emerging new gay publishing industry during that wonderful first decade of gay liberation. That was a golden time in the window between penicillin and HIV. During the “Titanic 70s,” the boys in the band played on, cruising ahead, full speed, innocent of the iceberg of HIV that lay ahead.