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The notion that the queer community patterns its strategies on those of the African American civil right movement is of great significance, and deepens our understanding of what was structurally required to fight white machine politics in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. He notes that “ key factor enabling to challenge police harassment successfully was the example of demands by blacks for police reform, and what enabled gays and lesbians to gain power-a toehold in city hall-was the emergence of progressive, black-led local electoral coalitions” (2). Second, the author argues that the rollback of police brutality was the common objective that catalyzed and defined what can also be described as a cross-race and cross-class coalition. He also identifies the pathways and strategies African Americans and the queer community developed to collaborate on common political objectives.
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He uncovers two key political patterns: first, the manner in which the knowledge and strategic depth of the African American community’s civil rights movement and struggles informed the approaches and strategies of Chicago’s queer civil right movement. Stewart-Winter combines a community study method (which traces and illuminates the intersections of movement activism and everyday life) and the study of the entanglement of political histories at all geographic scales (privileging the local, but also skillfully identifying its connections to the regional and federal states) (9-10). Stewart-Winter does much of that important exploring in, and, importantly, points the way to, local public history resources: the Chicago History Museum and the Gerber-Hart Archives. It is however sensitive to geography, quite insightful about questions of spatial structure and placemaking, and erudite about how the act of chronicling “the rise of gay politics in the postwar United States” (3) can substantially inform our understanding of Chicago as a queer place, or at least as a space where difference, the pursuit of equity, and a right to the city through coalition-building become the coin of politics. Admittedly, it is not primarily focused on Chicago’s queer geographies. It is a book situated at the intersection of social, political, and public histories, and it is of great value to geographers and other social scientists. There is much to be glad about Queer Clout. So, I start by remarking that this is a milestone of a book for addressing a lacuna in our knowing and understanding the “queer urban” in Chicago. It is quite astonishing that, compared to New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Chicago’s queer politics (and queer geographies) have received relatively little attention. Queer Clout is a very welcome contribution to the extensive scholarship on Chicago politics, and an urgently needed and long overdue scholarly intervention on Chicago’s queer politics.