Wright’s father came to Chicago and moved him out of one of his first apartments on Chestnut, telling him, “All those men hanging out on the front stoop are homosexuals.” I’d go in and drink one drink-it was a gin and tonic.” “My first bar was the Front Page Lounge at Wabash and Grand,” Wright says. Others remembered such long-gone bars in the area as Dugan’s and Sam’s. A lot of people who were gay went there.”Įd Urgitis adds, “They were all in that area-Clark and Division.” …My first place I found that I was happy in was the old Checkmate on Clark Street. “My partner got sick and died and that’s when I moved here. “I had been in the military and I’d been a restaurant owner in Ottawa, Ill.,” he recalls. If I walked in there, Shirley would pull my shirt up and say, ‘You have a fly in front and you can’t come in.’”īut Chicago’s gay and lesbian scene thrived in the 1950s and 1960s, in bars and other gathering places downtown, in the Gold Coast and elsewhere. They wouldn’t let you in unless you had two pieces of women’s clothes on. “I couldn’t get into the Lost and Found,” she says. In Chicago Sorman found her insistence on wearing men’s clothes kept her out of that era’s lesbian bars. “I came to Chicago in the mid-1960s,” Joey Sorman remembers.
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Lesbians also had to be wary of certain boundaries. “In those days your name was put in the newspaper,” Ron Helizon says. Police in Chicago raided gay bars and even private parties frequently in the 1960s. There was no dancing and there was always the chance a gay bar might get raided. "The summer I came to Chicago, you had to keep your hands above the bar, and you couldn't buy anybody a drink," Eugene Wright recalls.
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This list details Chicago’s top venues, crews, and parties aimed at connecting with queer community, crushing a cocktail (or five), and twisting the night away.It wasn't that long ago that Chicago's gay scene was very different than it is today.
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These organizations are going beyond designing safe spaces for queer Black folks to dance, make out, and meet-they’re creating moments that decenter the white gaze (not to mention white gays), showcasing the artistic talents and sweet joy of Chicago’s Black queer, trans, and gender non-conforming residents and curating welcoming opportunites for folks to get down free from inhibition and fear. Several of Chicago’s queer event collectives are set on partying with a purpose, especially those with Black queers at the helm. Much of that is thanks to the hard work of folks like the Chicago Black Drag Council and countless other queer Black nightlife prose, all backed up by those of us happily partaking in the scene. While Boystown and Andersonville continue to flourish with queer and queer-friendly businesses on every corner, since last year’s uprisings and calls for accountability in Chicago’s gay nightlife scene, things have started to (slowly) change. We have some of the most renowned drag performers, incredible queer nightlife artists of all kinds, and queer neighborhoods teeming with bars and clubs.
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Chicago has transformed into a true queer destination in recent years, no longer looked at as some podunk midwestern city cast in the shadow of coastal meccas like New York and Los Angeles.