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Allen Ginsberg, the openly gay beat poet and peace activist, led crowds in chants of “om” to calm protesters. The protests during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago had a profound influence on some early gay activists. Questioner Jack Floyd (left) at Sidetrack gay club in Boystown alongside owner Art Johnston (second from left) and Curious City reporters Jason Nargis (second from right) and Steven Jackson (right). But as it has grown, the neighborhood has struggled to be a place where all members of the community feel included. It’s been home to many successful businesses and has been at the center of important civil rights battles. The answer is tied to persecution, perseverance, and slow societal change.Įven though it’s not the only Chicago gay enclave, the neighborhood has played a central role in the LGBTQ community’s struggle for legal equality and social acceptance. His question for Curious City: “What is the history of Boystown? What made it become and gain traction as an LGBTQ neighborhood?” “There’s this gay neighborhood in Chicago that’s not really like anything else in America, or in the world, so it made me question what kind of forces are at play - whether they be geographical, cultural, demographic - that came together and allowed this neighborhood to become officially recognized as some sort of gay entity and destination,” Jack says. Boystown stretches roughly from Belmont Avenue up to Addison Street, and it spans from Halsted Street to Broadway. Big Chicks and Tweet are hulking, living art projects-experiments in business and community.Boystown is a gay neighborhood located within the larger Lakeview East area and it’s hard to miss - it’s marked with giant rainbow pillars. Those hours forced her to stop making art, “but that’s fine,” she says, and it sounds like she means it. And like that, she was working 80-hour weeks again. In 2003, long after Big Chicks stopped keeping morning hours, Fire opened an all-day restaurant next door, Tweet. She’d open her bar in the morning, when the old guys would come in, and work a shift at the Loading Dock at night. In the early years she worked 80-hour weeks. When the bar that became Big Chicks came up for rent, she had just enough money to grab it. She’d eyed the art deco terra-cotta buildings on the North Side forever-it’s what she used to draw. She knew she never wanted to borrow money, and she knew she wanted to be prepared. She started saving, though she didn’t know what for. bar.” That’s when she decided to, as she says, start participating in capitalism. In 1984 she landed that job at the Loading Dock-an “all-consuming, very exhausting 5 a.m.
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For ten years, she hustled, making drawings and prints, tending bar, working catering gigs, manning the temporary tattoo stand at street fairs. She studied art at UIC and made a place for herself in Chicago’s art scene. Nothing could be beat out of Fire she’d just fight through. “It’s called safety,” she says.įire peeking through the windows. Did that make sense? I’m having a hard time articulating myself, I can’t find the words. When I was here, I felt like a citizen, of the city and of the bar. Did she know what I meant? I felt calmer there, and maybe a little hopeful-like Chicago, a city that could be so backward, could be as good as I thought it was. Now I’m telling her how I used to feel those nights at Big Chicks, how I wanted to become part of the place, to be bolted to the wall like the photographs. I tried to look tough, like I owned the place, like the floor was mine.
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I philosophized, drunkenly, that nobody gets to live with art like this nobody gets to flirt and make out and spill beer in a museum. I sucked on a cigarette (this was back when people still smoked inside) I exhaled on the Diane Arbus photograph above me. But at Big Chicks-and only at Big Chicks-a bear could not intimidate me.
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Sometimes it seemed like it was only bears in the place-muscle bears, cubby bears, ginger bears, otters. Cruising the trans boys, the black girls, the grizzly raising eyebrows at me from the bar. I’ve been that boy leaning against the wall, lightheaded, cheap gin in my glass. She trails off, but I spent ten years of the aughts going to Big Chicks-I can fill in the rest.