Chicago central loop gay club

As one of the busiest industrial centers and transportation hubs in the United States, Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century attracted thousands of single women and men with new employment opportunities and nonfamilial living arrangements in the lodging-house districts of the Near North and Near South Sides.

The anonymous and transient character of these neighborhoods permitted the development of Chicago's lesbian and gay subculture. During the early years of the century, much of this subculture was centered in the Levee, a working-class entertainment and vice district. Here, several saloons and dance halls catered to gay men and featured female impersonation acts.

By the s, a visible lesbian and gay enclave was well established in the Near North Side bohemian neighborhood known as Towertown. In the tearooms and speakeasies of this district, lesbians and gay men from throughout the city and the Midwest met and socialized with local artists and with heterosexuals bent on obtaining a glimpse of gay life.

The Dill Pickle Club on Tooker Alley hosted group discussions and debates on homosexuality and lesbianism, while the Bally Hoo Cafe on North Halsted featured male and female impersonation acts, as well as a contest for cross-dressed patrons. InVariety estimated that there were 35 such venues on the city's Near North Side.

Gay men also gathered along Michigan Avenue and on Oak Street Beach and mingled with lesbians, hobos, and political radicals in Bughouse Square.

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Yet while these public spaces played an important role in the construction of Chicago's lesbian and gay community, private parties and personal networks remained the foundation of gay culture. One such network headed by Henry Gerber, a postal clerk and Bavarian immigrant to Chicago, founded the nation's earliest documented gay rights organization in ; the Society for Human Rights published two pamphlets before its members were arrested and the group disbanded.

With the arrival of southern black migrants during the Great Migrationa lesbian and gay enclave also developed on the city's South Side. African American lesbians and gay men became regular fixtures, as both patrons and entertainers, in Prohibition -era cabarets, including the Plantation Cafe on East 35th Street and the Pleasure Inn on East 31st.

In a black gay street hustler and nightclub doorman, Alfred Finnie, launched a series of drag transvestite balls on the South Side. Building on the success of the interracial drag balls that had been held at the Coliseum Annex on the Near South Side since the s, the Finnie's Ball became a celebrated Halloween event on the South Side, drawing thousands of gay and lesbian participants and heterosexual onlookers well into the s.

After the repeal of Prohibition inthe first bars catering exclusively to lesbians and gay men opened in Chicago. During the s and s, the Loop became an increasingly important meeting place for gay men; the theaters, restaurantsand bars of this district supplemented the Near North Side venues as gathering spots for both gay men and the soldiers and sailors who swarmed the city during World War II.

Lesbian bars on central the Near North and Near South Sides, especially those run by the lesbian entrepreneur Billie Le Roy, drew sizable crowds, as did the South Side's Cabin Inn, which featured a chorus line of cross-dressed black men. The residential and social concentration of gay men in the Rush Street area drew the attention of Alfred C.

Kinsey in and provided a significant sample pool for his landmark study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The gay leather community also coalesced during gay period—first, around Omar's Grill in the Loop, and in the early s at the Gold Coast, Chicago's loop gay leather bar. As Chicago's central and gay population grew larger and more visible, municipal authorities launched vigorous campaigns to suppress it.

Raids on lesbian and gay bars became more frequent, and thousands of women and men were arrested, both in the bars and on the streets, for being inmates of disorderly houses a label the authorities applied to lesbian and gay bars or for violating the municipal ordinance against cross-dressing. Although Illinois became the club loop in gay nation to legalize private, consensual, homosexual relations inthe authorities remained intent on eliminating public expressions of homosexuality; the local media assisted in this endeavor by publishing the names and addresses of those arrested in raids.

Lesbians and gay men began to organize in response to police tactics. Earlier local chapters of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, two national homophile organizations, had been short-lived and largely social, but in a more politically active Mattachine Midwest was founded. Under the leadership of Jim Bradford a pseudonym for most of the late s, this group organized a hour telephone information and referral line, published and distributed a monthly newsletter to local bars informing patrons of recent police crackdowns, and with the help of lesbian attorney Pearl Chicago and others, aided in the defense of gay men and lesbians who had been entrapped on morals charges or arrested in bar raids.

Following chicago June Stonewall riots in New York City, a more militant gay liberation organization formed at the University of Chicago. This group sponsored a club dance at the Coliseum Annex inthe first public lesbian and gay dance aside from the annual Halloween drag balls held in Chicago.