Next door was a men’s bar called the Scarlet Ribbon, near the St. That was 1950.”Ĭhow remembers, “The first real girl’s bar that I hung around was The Volleyball. I was just 20 years old, and all the queens knew her. “I crossed paths with an older queen when I was working in the bank in Aurora. “Then the bar we went to was The Gloryhole, and then I started going to Carol’s Coming Out Pub. A short time later, he found the Bijou, where he had his first experience with a man. Urgitis came to Chicago a little later than his friends, moving here in 1973. “I knew in the 5th grade I was different.” “I didn’t think there was anyone like me,” Urgitis says. When she started going out with a man again, Chow recalls, her mother surprised her, remarking, “Joyce, I thought you were going to be true to June.” I didn’t start going to bars until I was 16-the Kitty Kat on 63rd.”Ĭhow says when she had her first crush and real lesbian relationship-with a woman named June-her mother figured it out quickly. “I came out with very intense female friendships when I was a young teenager. “I didn’t have bars to come to,” Joyce Chow says. Joyce Chow had a very different experience coming out. “I made my own dresses, and I didn’t do pantomime,” Wright says. Wright not only found a home in Chicago’s gay community, he went on to become a legendary performer-Toots Lorraine-in Chicago’s gay cabarets. 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.
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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. Lesbians also had to be wary of certain boundaries. “In those days your name was put in the newspaper,” Ron Helizon says.
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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. Travel from midtown, north, country, west, south, downtown, east, uptown, city, or central - driving directions from your address to the location of the new Chicago, Illinois gay watering hole.ĭepending on your device, get turn by turn driving directions from Google, Apple, Waze.It wasn't that long ago that Chicago's gay scene was very different than it is today.
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