On Aug. 6, days before Thomas Ferry, the commander of the police Neighborhood Relations division, was to retire after 26 years with the department, 400 colleagues and friends attended a party in his honor in the grand ballroom of the Martinique, an Evergreen Park banquet hall.
Among the celebrants were five tables full of gays and lesbians, drawn to honor the commander, who had distinguished himself working on their behalf.
After the prime rib and the fish, after the flattering speeches and the plaques, it came time for dancing. Cops and their spouses took to the floor, and so did some of the lesbians and gays. “I went out and danced with two people,” recalls Larry McKeon, the City of Chicago’s own liaison to the gay and lesbian community. “We slow-danced. It was strange, on the one hand, and part of me was terrified. Yet it was also the most natural thing in the world. We made history that night.”
The dancing at the commander’s retirement party marked a startling transformation. A generation ago, Chicago’s homosexuals-that is, those few who ventured out of the closet-frequented back-alley clubs, where the most tentative two-step with a lover invited arrest by the police.
“If you had told me even 10 years ago that we’d be dancing in front of the cops, I’d have said, `Come on, get a life,’ ” says one gay activist who attended Ferry’s affair.
To be sure, local gays and lesbians have won a considerable amount of acceptance in recent times, beyond areas like the arts and entertainment, where they have always visibly excelled. Beginning about 1970, growing numbers of homosexuals became open about their orientation. Gay liberation, mounting voter registration and the dread AIDS virus eventually brought an era of political ferment, capped by enactment of a city human-rights ordinance in 1989, and now most city politicians court the gay vote ardently, especially at election season.
Meanwhile, gays and lesbians have achieved business success in more than bars and bathhouses-in such ventures as restaurants and bookstores, appealing to the gay community per se as well as to straights. For socializing, there exists a rich mix of alternatives, from sports organizations to churches. “This is a golden era for us,” says Linda Rodgers, owner of an upscale lesbian dance hall called Paris Dance.
Yet there are limits to the ascendancy. If you are homosexual and Catholic or Jewish in Chicago, your church or synagogue is still not altogether accepting. Walk down the street holding hands with your lover, and you risk stares-or worse; dance in a straight bar, and you may get booted out. Homosexuals in the corporate world are gradually coming out-and with some trepidation. And although the nation is witnessing a rising tide of openly gay and lesbian elected officials, Chicago has yet to see one such candidate lifted into office.
The more-radical activists lament the level of respect that has been achieved. “We have to get over being nice-nice to politicians,” says Tim Miller, a leader of ACT UP/Chicago, a leading group of radicals. “It hasn’t worked. We’re still viewed as third-class citizens.”
Not, it seems, to the present-day Chicago police department.
In 1989, when Police Supt. LeRoy Martin named Tom Ferry Neighborhood Relations commander, part of the job was to direct outreach to gay and lesbians. “When I first got the assignment, I was concerned, but mainly over whether my last name would be perceived as an insult,” Ferry recalls. “When I shared my concern with the head of this one gay organization, he said, `Gee, Tom, we just felt sorry for you, having to deal with us with a name like Ferry.’ “
With Ferry at the helm, the division won favor. Under a freshly passed ordinance, hate crimes against gays and lesbians were more carefully logged. At the suggestion of an 11-member advisory committee, a hate-crime poster went up in station houses, and a message encouraging sensitivity to homosexuals was read at roll calls. This year Mary Boyle, co-founder of a nascent group of gays and lesbians within the police department, went to work for Ferry.
In late June, Ferry hosted an informational meeting at Ann Sather Restaurant on West Belmont Avenue for homosexuals who wanted to be cops. Chairs were set up for 25 people; 84 showed up.
“It was unbelievable to the point of tears,” says Larry McKeon, who attended.
No wonder, then, that the community turned out to honor Ferry two months later.
“My work with the community was one of the most important accomplishments of my career,” says Ferry from his retirement home in Las Vegas. “We did some good things. There’s still homophobia on the part of some police officers. But their feelings belong at home. At work they are becoming professional enough to keep their prejudices to themselves.”
What a difference from the 1950s and ’60s. Police in the era of Richard J. Daley often conducted raids on homosexual bars and bathhouses, making arrests on the charge of public indecency. “Years ago everybody left home with bail money in their shoes,” recalls Marge Summit, a lesbian bar owner who grew up in Chicago.
When the Lincoln Baths was raided in the mid-’60s, the customers found all their names listed in the paper the next morning. “My father was not homophobic,” Mayor Richard M. Daley says. “He had people on his staff who were gay and lesbian. But the public bathhouses were questionable-there were a lot of problems.”
The raids were supported, at least in principle, by churches that saw homosexuality as a degradation and psychiatrists who viewed it as a disease. Illinois may have seemed progressive in 1961 when the legislature repealed its anti-sodomy law, becoming the first state in the nation to do so, but bitter experience told gays and lesbians to distrust the level of tolerance.
The sea change for gays and lesbians began on June 28, 1969, when New York City police raided the sixth gay bar in three weeks-the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Instead of behaving docilely, as the police expected, patrons of the Stonewall and their supporters did not go quiet into the night. Rioting ensued for three days, and the gay liberation movement was born.
In Chicago, the atmosphere became charged. The prime commercial hub for homosexuals had been centered around North Clark Street and West Diversey Parkway, but post-Stonewall there developed a new concentration of bars, bathhouses and restaurants closer to downtown, around Clark and West Hubbard Street.
Art Johnston, now a prominent bar owner, remembers first visiting the Bistro, a party disco at Dearborn and Hubbard Streets, as a graduate student at Northwestern University. “I was barely out of the closet,” he says. “I had never seen so many gay people in my life, and no one was sitting there crying to Judy Garland records and contemplating suicide. People were dancing and throwing themselves on each other with abandon; they were laughing and making dates. Such joy I’d never thought was in the cards for someone who was gay.”
Johnston acknowledges that the early bar scene, redolent with sex, led inexorably to the scourge of AIDS, but he sees the time as having its virtues: “Sure, we had our excesses, but the sex was more than just physical acts. We were a minority, coming out and being one with our own. The sex was as political as the black athlete standing at the Olympics in Mexico City with his fist in the air.”
Real politics came along soon enough. Charles “Chuck” Renslow, owner of the Gold Coast, a leather bar, and Man’s Country bathhouse, led the establishment Gay Democrats. But there also developed a grass-roots movement centered in the 44th Ward, in Lake View, where a growing concentration of gays and lesbians was settling. Gay candidates in the ward were notably unsuccessful, but then, in the mid-’80s, the AIDS epidemic quickened everybody’s pulse.
“All of a sudden people were fighting for their lives or for the lives of their friends,” Johnston says. “Suddenly there was an army of people with nothing to lose. With a death penalty hanging over your head, suddenly you aren’t so concerned about being polite to politicians.”
In 1973 Ald. Clifford Kelley (20th) had introduced a bill in the City Council to bar discrimination based on sexual choice. The measure got nowhere, but beginning with Jane Byrne, Chicago mayors warmed to the issue of gay rights. (Renslow has the original of Byrne’s executive order banning discrimination in city hiring posted on his office wall.) In 1986, encouraged by Kit Duffy, Harold Washington’s liaison to the gay and lesbian community, activists pushed for a vote on the 13-year-old Kelley bill.
On the night before the vote, supporters of the ordinance assembled in a candlelight vigil in Daley Plaza. There were clots of people from the gay churches and delegations from 28 bars, shuttled downtown aboard off-duty CTA buses. The speakers included Renslow and Johnston, by then the proprietor (along with his lover, Jose “Pepin” Pena) of Sidetrack bar on Halsted Street; as the speakers addressed the crowd, a resolve seemed to settle over those who were present. “It was an electric moment,” Johnston thinks. “That was the real birth of gay and lesbian politics here.”
The next day, Kelley’s bill failed, but that had been expected; the Archdiocese of Chicago, considering homosexual sex as intrinsically sinful, had issued a condemning position statement.
In 1987 energies flowed into the campaign of openly gay Ron Sable for alderman of the 44th Ward. Sable, a physician and the co-founder of the AIDS Clinic at Cook County Hospital, was pitted against Bernard Hansen, the incumbent and a former ward superintendent nicknamed “Bernie the garbage man.” Hansen bore the reputation of being a good service provider, but it was a question how much that mattered, given that the ward had turned heavily homosexual.
By Hansen’s estimates, about one-third of projected voters were gay or lesbian, and as Sable now notes, “Bernie’s efforts around the gay rights ordinance had been lackluster at best.” Sable came within 4 percentage points of toppling Hansen, who saw the writing on the wall.
Bar owner Rodgers remembers Hansen at a massive gay and lesbian march held in Washington, D.C., the next October. “There’s Bernie, huffin’ and puffin’ up the hill with me,” Rodgers says. “It was killing him-I don’t think he’d walked that far in a long, long time.” When a second drive began to pass a rights law, homosexuals found a ready ally in Hansen.
This time out, a new group, the Gay and Lesbian Town Meeting, directed the effort. The Town Meeting found savvy leaders in what came to be known as “The Gang Of Four”-Rick Garcia, a Catholic gay activist; Laurie Dittman, then administrative director of the Independent Voters of Illinois-Independent Precinct Organization; Art Johnston; and Jon-Henri Damski, an outspoken columnist for Windy City Times newspaper, a gay- and lesbian-oriented publication.
The Gang of Four switched tactics. Clifford Kelley’s ordinance was redrafted to outlaw unfair treatment based on sexual choice as well as on disability, ancestry, marital status and more; in all, 13 categories of “human rights” were covered. The organizers decided to bypass the Catholic Church and to directly lobby aldermen. Damski helped win over Ald. Edward Burke (14th). Sympathetic nuns lobbied other Catholic members.
In September 1989, the council spurned the bill in a session suffused with ugly rhetoric. Ald. Marlene Carter (15th) called gays “sissies,” and Ald. George Hagopian (30th), turning to the packed and angry galleries, termed the occupants “animals.” Ald. Robert Shaw (9th) picked up a Bible. “By approving this ordinance we are saying to everyone that we should disregard the teachings of the King James Bible,” said the alderman, underlining scriptural proscriptions against homosexuality.
In the interim, Mayor Eugene Sawyer, running for re-election and sensing salvation in the gay vote, became a dogged advocate, putting pressure on various council members. “I asked people to vote for it,” says Mayor Daley, then Cook County state’s attorney. Despite rabid opposition from religious fundamentalists, the human rights bill sailed to victory on Dec. 21, 1988 on a vote of 28 to 17.
“At the time of the vote, the council chamber became absolutely still, like a chapel,” Garcia recalls. “There was none of the usual scurrying around. As soon as it was over, I had a feeling of blessed relief.”
To many, enactment of the ordinance amounted to a blessing for people too long consigned to the fringes of society. But then gays and lesbians had already grown into a potent force, not only in politics but as consumers, in business and in social circles, and they remain so today.
The Chicago metropolitan area is home to 527,000 homosexuals, according to Overlooked Opinions, a gay-owned firm that does market research about the community. A small contingent live in Oak Park and Evanston, but more than half the total-282,000 people-reside in the city. The old concentration in Lake View, the so-called “gay ghetto,” is spreading north and northwest, to Uptown and to the old Swedish neighborhood of Andersonville. The lakefront population compares favorably in terms of density with fabled homosexual enclaves in other cities, such as Greenwich Village in New York, the Castro in San Francisco and West Hollywood in Los Angeles.
Increasingly, people are out of the closet, according to a confidential survey by Overlooked Opinions. Of homosexuals nationally, 56 percent are ” `out’ to at least some segment of outsiders,” says Jeff Vitale, president of Overlooked Opinions. No more than 10 percent were open about their sexuality a generation ago, Vitale says.
Coming out to kin seems the greatest stumbling block. “That’s still a hard one,” says Marge Summit, “especially for ethnic families that are real macho.” Says one aging businessman: “There’s still a closet, though it’s nowhere near what it used to be. But take me. My parents still don’t know. Oh, I think my mom knows instinctively, but I’d never bring it up to her. She should never have to feel guilt.”
One decided tendency among gays and lesbians-whether out or not-has been to vote in high percentages; the supposition is that by casting a ballot, they are able to shout their preferences in total confidence. “You can enter the voting booth and not BE gay,” Vitale explains. “Then you can express yourself. It’s what I call `stealth voting.’ “
Voter registration has proved amazingly effective. Since 1988 Norm Sloan, a customer-service representative for a printing company, has conducted a mostly one-man registration drive in the city, working for IMPACT, Chicago’s gay and lesbian political action committee. Going door to door or at a table outside the strip of gay bars that line Halsted Street in Lake View, Sloan or his confreres have added 47,000 voters to the rolls.
When The Gang of Four sought Mayor Sawyer’s support for the human-rights ordinance, Garcia recalls, they only had to remind the vote-hungry mayor of Sloan’s labors. According to an Overlooked Opinions 1992 exit poll of homosexual voters, 89 percent went for Bill Clinton. People said they preferred the Democrat because of his commitment to lift the ban on gays in the military and out of repulsion for the Republican party’s antipathy toward gays and lesbians.
Beyond being voters, gays and lesbians are also well educated and monied, according to Overlooked Opinions data. One quarter have a graduate degree. The average homosexual in Chicago makes $36,800 a year, more than 2 1/2 times the national average, with household income running to $46,000. Total local earnings reach $14 billion, and given the lack of dependents, much more of that is discretionary income than it would be for hetereosexuals, with their greater family responsiblities.
(Typical occupations defy stereotypes, according to a national study conducted by Overlooked Opinions. For instance, far more people work in management, health care or education than in the arts, which accounts for less than 5 percent of jobs.)
The ample consumer power and a more open lifestyle has resulted in the growth of gay- or lesbian-owned businesses geared either all or in part to the gay and lesbian community.
There are, of course, the bars. Although a generation ago many were owned by straights yet fronted by gays-since to do otherwise was considered unsafe-ownership is now largely homosexual. Then there’s the effect of the ever-darkening nightmare of AIDS. The number of cases within the city has increased 150 percent in the last four years, according to the Chicago Board of Health, to 5,488 who have been diagnosed with the disease. Figures show that 68 percent of the total were gay men, with an additional 4 percent who were both gay and IV drug users.
The bar scene has turned relatively sedate. “Sex isn’t the uppermost thing when customers come in,” says one Halsted Street bar owner, “though it’s still there up to a point.” For that reason, the bars offer free condoms, largely donated by the Reimer Foundation, named in memory of the AIDS-stricken lover of organizer Del Barrett.
Yet while the bars have changed, they continue to thrive. Sidetrack is now nearly four times its original size, with a video theme and a devoted clientele. Seven years ago, when Linda Rodgers decided to start an upscale lesbian bar on West Montrose Avenue in Uptown, her goal was not to hide. “We weren’t down some side street,” she says. “We were conspicuous.”
Paris Dance has a marquee, lighted parking lot and a tony, glass-block interior credited to a designer. On the weekend the place is packed with blue-collar workers and upper-level professionals. “My God,” Rodgers marvels, “there are lesbians driving Jaguars and checking their fur coats.”
The bars are particularly active in sponsoring athletic teams. The 1,400-member Metropolitan Sports Association, the largest such group catering to gays and lesbians in the nation, with many bar sponsors, mounts football, baseball, volleyball, tennis, bowling and golf teams. “A lot of us never fit in as kids,” says association president Lora Kirk. “We weren’t picked for the team. Here there’s a level of play that is accepting.”
The business life extends far beyond the bars, however. There are gay and lesbian-oriented doctors, lawyers, accountants, psychologists and travel agents. RPL Real Estate, a gay-owned firm on North Broadway, does $10 million a year in residential sales primarily with a gay and lesbian clientele.
Three newspapers-Windy City Times, Gay Chicago and Outlines-serve the homosexual reader. Windy City Times, a weekly with a giveaway circulation of 20,000, wins journalism awards for its reporting and runs illuminating question-and-answer interviews with nearly every major candidate for office. (U.S. Senate hopeful Rich Williamson was notable for not sitting down with the paper this past fall. “We had to turn down a lot of requests,” said Williamson spokesman David Loveday after the election. “It was a matter of time-we had to find the best way to hit our target audience.”)
The newspapers attract mainstream advertisements, though there are boundaries. Although Windy City Times draws ads from beer manufacturers, car dealers and theaters, banks are pretty much absent. “Banking is very conservative, and we don’t try hard there,” says Windy City publisher Jeff McCourt. “What’s the sense in beating dead horses?”
McCourt and his salesmen have made concerted efforts to entice downtown department stores. The results, however, have been disappointing.
It’s a happier situation for lesbian- and gay-owned businesses that ply their products to a broader market.
