Consider Unabridged Books, a bookshop on Broadway owned by Ed Devereux. Devereux launched his store in 1983 after noticing that regular booksellers were minimizing gay titles. “I thought a good general bookstore with a strong gay section could do well,” he says. He was right. “I’m amazed,” he says of his revenues. Unabridged markets 20 wall units full of gay material, openly labeled instead of marked by the euphemisms favored by chain stores, like “gender studies.” Still, the homosexual section constitutes only one-eighth of the shop.
Only rarely have Unabridged’s straight customers complained about the gay and lesbian flavor of the place. The most negative reaction comes from teenagers, who walk in, point to the gay section and smirk.
Women and Children First, an Andersonville bookstore run by partners Ann Christophersen and Linda Bubon, was founded in 1979 as a feminist venue. It caters to neighborhood people, feminists, the literati, moms and lesbians. “We’re like Switzerland,” Christophersen says. Bubon is as proud of the fact that lesbians feel comfortable in the store (“I’ve had quite a few women tell me the first thing they did as lesbians was come here”) as she is of the rich mix that attends the weekly story hours. “Both lesbian and straight parents come,” Bubon says, “and they all get along. When you’re dealing with kids-with diapers and tantrums-other things become more important than anyone’s lifestyle.”
If there is a single testament to gay and lesbian acceptance, it is Ann Sather Restaurant on Belmont. Since 1980 the venerable Swedish eatery has been owned by Tom Tunney, who sees it as his duty to please three groups of customers-Swedes, senior citizens and homosexuals. “It’s a balancing act,” Tunney says. He keeps up the potato sausage and cinamon rolls, and during the day the White Crane Wellness Center, a senior program, uses the second floor for everything from flu shots to folk dancing. Otherwise, the second floor is scene to meetings by virtually every gay and lesbian organization in town, not to mention same-sex wedding receptions.
“The first few of those, there were a lot of eyebrows raised by the people in our dining room,” Tunney admits. “And when cross-dressing groups go upstairs, there can be some looks. But in general I’d say we’ve been able to resolve a lot of ignorance by breaking down barriers. There’s a comfort level here. You can be who you are, and in that there’s safety.”
There’s also money. “If we’re open, we’re busy,” Tunney says. “At least I hope we are.” The restaurant on Belmont, with 150 dining-room seats plus three banquet rooms upstairs, grosses $5 million a year. “For an operation of that size, that’s fantastic,” says Erik Jensen, executive director of the Illinois Restaurant Association. In addition, there are Ann Sather branches in Andersonville and Hyde Park, owned respectively by Tunney’s sister and brother. Tunney can usually be found at the original place on Belmont, clearing dishes during the mealtime rush.
The attitude of corporate Chicago toward gays and lesbians is now beginning to soften, in part through the formation of support groups within their carpeted environs. AT&T, Andersen Consulting and Commonwealth Edison are among firms where support groups have taken root.
The need is clear. “Being here can take its toll,” says Rich Mielke, a technical support representative at AT&T. “To be in a meeting and hear faggot jokes, that’s hard. Or to get personal phone calls and have to change the pronoun of your partner.”
Mielke, an AT&T employee for 15 years who came “out” to his manager only in early 1992, says he was emboldened by the presence of the company support group. The group, which claims 110 members, has monthly meetings at which various issues are discussed, such as how to cope with disparaging comments or the need for domestic-partner benefits. For Mielke, the effect has been salubrious: “When I was gay and in the closet, the effort I should have been putting into my job I was putting into hiding. Now it’s different.”
In general, superiors have been encouraging. Last spring, before the so-called Pride Parade, the annual march through Lake View that marks the anniversary of the Stonewall riot, the support group at Commonwealth Edison notified senior vice president Donald Petkus of its wish to join the proceedings. Though the Pride Parade has sobered up in recent years, it has traditionally been marked by the flamboyance of its drag queens. Yet Petkus had no problem with the support group participating; the company even contributed T-shirts.
Notwithstanding, being “out” in a big corporation is not easy for everyone. Of the dozen members of the Arthur Andersen support group (tentative name: Club Andersen), only three are noticeably out at work. One gay man with a nightlife business has a high-paying day job on LaSalle Street where, he says: “I’d really rather they not know about me. Maybe someday, but not now. It could cause problems.”
Being homosexual in Chicago continues to have other down sides. Sexism persists among homosexuals. There are more separate gay and lesbian groups than there ever were, and lesbians, in particular, cite instances of discrimination from male homosexuals. “A gay man, just like a straight man, will say to a woman, `Honey, can you get me a cup of coffee,’ ” says Linda Rodgers. Rodgers also faults gays for failing to bring as much fervor to the fight against breast cancer or for abortion rights as they have to the AIDS battle.
Although there are a dozen gay and lesbian churches, many exist solely because their members feel unwelcome in their home pews. The Metropolitan Community Church is a catch-all denomination for the disaffected. Congregation Or Chadash, the community synagogue, labors under the disapprobation of Orthodox and Conservative Jewry.
In 1988 Dignity, the independent Catholic congregation, was faced with eviction from St. Sebastian’s parish (on West Wellington Avenue, now defunct) in the wake of a letter from Rome that condemned homosexual activity as “morally disordered and intrinsically evil.” Nine months of negotiation with the Catholic archdiocese produced no compromise, and Dignity lost its home.
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin is now encouraging of the Archdiocesan Gay and Lesbian Outreach of Chicago (AGLO/Chicago), the formal ministry to homosexuals that is accepting of homosexuality yet frowns on its physical expression. “This represents the commitment of the archdiocese to provide meaningful ministry to gay and lesbian Catholics,” says Father Michael Place, theological consultant to the cardinal. Although the 250 parishioners of AGLO/Chicago gather weekly, they tend to skirt the church’s position, says AGLO coordinator Dan Riehle: “As far as the church’s doctrine, we don’t get into that. That’s something for each individual to consider for himself.”
In a newspaper column published in November, Bernardin, alarmed by letters he’d received and the prevailing election-year rhetoric, condemned the mounting level of discrimination and violence against homosexuals. The letter drew protesters to the cardinal’s mansion, who pointed to the church itself as a culprit, but in many gay and lesbian households, Bernardin’s words struck a chord.
Indeed, the violence has worsened. Nicole Hall, head of an anti-violence project at Horizons Community Services, a Lake View agency, suggests that recent homosexual advances have brought a backlash. In 1990, the year Chicago passed a hate-crimes ordinance, the city police recorded 11 hate offenses against gays and lesbians-battery, assault and criminal damage to property. In 1991 the cases recorded rose to 28. Horizons contends the police misclassify many reports against homosexuals as simple robberies or batteries, ignoring the gay-bashing motive behind the incidents, and that the real figure for 1991 should be 110 cases, a record high.
It hasn’t gotten better lately. Police and activists say that at 4 a.m. last March 31, three young men jumped from a car just off Halsted Street to hassle bar maintenance man Ron Cayot and his friend. A fight ensued, and Cayot was shot in the back and neck. No one has been apprehended, and Cayot, a familiar figure in the community, is slowly recovering; his voice box has been rebuilt, but a bullet is still lodged in his shoulder.
Open displays of affection are now avoided. “I can walk down Halsted Street holding some girl’s hand, and there’s every likelihood I’ll be cracked up the side of the head,” says Marge Summit. For a lesbian, says Linda Rodgers, a car is a necessity. “You just can’t take public transportation,” she says. “To get on a bus at night with your lover is inviting danger and more so than for just two women. It’s a question of somebody saying, `You can be queer, just don’t make me deal with it.’ It’s the skinhead saying, `I have the right to hit a faggot.’ “
The violence and intolerance-and AIDS-have produced a new generation of in-your-face activists who challenge head-on what they perceive as bias. ACT UP/Chicago bedevils public officials over AIDS. “To get things accomplished, we have to embarrass people,” ACT UP leader Tim Miller says. “If you don’t criticize, and many times loudly, politicians will think there’s nothing to improve on. Things right now are going too slowly, and we’re fed up.”
Queer Nation/Chicago, another cell of activists, practices what one member calls “urban beautification”-putting up stickers and posters that announce pride in homosexuality. Another signature is “kiss-ins,” which find members smooching at shopping malls and train stations. “The purpose is pretty straightforward,” says member Scout Weschler, “to show that gays and lesbians can do things appropriate to straight people.” Onlookers, Weschler says, “are surprised and dumbfounded a lot, though sometimes we get questions and, occasionally, applause.”
Queen Nation has also made it a point to test the city’s human-rights ordinance. One night in November 1990, two young men purposely started to dance together at the Baja Beach Club at North Pier Chicago, and, according to later testimony, they were removed by club security. One of the men filed a complaint with the city Commission on Human Rights (CHR). Similarly, when a group of 30 men and women tried to dance at Mother’s, a nightclub on Division Street, in June 1991, the manager stopped the music, and the group was asked to leave. Again, charges were lodged with the CHR.
Both cases resulted in the defendants making settlements, according to CHR legal officer Constance Bauer. Bauer says the details of the settlements are confidential, but, according to sources, Mother’s paid each plaintiff $600 and agreed to post anti-discrimination signs, reiterate the policy in their newspaper ads and subject their staffers to sensitivity training.
The city’s efforts on behalf of gays and lesbians is centered within the CHR. There, Larry McKeon acts both as community liaison and as director of the Advisory Council on Gay and Lesbian Issues (ACGLI). ACGLI, one of eight special-interest advisory panels to the full CHR, meets monthly and has standing committees on health, access and advocacy. There is criticism that McKeon is not assigned to ACGLI full time and that the committee’s chairman is not invited to full commission meetings, but CHR chairman Clarence Wood rejects both charges.
The soft-spoken McKeon, a onetime watch commander for the Los Angeles County Sheriff, is HIV positive. “I lost my lover to AIDS three years ago,” he says. His condition gives McKeon a special passion for his job, and though he is fairly well out of the City Hall decision-making loop, he is intent on having an influence.
He monitors human-rights and hate-crimes violations, as well as the work of Ferry’s old police Neighborhood Relations division. The two-year-old Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, a collection of notables now on traveling exhibit, also falls under McKeon’s purview. It pleases McKeon that Daley has made a couple of gay appointments to city boards, including Tom Tunney to the Economic Development Commission, and he hopes to engineer more.
Daley has taken his lumps from gays and lesbians. When he was mayor, Harold Washington sanctioned the Mayor’s Council on Gay and Lesbian Issues (COGLI) to advise him directly. “You could go right up to the fifth floor, knock on the door and talk to someone,” says lawyer Larry Rolla, who chaired COGLI. But early in his administration Daley paid short shrift to COGLI.
In November 1989 Daley came to a community meeting at Ann Sather on Belmont. The crowd that night was heavily populated by members of ACT UP as well as by people with AIDS. The assembled were troubled over COGLI and a weak city policy on AIDS. Nancy Reiff, Daley’s first link to the community, was booed. When someone shouted, “You don’t know what it’s like to have a deadly disease,” Daley, whose son Kevin died of spina bifida, lost his temper. “I have a child who died of an illness. Are you insinuating that I’m not human? Please don’t ever do that to anyone again because you’re doing a disservice to the people of this city.” Then he stormed out to cries of “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Shortly thereafter, in a sweeping restructuring, Daley took all special-interest commissions, whether advisory or free-standing like COGLI, and folded them under the aegis of the CHR. Direct access to Daley was over. “This was viewed as stepping on our autonomy,” Rolla says, “but, in fairness, it also reflects Daley’s approach to his office, which is more federalist and less grass-roots than Harold’s was.”
Daley had been the first mayor to lead the Pride Parade-he rode in a bright blue Thunderbird convertible in 1989-but two years later he begged off, saying he was reserving Sundays for his family. The community responded by dumping the mayor as honorary chairman of the AIDS Walk Chicago. Relations hardly improved last year when the mayor, citing financial constraints, refused to recommend an increase in the AIDS budget of the Department of Health, which Windy City Times had found to be the lowest municipal AIDS allotment among big cities.
On April 2, when the mayor took part in a candlelight anti-violence march through Lake View, he was hooted at. “He looked rattled,” Damski says, but his appearance was considered gutsy by some activists. Mike Schumann, a veteran of ACT UP and Queer Nation and one of those booing, gives the mayor credit. “He came and he stayed, and he took it. He’s trying.” Later that month Daley reversed field, backing a bill sponsored by Ald. Helen Shiller (46th) that boosted AIDs funding by $2.5 million.
Today the Department of Health is spending $3.6 million annually on AIDS patient care and education and prevention, says Judith Johns, assistant commissioner for HIV/AIDS planning and policies. But when federal and some state dollars are added on, Johns says, the outlay climbs to $13 million. “We need more money for AIDS,” she says. “But the mayor has many health problems, like infant mortality and lead poisoning. Whenever I’ve spoken to him, Mayor Daley has been very sensitive to the issue of AIDS.”
At this year’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony in November, Daley was applauded when he was introduced. He proceeded to hand out awards to the inductees, among them the late Daniel Sotomayor, a cartoonist and ACT UP leader who had regularly screamed at Daley at public events. Sotomayor died of AIDS in February 1992. His lover, the playwright Scott McPherson, another inductee, had succumbed to AIDS 10 days before the Hall of Fame event; a plaque had been given him on his deathbed. When the Hall of Fame announcer noted that Daley and Sotomayor had had a peculiar relationship, the mayor, who retained a personal fondness for the obstreperous Sotomayor, shrugged and smiled gracefully, as if in tribute.
The mayor insists his commitment to gays and lesbians dates from his days as state’s attorney, when he improved prosecution of hate crimes. He calls homosexuals “a great asset to the city. They have improved communities, small businesses, homes and apartments.”
For the moment, anyway, activists have trained their attentions off Daley and onto Cook County Board President Richard Phelan. When Phelan took office in 1991, it was perceived that he would take prompt action on a countywide human-rights ordinance. “I only promised that I’d work toward one,” Phelan says now. The county board president’s problem came from suburbs that didn’t like the county muscling in on their prerogative. Phelan took a half step in issuing an executive order banning discrimination by or against about half of all county workers in October 1991, also setting up an internal commission to implement it. But when he didn’t, as expected, support a full ordinance, activists turned against him. Phelan says that, without a compromise with the suburbs, he didn’t have the votes to enact a law. At a board meeting this summer Queer Nation tried to pelt Phelan with waffles, in an unspoken comment on his leadership.
This fall found the Northwest Municipal Conference, representing the full ring of Chicago suburbs, negotiating with Phelan’s commission and The Gang of Four on a compromise measure. The compromise would ban discrimination except within the suburban governments themselves and would allow towns to substitute the county strictures with those of their own. (Besides Chicago, Oak Park and Evanston already have human- rights laws.)
Gay and lesbian leaders are justifiably proud of how far they’ve come politically. Straight office-holders, especially liberal ones, go to great lengths to win community trust, and votes, to be seen as what’s called “gay-positive.” Last February, at the annual dinner of IMPACT, some 80 gay-positive politicians enthusiastically trooped down the stairs at the Chicago Hilton and Towers, to be introduced by spotlight. Bernie Hansen remains at the forefront; he has introduced a bill entitling homosexuals to sick leave to nurse an ailing partner and to a three-day bereavement pass, a wedge toward what Hansen hopes will one day be full recognition of gay and lesbian domestic partnerships.
Still, there is a deep-seated ambition to escape the plantation-for homosexuals to stop having to deal with straight politicians and get some of their own elected. Says Linda Rodgers: “It’s imperative that we do that. It makes the statement that our leadership comes from within.” Adds Art Johnston, “Nobody can speak for you as well as you can speak for yourself.”
The trend has been growing nationally. There are 75 openly homosexual elected officials in the U.S., according to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based PAC. That’s up 11 people in November. The roster includes two Massachusetts congressmen, Gerry Studds and Barney Frank, and the mayor of Santa Monica, Calif., Judy Abdo, plus assorted judges, school board members and city councilmen. William Waybourn, Victory Fund executive director, says the main problem in electing homosexuals is “the green ceiling,” an inability to raise campaign money. But that seems less difficult in Chicago, where, in his last aldermanic run, Ron Sable amassed a $150,000 war chest. “That’s a significant sum of money in a ward race,” says political consultant Thom Serafin.
The nagging problem here is that for homosexuals to win, they must likely run in a lakefront district where the politicians are already supportive; in other words, gays and lesbians will have to hurt a friend or two.
“Yes, that’s a dilemma,” admits Lisa B. Cohen, executive assistant to Illinois Atty. Gen. Ronald Burris. Yet Cohen and other high government officials who are out are meeting regularly to brainstorm about their roles in public life. The group, convened by Ald. Mary Ann Smith’s chief of staff Greg Harris, also includes Chief Deputy Cook County Clerk Brandon Neese and Tom Chiola, general counsel in the state Department of Professional Regulation.
Chiola is planning to run for judge. Although State Rep. Ellis Levin is supportive and bested an openly gay Republican in November, he will likely face a primary challenge in 1994. Tom Tunney, of Ann Sather, is mentioned as a likely candidate for 44th Ward alderman. And Sable refuses to rule out another try at office.
“Our movement is only 20 years old,” Rick Garcia points out. “Back then we were this invisible minority, and the aldermen didn’t even know us or pretended they didn’t. Now they know us for sure, and not as bar owners but as businessmen and politicians. They are seeing more and more openly gay folks and realize we are nothing but human beings.”
