Karen Sendziak leafs through a file folder containing press releases, handbills, photographs and even a T-shirt from the 1978 state representative campaign of Gary Nepon — the first openly gay person to run for public office in Illinois.
“His surviving lover in New Mexico donated this material,” says Sendziak, an archivist at the Gerber/Hart Library, the Midwest’s largest repository of materials relating to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender history and culture.
In the now-yellowing photos, inside a Fotomat envelope, Nepon smiles broadly, a dapper candidate with his thick mustache and his brushed-leather jacket. He went on to lose his run for the Democratic nomination in the 13th District, which included the epicenter of gay Chicago, the Lake View neighborhood. Thirteen years later, he was dead of AIDS.
One flier from the campaign is a hand-lettered announcement of an appearance by the candidate at the University of Chicago. It includes a statement from Nepon: “Our campaign is only our first statement for human rights!”
But someone using a blue-ink ballpoint pen has crossed out the final two words and replaced them, so that the statement now reads, “Our campaign is only our first statement for Satan’s membership drive for occupancy of Hell.”
Just a single sheet of paper, but it richly brings back to life a particular moment in Chicago gay history, providing a glimpse of Nepon’s pride at being first to stand for office and at the shoestring nature of his campaign — and at the emotionally charged opposition that it sparked.
The Gerber/Hart Library, in a modest storefront at 1127 W. Granville Ave. in the Edgewater neighborhood, is filled with tens of thousands of similar relics that trace the evolution of the gay and lesbian communities in and around Chicago over a period of more than four decades.
Collecting for two decades
For 20 years, the organization — named for Henry Gerber who, while living in Chicago in 1924, founded the first gay rights organization in the U.S., and Pearl Hart, a lesbian attorney and early activist for equal rights for gays — has collected and guarded such materials, including, for example:
– A 1949 invitation to a male-only Halloween Ball on Cottage Grove Avenue.
– An article written by Gerber in the early 1960s about his founding of the Society for Human Rights and his subsequent arrest on morals charges by Chicago police.
– Copies of a short-lived newspaper from 1971 in which lesbians and gay men transformed the pejorative terms often applied to them by mainstream America into prideful references. Its title: “Killer Dykes (and Freaking Fags).”
– A calendar from the same period in Day-Glo colors with a cover featuring images of butterflies and a bomb and the title words, “gay is angry.”
– A souvenir program from the 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
– Clippings from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Chicago Gay Life from July 1981 when the first news of AIDS, still an unnamed “gay cancer,” became public.
– Gay Christmas cards, including one that reads, “Don we now our gay apparel. . . .”
– Games and puzzles with gay- and lesbian-related themes and even a copy of “Super Gay Comics.”
Understanding the past
Each item in the collection, says Wil Brant, another archivist and the recently elected president of the Gerber/Hart board of directors, is a building block to an understanding — among both gays and straights — of the past.
“They provide a lot of pieces to the puzzle — to a lot of puzzles,” Brant says. “To preserve [such historic materials] is to allow people to put [the puzzles] back together — so people can know what happened.”
In addition to safeguarding such materials in its archives, Gerber/Hart has also served as a lending and research library — with its 18,000 volumes and some 12,000 issues of 700 periodicals — and as a community center where reading groups gather, art is exhibited and clubs, such as the Windy City BackGaymmon Club, have their monthly meetings.
But, after a financial scare late last summer, the organization now finds itself at a crossroads, as leaders re-evaluate its role and function.
The most recent money problems began earlier this year when then-president Don Landers, distracted by personal tragedies and business disasters, let fund-raising efforts lapse. By the time Landers stepped aside and Michael Hemmes took over as acting president, “we were facing September with less than $300 in the bank and $8,500 to $10,000 in monthly expenses,” Hemmes says.
Hemmes, a freelance editor and writer, went public — “No one throws a drowning man a life preserver unless he screams for help” — and articles in gay and alternative publications prompted not exactly a flood of funds, but enough to pay the bills for the rest of the year and provide what Hemmes expects will be a $10,000 cushion for the new board coming online on Jan. 1.
“We dodged a bullet for this year, but we’ve got 12 bullets to dodge, one for each month next year,” he says. “We’ve got to get out of the mind-set of hand-to-mouth.”
Meanwhile, in early autumn, Gerber/Hart was approached by Horizons Community Services about relocating to a new gay-lesbian community center, the Center on Halsted, now being developed in a former Chicago Park District building at 3640 N. Halsted St.
The move would be a return to Lake View community where Gerber/Hart was founded in 1981 and operated out of a series of sites until 1999. But it would require splitting up the organization’s holdings, since the new building, set to open in 2004, has room for Gerber/Hart’s books but not its archives of diaries, manuscripts, posters, games, videos and other materials from the history of gay Chicago.
Those archives, Horizons officials have suggested, could simply be donated to the Chicago Historical Society.
That’s an idea that has fallen on deaf ears at Gerber/Hart. “The concern of our board was that much of what we’d collected would be discarded,” Hemmes says.
Besides, Hemmes envisions Gerber/Hart itself becoming “the gay Chicago Historical Society” within the next 10 years or so.
Much must be done, though, to reach that goal, including better fundraising and the establishment of an endowment to pay operating and future development expenses, Brant and Hemmes say.
Throughout its history, Gerber/Hart has relied almost exclusively on volunteers — numbering 35, at present — for its operations and planning. Over the past eight years, the institution has experimented with paid staff, but nearly all have been part-time workers, and there has never been more than one at any given time, except for a brief period in 1996 when there were two.
Need for professional staff
“We need to identify, develop and find the funds to be able to have professional staff people,” says Brant, who is the coordinator of academic publications at the Chicago Theological Seminary, where he is also a doctoral candidate.
Brant discounts a move to the Center on Halsted. “The amount of space they have available is not enough,” he says. “We don’t see it being a possibility.” In addition, Brant says that, by returning to Lake View, Gerber/Hart would be turning its back on Edgewater, “one of the growing community areas where gays and lesbians are living.”
For the future, Brant says Gerber/Hart will downplay, but not eliminate, its role as a community gathering place. “Right now, we need to focus on being a good library and a good archives,” he says.
And, in retrospect, he says the financial crisis of last summer may have been a blessing in disguise. “It’s given us an excuse to reassess things.”
