What Was Queer Lakeview Like In The 1980s?

By Allison Yates

Like all of Chicago, the North Side Lakeview neighborhood has gone through several dramatic changes over the last century, from its humble beginnings as a quiet outpost, to a hotspot for punk youth, to eventually solidifying huge swaths of the boundaries as one of the best “Gayborhoods” in the U.S.

In the early 1980s, Lakeview was already the preferred neighborhood of the LGBTQ community—the majority white, cis men, though there were some other communities represented—and the epicenter of the organizing and fight around the city and country’s lack of response to the burgeoning HIV/AIDS epidemic. In Rebecca Makkai’s award-winning novel The Great Believers, we get a well-researched, detailed view of this neighborhood as its LGBTQ residents grappled with the loss of entire friend groups to the virus and how to support one another while also organizing for healthcare.

To understand more the real-life parallels between Makkai’s novel and 1980s Lakeview, Read & Run Chicago hosted three LGBTQ elders after our Book Club Run of The Great Believers in January 2025 in partnership with Gerber/Hart Library & Archives, the largest LGBTQ archives in the Midwest and a resource for Rebecca Makkai.

In the video below, hear the panel discussion moderated by podcaster and book club host Betsy Tomszak with Tracy Baim, Arnie Aprill, and Gary Chichester, all of whom were active in the LGBTQ community at the time the book is set, whether as journalists, community organizers, or in the arts. As you watch the panel discussion, you’ll start to identify many similarities between the novel’s characters and these elders. In fact, Tracy Baim was one of the people Rebecca Makkai interviewed while writing this book.

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Transcript

[ 00:03:21 ]always join any one of our events in the way that is right for you. So, you are always welcome to come for just a Q &A or both portions, whatever. So, for those of you who just joined us, we did a three-mile route where we stopped at a few different places where each of these people has a connection to, and Betsy is going to explain that in a moment. But I just wanted to say to all of our panelists, who we will introduce in a moment, these are a group of amazing Chicagoans. Who love to explore the city using movement and stories, and they all read The Great Believers, and they're all really, really excited to learn about you so thank you for being here tonight, um, so I'm going to pass it along to Jen first to talk about Urban Heart Library Archives, and then I'm going to pass it on to Betsy for the panel, but I want to mention after the panel,

[ 00:04:12 ]keep your little butts in your seats because we have our Apple and someone else's. Woo! That was a good one, right? Okay, so, um, hello? You're good. If you lost it? Yeah. Did you lose it? Yeah. True. Okay, let's just all pretend we have it. Alright, um, so, Jen, use this mic to talk about Gruber Heart Library and then we can tell them about our fun, fun plan. I was like, what? I'll hold it here in case the sound comes back on. But I'm Jen. I work at Gerber Hart Library and Archives. We are at LPPQ Library and Archives, situated in Rogers Park. And we were founded in 1981. So we have a lot of materials that relate to the events that happened in The Great Believers and Rebecca McIsaac's research at Gerber Hart as well.

[ 00:05:02 ]I created this little reading list, which is at the front. On the back, it has a bunch of suggestions of, like, if you want to learn about the papers that inspired the newspapers that are in great labor, do you want to learn from general LGBT? There's a lot of recommendations here. This barely scratches the surface. So, if anything piques your interest about Chicago LGBTQ history, you want to learn more, there's an email for us. There's also a QR code that goes to our website. So I'm happy to help. And I love doing history sleuthing. So follow us on Instagram at River Heart. You can sign up for our newsletter at the front or on our website as well. Very excited to hear more about the book.

[ 00:05:41 ]I read it for the first time last year, week. It took me a long time to build up to reading it and it was definitely very emotional and beautiful, and I can't wait to hear from everyone on the panel today. So thank you all for being here. Thank you all for your presence. And also it makes me look really official, right? Okay. So for those of you who went on the run, you already heard who Betsy is, but I'll introduce Betsy again. And I also did just wanted to say we did host Rebecca Mackay back in 2023. Um, which was awesome and we had the panelists who are here with us today, we had them along the route when we did this in 2023.

[ 00:06:19 ]Um, and so Rebecca says hello, yeah, and she says thank you, and she says she wishes she could have been here with us but she's on vacation. Um, but that being said, one of the things that we loved about our 2023 event with you all is that we heard a little bit from you, but we heard about five minutes each. So people really wanted to know more about you. And so this was our one opportunity to be able to do that. So this is a very exciting opportunity. So now on to Betsy. So Betsy is the host of her own book club and the podcast 'Books with Betsy', which celebrates the reading life for all readers. And each week, Betsy interviews a different person about their reading life. One of you could be a lucky podcast attendee, or what do you call them? Guests. And Betsy encourages all readers to find their most accessible path to enjoying reading and pass it on to you. Thank you, Betsy. Thank y'all. Yeah, and the, um, there are, yeah, Allison was a guest, Sarah was a guest, and Cynthia was a guest. So, um, I expect anyone who would like to,

[ 00:07:38 ]Okay, so one thing I also wanted to invite everybody here, I also run a book club at Off Color Brewing, which we have a little offline. When I invited everybody to this, I said, 'Who likes to run?' And it was perfect. But we are discussing The Great Believers as our January book. And that's going to be on Tuesday the 21st, so if you're interested in having it open to anybody, it's at seven o'clock um and it's very chill low-key, small groups, so you get to sort of like get into more of an in-depth discussion of the book. Um but here we are, so I'm gonna get to introduce our our wonderful panel tonight, and basically the way this is gonna go is that I'm gonna introduce um each member of the panel and then give them a chance to sort of give their kind of history and their connection and their story as related to our stops on the run.

[ 00:08:37 ]And then afterwards, we will have it open, so if you want to think about a question you would like to ask or some more information as related to either their experience or the book or whatever that might look like, you are going to be welcome to do so. So you can start thinking about that a little bit. So, I'm going to introduce them individually and then tell their story and then go to the next person. So you know what. Yeah. We have a bio-loop. I don't know. That's so weird. Okay, so we're going to start with Tracy Dean. I did not practice that thing. That's good. You got it. And Tracy is the co-founder of Woody City Times and is an author and activist.

[ 00:09:20 ]Her work was used as research in The Great Believers, and she was interviewed by Rebecca McKay for the book. She was inducted into the Chicago LGBTQ Hall of Fame in 1994. And the stop that we just did over there where we were talking about the newspaper would be the stop that correlated to Tracy's experience. So Tracy, would you like to go ahead and share a little bit? Sure. First, I want to point out legendary Tom Tunney, owner of Ann Sathers, here with us. And he could easily be on this panel as well. The Illinois Masonic Stop and others provided meals for just thousands and thousands of people impacted by HIV/ AIDS over the years, including through Open Hand Chicago and at Illinois Masonic. So Tom has many a story as well.

[ 00:10:15 ]And St. Joseph's. And St. Joseph's, yeah. So I'm going to. I know everybody has cinnamon hands. But this is a book that is available at Gerber Hart Library. It's not available for sale. We did it for our 35th anniversary of Windy City Times in 2020. It has hundreds of covers, including right at the start on page eight from 1985. This is kind of the source material that Rebecca was. Looking at um so you can go and see it at Gerber's Heart, we might for our 40th anniversary this September reissue it and make it available more widely; it was a limited run fundraising book but um, you can see all of the LGBT papers um that I was associated with in some way in here and so I'll pass it around and uh, trusting, trusting I have 10 I have 10 left, just FYI.

[ 00:11:05 ]So the Windy City Times newspaper was co-founded in 1985 by Jeff McCourt, Bob Bearden, and Drew Bananish, and I, with a bunch of other writers and other folks. We were first located in a third-floor walk-up where Jeff and Bob lived together on Melrose and the Lake. Bob was diagnosed with HIV/ AIDS within a very short period of time, maybe three or four weeks after when we launched in September of 1985. That was also around the time when Rock Hudson was diagnosed with HIV. And Bob was very, very sick for a long time. And we eventually moved out of that facility and moved to a second-story over here that was called the Rhody Center. In the front of the Rhody Center was Horizons Community Services, Social Service Agency, a counseling center, a couple other tenants, and we were in the back building on two floors, on the second and third floor, right next to the L.

[ 00:12:05 ]So when Rebecca, a few years ago, came to my house and interviewed me about a gay newspaper in 1985. It was fascinating to hear her questions as someone who was a little kid then, not part of the community. And I felt like, you know, ultimately what ended up in the book is a totally different name of newspaper, different genders, different everything. But there were some really funny stories that were right out of the time period that we were working in. It was a volatile time period, passionate. And all sorts of things that were happening. But back then, the LGBT media were the only ones really covering any depth of what was going on with HIV/ AIDS. We were the only source of information for the broad public.

[ 00:12:46 ]We, you know, gay doctors were providing information, nurses, everybody that could find any scientific information as drugs started to be developed and everything. So the LGBTQ press was just vital to communicating what was going on. Equally important was documenting the lives we were losing. There's a new book that's going to come out in around April that I worked on in the last year and a half. It's the history of Howard Brown Health. In it is extreme detail on how that organization started around 1973, 74 as a VD clinic and then did work on the hepatitis B vaccine. And that work led to them also doing early research on HIV/ AIDS, which fast forward. Helped on creating a vaccine for COVID, which in turn may help finally create a vaccine for HIV.

[ 00:13:39 ]This is the journey of Howard Brown and the importance of it in in that era that The Great Believers is about. You're going to be able to read a lot of detail about it both Gary and Arnold are in the book as well as about 130 other folks, and hundreds, and you know thousands of pages of archives were looked through to really tell the story of the resilience of a community, internal traumas and fights, and all of that drama that comes when you're fighting for your lives as well as fighting one another, but you still make it through. And so if you want to carry on, obviously Gerber Hart will have the books and you'll be able to get them from Howard Brown and other places.

[ 00:14:19 ]But I'm really grateful for The Great Believers because Chicago were often forgotten in the fight of the gay movement generally, but also HIV/ AIDS. It impacted this city differently than the coasts. We learned from the coasts and how they responded. And we're able to. We weren't as devastated here, but we were certainly devastated. But that is thanks to the people that were working on the coasts to fight for change. You know, ACT UP was started in New York. It came here, right? Those kinds of things. But we did a tremendous amount of innovative stuff, including Tom, delivering, you know, just people would walk people's dogs. They would deliver meals. They would do anything they could to serve our own community. The lessons of that are going to be needed again. So I appreciate being here tonight.

[ 00:15:21 ]Um has provided over 50 years of commitment and work to the LGBTQ+ communities. In 1971, he co-founded the Chicago Gay Alliance, which created Chicago's first gay and lesbian community center. His signature was on the first permit issued by the city of Chicago for our Pride March in 1971. So cool. 70 was not a permitted march. That's a whole history thing. So in '71, we went for a permit. Got it. And as Quinn filled us in. At the stop at Clark and Wellington, that was the first um the 1970s break was the first Pride parade period so in the world in the world yes so um we are gonna hear enough I'm like a big microphone um

[ 00:16:31 ]Going back to the history of the First March, there's a little park down across from the Newberry Library. It's nicknamed as Bughouse Square because it was originally donated to the city of Chicago for a free speech area. Back in 1970, there was going to be an anniversary of the first rebellion against, you know, which is basically the Stonewall Riot that everyone probably has heard of. And so in our thing, we were going to have no permit necessary. Wonderful. So we went down there and actually did a demonstration and a rally in Bughouse Square and then on to a march down to the Civic Center. And that was the first march. It was much more of a radical thing than it was what it is today with sequins and glamour and everything that one sees in it.

[ 00:17:31 ]As a matter of fact, I'm working on the side project for getting a recognition from the federal government for historic landmark status for the first march in the world to commemorate the Italian at Stonewall. So then the following year, there was a breakup between the Chicago Gay Liberation Front and a group of less radical people, I guess you could say, that was basically how Chicago Gay Alliance got started. It was more like working within the government areas and trying to do sort of like that. So we did open up a community center at 171 West Elm, kind of a small little house just on the side of kind of a bad neighborhood. But we served a lot of people. We were there 24 hours. We had a library. We had a phone line.

[ 00:18:36 ]We had a potluck dinner area. We had meetings on a regular basis. And we took in people that were homeless, people as we approach them in the book. A lot of people were disowned. So they would come to Chicago and try to find whatever. I know when I first came out, I knew I was looking for something, but not really knowing what it was because there was no information out there. We didn't have the internet. We didn't have any of this stuff that's going on. And then you ended up getting AIDS in 1981. And that was really scary because I was at the time working in the bar business, I guess, the hospitality industry. And even though I didn't know a lot of these people really well, there were so many customers that you would start seeing that in the obituaries

[ 00:19:32 ]And that was another thing. I never saw a gay obituary before. And then the gay press started printing them on a regular basis. And it was every week. You go to the obituaries and see the people that you knew or didn't know, but how they fit into the city itself, the antithesis of the community, and how you lost these people. And it was really depressing because at the time it was like, hey, this is a death sentence. You know, it's not, you know, even though today there is medication. It's still kind of a death sentence. We didn't know what it was. Up until 1985, you never got any kind of public information about it. The President of the United States during the time, and certainly Mr.

[ 00:20:26 ]Ronald Reagan, and George, the old George Bush, refused to even mention the term HIV or AIDS. It just wasn't. Part of what they did is that a queer disease and you know we found out later no it's not, it's just a disease it wasn't you know we needed to take care of it so we figured we lost what would you estimate Tracy about 40, 000 people that were lost because just being ignored it in that period of time. Well, you mean just in Chicago? Yeah. Probably, I think, around 20. It would depend on the time frame. Yeah. Overall, hundreds of thousands across the country and millions around the world. Being ignored, you know, just being ignored. Gay men were freaking out. Thank God for our lesbian sisters. Yeah.

[ 00:21:18 ]Because they kind of took over. Made things right for us. They were friendships. They didn't have to worry about the same thing, but they were really a great way of bringing the two communities together. We were kind of separated there for a while, but it was really great. We had, when you brought up Tom Tunney, we had, this was his restaurants during the time, always served as a community meeting house and meeting place that you could always tell we have this meeting we have that meeting can we use your spaces and he was oh sure whatever you need and you got your you know your cinnamon rolls on top of it so uh and then from there we just kind of got on there's a lost soul that people were lost and their families refused to acknowledge them they disowned them It was a very scary time.

[ 00:22:24 ]And if it wasn't for the community kind of getting their shit together, that was a positive aspect of it, that we were forced to take care of ourselves. And that, to me, is one of the most important things that came from that period of time. Even now, I look back at those times and see how the way the country is right now. Nobody seems to be talking to each other at all, as you watch the news every day now. But we disagreed back in those days, but it was a good disagreement. We learned from each other. We were maybe bitchy at one point, but we were civil on other points. And we really made Chicago one of the great cities as far as the LGBT community in the country, as much as well.

[ 00:23:45 ]We did test the mic, of course. I do know it took me like 30 minutes. That's probably what it is-that burns out the battery. All right. And our last but not least, Arnie April is a gay man who is formerly the Community Outreach Coordinator for Aging Services at Howard Brown Health. He's an award-winning writer and theater director with a community organizing background in the areas of school reform and juvenile justice activism. And when we did the run, when they did the run previously, Arnie got a chance to speak when we were at the stop outside of Masonic. Yeah. So the most important part of my story is the experience that that you know the other speakers have already spoken about about the total devastation of the AIDS crisis because we had just come into our own sexuality so there was a real sense of of sexual liberation and joy in our community, and then when AIDS came in and there was just there was no real information but horrible

[ 00:25:06 ]public information about this horrible, dangerous gay cancer that was going to ruin the country. There was deep, deep hysteria against HIV in the whole community, and the failure of those two presidents to even acknowledge this as an issue was devastating. I also want to validate what the other speakers have said: When we realized that we had to take care of each other and that we would get no real information and no real support, nothing but public hate for our needs, we stepped up and served each other. We got into all kinds of organizational fights about how we did that. A lot of them were very bitter; disagreements. There were fights. It's because you know, not worse than what we have in the Republicans in Congress right now, so you know, um, but um, a couple things happened that were very significant that I as a person who had just come out recently before AIDS had hit and had been so grateful to be a patient at Howard Brown from the time I was young,

[ 00:26:28 ]there was just such deep despair; I mean, you would go out to a bar and you would see people that you had crushes on or that you had slept with who had Kaposi's sarcoma over their whole face, you know, so, and there was no information about how it was spread, so we all thought that if we had been sexually active, we were going to die; we were going to die a horrible death. And as Gary said, 'Each week you would open Windy City Times and find out more of your friends that had died. You'd seen them a week ago. You didn't even know they were ill. So it was loss after loss after loss.' And we were worn out from going to funerals. I didn't even go to all the funerals that I wanted to.

[ 00:27:17 ]And it was really devastating. But there was this. Because there were no other resources and so little information, we depended on gay newspapers and we depended on the health clinics where there were gay doctors and gay nurses, and you felt safe talking about your own fears and vulnerability. I had several of my roommates in a row die of AIDS. I finally found a long-term partner that I adored, and he died of AIDS. There was enormous loss. Of all my closest friends from that period, there's only two that survived. And I was so grateful to the lesbian community who stepped up and took care of so many of us. People, families had rejected them. Their friends had rejected them. You know, their straight friends wouldn't have anything to do with them.

[ 00:28:18 ]There was so much hysteria around AIDS, and it was all directed towards hate towards the LGBTQ community. And there wasn't even any discussion about the hate directed towards the trans community. So there was internal conflicts inside the LGBTQ community where cis gay folks were very hostile towards the needs of trans folks. And then after the crisis had passed, many lesbians who had taken care of many of us, many of us had died in their living rooms. And there was very little interest in the folks who had survived and became assimilated into mainstream culture towards the needs of gay women in our community. So I know many lesbians who are caretakers for people dying of AIDS who are profoundly bitter towards all cis gay men. So, you know, there were coming togethers.

[ 00:29:22 ]I used to live in an apartment building where most of the people in the building were gay, and everyone's doors were open, so if you ran out of you know coffee, you would go to your neighbor's place and just take some coffee, not even have to tell them. So I'm very concerned about the loss of that sense of community, and I'm really concerned about young people who didn't have any knowledge or contact with the AIDS crisis and um and don't realize what danger we're in now because of you know the Trump government and the oligarchy is taking over all policy um so um I just want to finish with one um short story. While I was working at Howard Brown in aging services, I helped convene a long-term AIDS survivor support group which I'm still a part of even though I'm not working there anymore.

[ 00:30:23 ]I was one of the few people in my circle of gay friends who never contracted HIV. But everybody else died. Everybody else died. And many of them died really horrible deaths. I was proud that the community really came out in support of the people who were surviving with AIDS. And I'll finish with one kind of funny story from the ward at Masonic. So my personal physician was David Blatt before the AIDS crisis hit and his partner formed the unit at Masonic. And what's documented in the book was the express intention to develop a caring community inside that ward that people who were dying were just kind of discarded, you know. And of the folks that I work with now that are long-term survivors, they thought they were going to die within a year, so they spent all their savings and they don't have money now, and they don't have they don't have family to take care of them, the support services are very hard to get.

[ 00:31:40 ]So one day in this loving AIDS ward, And David Blatt flew in at my request to just talk to the current survivors about what those early years were like. And one of the patients came up to him and said, 'David, why are they making an announcement? Would the drama queen please come to the front desk?' Okay, and David had to say to this patient, 'no', they actually said, 'would the trauma team come?' But the fact that he could tease them and they could laugh and they could express outrage was part of the character of that sign.

[ 00:32:53 ]Just hold your phones off. Yeah. Yeah, and I want to open it up. We had a lot of really great discussion. There's so much you can talk about. Their experiences with the panelists is related to the book and is related to existence um and so is there anything um I want to open it up if anybody has any questions for the panelists is there something you want to hear more about if there's something related to the text or um just a question you would like to hear yeah okay I will use my hearing super hearing

[ 00:33:45 ]This neighborhood actually was a place where Japanese Americans who had been in internment camps during World War II, they were not allowed to go back to their homes in California. They were largely moved to Chicago, and a lot of them were moved to this neighborhood. So there used to be a lot of Japanese restaurants and paper stores. So I don't know when and how it became a target for gay, you know, arrivals. But it's interesting, you know, it's interesting to me that this was a neighborhood for marginalized people, and then another set of marginalized people came in. It was also heavily Latino in the 70s when Little Jim's Bar opened at the spot that now Howard Brown Health is at, the corner of Cornelia and Halsted.

[ 00:34:42 ]In the early 70s, there was the Beckman House Lesbian Community Center, which Horizons eventually took over, which is now Center and Halstead. There was a lesbian, bisexual woman opened a bookstore on Halstead, near where Center and Halstead is now, so kind of the early to mid-70s. Closet Bar opened on Broadway. Tom Tunney took over Anteater's Restaurant in the early 80s. What changed because the community kept migrating from downtown it kept moving north north north and north and it kind of anchored for a very long time here and then spread out from here because people started to own the buildings owned the businesses the mafia had owned a lot of the businesses and and and people were renting bar locations but there were finally kind of permanent lines in the sand as people started to own property in this area um and that kept people here longer and of course then it grew so

[ 00:35:34 ]At the Dunkin' Donuts that used to be at the corner where I think it's a Target now that was a huge gathering spot for gay youth in the 1980s. There was a juice bar just near where the Windy City Times offices were Medusa's that attracted a lot of queer youth at the time. The Chicago Reader, like three or four years ago, ran a huge cover story on the history of Medusa's, which talks about that legacy. So really by the mid-70s, it started to become more of that. It's because of ownership; it's a little like Greek Town, you know? Once people started owning the businesses and and Greek Town communities could be more stable, right? Um, in that but still the community, obviously, is spread out; it's too big to fit in any one city or neighborhood, right?

[ 00:36:17 ]So um, that's really the migration was people we were kicked out of places so I had to keep moving north. Most of the bars uh that were popular LGBTQ bars, mostly gay male, were located at Clark and Illinois. Clark Street being kind of a seedy area at the time. But then rents were cheap down there for bars. And it was, you always, bars are more successful if there are other bars there to kind of feed off of it. So you could go at the time downtown, it was the Bistro, the Gold Coast, the Readout, the Baton, you know, all these different clubs that people would go to. As those kind of closed up then the migration yeah yeah because again the Illinois Medical Association I believe owned most of that property down there and slowly we were kind of priced out, so we moved up to where things were a little more affordable.

[ 00:37:16 ]Now you have Halston Street, and it's not that affordable anymore. And I want to point out that Buckhouse Square, where Gary started his organizing, that used to be called Tower Town. It was one of the earliest gay neighborhoods because a lot of artists started moving to that area. And the arts community was just more open to gay folks because so many of us are in the arts community. I also want to pick up on Gary's point that there's always been in our movement a conflict between the people who are seeing their positions as radical and people who want to, you know, um assimilate into the dominant culture and uh it's been a you know so when the you know the Pride parades were originally protests they weren't just pride parades um and we like the original folks who were part of the Stonewall uprising got marginalized very quickly from the work in New York.

[ 00:38:19 ]So it's always been a tension in our community and I am very concerned about how the gay organizations and the LGBTQ organizations are all competing for funding from private funders. So, in my job is trying to make connections between the different resources that has been severely compromised by competing for dollars. Let me just, let me interject a little bit of history because Ann Savage is part of the history of Lakeview prior to the gay community. This used to be a Scandinavian neighborhood. In fact, where Medusa's is at was a Norwegian like fraternity house. And what happened in the 1960s with the advent of the automobile and the suburbanization, a lot of inner city neighborhoods declined. Right, right, right. This neighborhood was declining.

[ 00:39:21 ]The lakefront was fine, but as you got to Broadway and Halstead and West, it was a very disinvested neighborhood. And we're the last vestige of the Swedish component of this history. And what happened, and I was part of it, Gary and Tracy and I were part of the investment by the gay community in Lakeview for a couple of reasons. Number one, the prices were cheap. Generally, gay men, and for that matter, lesbian women, but more so gay men, didn't have kids. So they didn't have to worry about their personal safety, but they always lived on the edge anyway. So the idea of Lakeview being a little seedy is actually maybe more attractive. However, we didn't have to worry about the school. We generally didn't have kids, so we didn't have to worry about the quality of the public school.

[ 00:40:28 ]So it's not just in Chicago. But you have Chelsea and Greenwich Village in New York. And you had Castro on the coast. So, this neighborhood was, you know, wasn't much different than what happened in New York and what also happened in San Francisco. So, you know, there's a lot more written about it. But, you know. The interesting thing they when one of the speakers talked about Japanese American we did a lot of work with senior wellness that included a lot of Asian people and it was very interesting in 1940 the census in Chicago had 500 Japanese people in the whole city of Chicago, 1940. Now we've talked about the internment and the fact that most people on the West Coast were put into camps and lost everything.

[ 00:41:25 ]When the war ended, so Chicago, if you can believe it, was less prejudiced because the Californians didn't want the Asians to go back to California. There was enough antipathy towards Pearl Harbor and other things. So what happened was that a lot of Asians, or Japanese specifically, came to Chicago because number one, can you imagine this? We were less prejudiced. And number two, there were jobs. So what happened is in 1950, the census in Chicago, the Japanese population rose to 20,000 people from 500 10 years previous. And they not only located in Lakeview, but Hyde Park was the other. And so that was. Kind of interesting, you know, just from not only the Scandinavian part, the gay part, the disinvestment, and as Tracy said, there were a lot of gangs in Lakeview; yes, there were some serious this was a serious uh crime-ridden area.

[ 00:42:36 ]Not so much necessarily along the lakefront, but if you got off the lakefront, whether it was Broadway, whether it was Halston, whether it was Bracy or Clark, there were problems. And you know Wrigley Field has been here. But it was tough around Wrigley Field. You know, it was a very difficult and highly Latino. And of course, with the changing times, you know, the gay community put the investment dollars and made themselves at home here. And they also followed with gay-owned businesses. Right. So the combination really set a foundation here for the community, as was said. Community started you know not started here because it was evolving over a period of time from Bug House Square to uh Alfie's was on Rush Street and then uh Clark and Diversity was an area, and then but finally settled because a lot of us actually now own the building so we couldn't be we couldn't be displaced because people fell in disfavor oh my god we got a gay bartender we got to get rid of them.

[ 00:43:44 ]So we have our own ownership of the property and our businesses, and that's how, I think, the seed and the foundation here, but obviously it has spread through all parts of the city. But historically, Tracy, you might be a better figure of this, there were some lesbian bars here, but it was kind of ironic that the lesbian community wasn't necessarily centered in Lakeview. You know, it was a little bit in a, certainly in Andersonville was ahead of its time as a woman's based community. And then there was also a little more spread out, but it wasn't the sense of the gay bar district that Halstead became. There's never been a lesbian bar district because there aren't enough. They don't spend this money the same way, but there was a lesbian bar, Ladybug. I think it was on Halstead. There was the Swan Club right by Wrigley Field. There was his and hers, which was all gender. Right next to Wrigley Field, the closest women-owned on Broadway. So it was periodic, sporadic around the city. So we never had a concentration, but definitely were kind of pushed off of Halstead as the pricing went up on Halstead. That lesbian bar closed.

[ 00:45:08 ]Now gentrification is a bad word. I don't necessarily agree with that, but there was displacement, and there is displacement still, but there's also a much broader gay and lesbian community that is much bigger than Lakeview. But that's why we were very deliberate about the center on Halston being at one end of the Hall Street corridor that gave our owners and restaurants and the other LGBT senior housing, you know, and we hope someday Gerber Hart has a presence on Hall Street, but that's my personal bias. But, you know, the idea is we're trying to keep this identity because not only is it good for our Chicago community, but it's good as a tourism. You know I've been to many cities looking at the gay and lesbian environment, it's all here, there, and everywhere.

[ 00:46:01 ]You got to have a car and you know what's been interesting is that Chicago has a concentrated community with support services, whether it's Howard Brown Center or Allspit or LGBT housing intertwined with a commercial district. You know, but it's hard, yeah, yeah, I, I've said enough, and I want to as the panel knows that I think. But it's really important to talk about, as Tracy and Gary have mentioned, we had very little access to information. And in the early days, one of the only places that I, as a young gay man, could get any information was at panels held at Ann Sathers. I went to a panel when I was very young, and there was a panel about LGBTQ aging. And I hadn't even thought about that. Now I'm old, you know. But there were people like Gary and Tracy who really helped people converge. And I also want to really encourage folks to go to the Gerber Hart Library because there's lots of research that needs to be done there. And we need the next generation of folks to start doing it.

[ 00:47:19 ]Is the Leather Archives yes that is an amazing piece of LGBTQ+ history now that where is it at two blocks away from us at River Hearts pretty cool good night everybody thank you um okay well I think that was one more question one more yeah one more question

[ 00:48:02 ]so the tourism here is different right so the there was a slight lag between the numbers the cases that happened especially in New York San Francisco and LA that allowed a little bit of time for our community to learn what they were doing with condoms and safe sex. The organizations on the coast would allow people just to replicate their information here. So there was an organization called Stop AIDS out of San Francisco where they came to Chicago and taught how people could socialize the issues of safety. So I'm not saying we were not devastated, but the numbers were never proportionally as high. So in the Howard Brown book, we talk about the multi-center AIDS cohort study, the MAX study that started in 1981 with Howard Brown.

[ 00:48:52 ]The hundreds of men who volunteered their time to participate in that were getting information ahead of the curve. So Chicago was the only community center that was part of this study. It was all academic institutions. So there was a lot of intellectual property almost that was happening. Our doctors and scientists here were getting ahead of that curve and learning and being able to respond to it. So when they went back after an HIV test was developed, because Howard Brown had done this hepatitis B research, there were samples the CDC had of gay men's blood from the late 70s. They were able to go back and test that blood to see if there was HIV in the bloods before the first public case in 1981, and there was.

[ 00:49:38 ]And what it showed was proportions were very high, but over time, in part because of the MAC study and education, the proportions went down of folks. So, education and prevention, you know, many people were upset with safer sex stuff. Like they felt it was anti-community members that were trying to get others to do safer sex because nobody knew what was actually safe. It was safer sex. There were people called Puritans, and, you know, I'm going to do what I'm going to do. And there was some of that. But for the most part, people wanted to help their community. They wanted to participate in the research that may not be able to help them save their life, but it was going to help the next generation of gay folks.

[ 00:50:19 ]This is what The Great Believers title is so impactful to me. Because in this Howard Brown stories are fresh to me because I just finished it. But there were people that came to their six month check-in with Howard Brown, who were so weak and sick. And the researchers were like, 'How are you doing this?' It's like, 'I have to do this for my community.' They believed there would be a future where people would live. And I'm telling you, we're going to face this very soon with immigration, with anti-vaxxers, with instead of Hoovervilles, we're going to have Trumpvilles. We have to believe we're going to get to the other side. There's nothing more important than hope. But I was on another panel this morning, and there's also nothing more important than joy. We cannot let them steal that joy, and you will not make it through this if you don't find ways to find joy as well. So, hope and joy and the great believers.

[ 00:51:32 ]Trying to find money. And there was a group here that we've learned from New York called Act Up. And the leader, one of the leaders of Chicago's Act Up was Danny Sotomayor, who was a political activist, cartoonist, and some amazing, amazing things that he had drawn. And he and his partner, the person. I ended up both dying of AIDS and great loss. But he did go and they had such a style about making it angry, but also making it fun. Yes. Uh, they had such a style of being able to be theatrical which works really well with the gay guys, you know, and how they, you know, people learn from that. He was able to grab a lot of big pharmaceutical money; we all know that pharma has a lot of money to throw around, you know, a lot.

[ 00:52:35 ]Yeah, there are two documentaries about Danny, and one of them is uh, you can watch it online at www, but it's really worth watching, and Scott McPherson was my roommate until he moved in with Danny, yeah, yeah, yeah. Another one of my roommates was dying of AIDS, and I came home one day and there was a check for the next month's rent; he had gone to a hotel to commit suicide, and I I had to forge his name to deposit the check, yeah. But that's what people were going through at the time. You were lost because you didn't know what was going on. Yeah. And there was no information at all that we could go after our own information. Yeah. And we think we did a pretty good job.

[ 00:53:26 ]That's why we're all kind of sitting here today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Okay, well, Connie, I know one quick last question. You kind of touched on this, Tracy, with the joy. And I wonder if this is your answer, but of all the things that you went through and saw, and all the things that of the friends that you left behind that didn't get to come into the future with you like what is one thing that kept you through getting through all of that over and over again and telling your story over and over again because I know that it's difficult-you have to relive it every time you talk about it so what keeps you wanting to talk about it, what keeps you going if you wouldn't mind sharing, uh?

[ 00:54:03 ]I love Pride. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if you go into any kind of a Pride gathering, the whole month, I could go for a year. Because I love the rainbow colors. I love it all. And that's what you learn when you look at people and try to figure out all the different stories. And it's all part of our community. And our community is such a diverse community. It's such a multifaceted community. That's what brings me joy to see how we all interact with each other. And I think it's really important to pick up what Tracy was saying. We've got to make more deeper connections to each other. It's the only way we'll get through this. And the other thing is, we have to have relationships with younger people.

[ 00:54:54 ]Who are skeptical of folks your age or my age, and a lot of my community is skeptical of young people, but they need the information from our lived experience, you know. Because things are going to be rough these next couple years, and we've got to organize. Yeah, I would say that the joy that we got in the day is there was a lot of fun, and there was a lot of parties. I think, I think it was the DJs that did the best right, like the dancing late night, and then being able to fight the next day. Um, what I would recommend for the next few years is that we're never gonna we can't all do everything right.

[ 00:55:30 ]The way that I haven't burned out in doing this for 41 years is you got to understand that each day you can accomplish what you can accomplish and you will not change the world, but every day you do something. And I am a slightly optimistic in terms of the LGBTQ space, except for the anti-trans work that's going on. I'm slightly more optimistic because the amount of allies this community has in this year versus 40 years ago, where that that book is set, is unbelievably different and we never got our rights. Without allies, but now the number of allies we have and the number of families who are accepting of their younger children because kids are coming out much younger these days, and many are not accepted but many, many more are accepted, um, as their full selves.

[ 00:56:16 ] And so that I see the progress-that's what keeps me going. But I have a tremendous amount of privilege as a white, cisgender lesbian in Chicago, that I have to remember, it's not that I don't get to not do the work, but it is a privilege to do the work, so that gives me joy to be able to keep doing it. And one thing that really pissed me off this past year was when the city of Chicago decided they were going to take control of the parade, and the parade has been the community being proud for so long. But they wanted to shorten it and do this to and do that. I've sat in on meetings with city officials that didn't know what the hell they were talking about. Yeah, yeah, they had no sense of history; they just knew that this is what there was going to be. And I was so pissed off that we did not at least have a town hall meeting with LGBTQ people to put our input. The mayor didn't even ask, even though he has a you know a group of people-LGBTQ people-that you know are there and he just didn't do it. So that's my political thank you. You're so much, I also want to mention that the Village People are not my friends.