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After a couple of name and location changes (Carol’s Pub and Carol’s in Exile), Carol established this members-only club at 1355 North Wells Street and ran it until passing away in September 1979. Carol (Richard Farnham), was a grocer who first opened a gay bar called Coming Out Pub in 1972. In October 1978, Mother Carol took over the Den One space in Old Town where famous house DJ Ron Hardy first spun. The beloved club was torn down to make way for a parking lot in 1982. “Who else could put a thousand miles of mylar ribbon down the outside of a building and cover a corner with glitter – right across the street from a police station?” quipped impressionist Allan Lozito of Dugan, as quoted by the Chicago Tribune. The club’s sixth anniversary featured nine mirror balls and four mortar guns shooting foam stars. As Danny Goss, DiVito’s alternate for many years, recalls, “Lou was the first DJ I ever heard mix on beat and in perfect pitch.” DiVito became Chicago radio’s first “hot mixer” in 1979, recording mixes for WDAI from his DJ booth.Įach year the club’s interior was refreshed in preparation for an anniversary bash. Billboard named DiVito “best regional dee-jay” in 19. An interior decorator, DiVito assisted in designing the club’s layout and sound and light systems. Lou DiVito became the Bistro’s main DJ in 1974. Dugan alluded to the club’s restrictive door policy in a 1974 Chicago Tribune article, explaining, “We’re primarily gay, and we don’t want straights filling the place up so our regular clientele can’t get in.” On some nights, the line of people waiting to get in stretched an entire block, just north of the iconic corn-cob shaped towers of Marina City. Go-go dancers, including a drag queen known as the Bearded Lady, often performed above the large dancefloor, which was surrounded by three bars and decorated by a pair of bright neon lips. The evening begins with a reception at 5:30 p.m.Eddie Dugan opened The Bistro, Chicago’s first big, influential disco, in May of 1973, at what had been an old French restaurant. Tickets are $20, $15 for students and museum members. "Our Bars" is to be followed by "Art, AIDS and Activism in Chicago" in March and "From New Town to Boys Town to Lakeview" in April.
#Chicago gay bar downtown series
The series typically has three programs a year. It's the first program in the 14th year of the "Out at CHM" series focusing on LGBTQ issues.
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#Chicago gay bar downtown windows
"I still remember what a big deal it was when you finally had bars with windows that you could actually look out of and that didn't have entrances off the alley or the front windows painted dark," Keehnen said.Īccording to a museum news release, the discussion will concentrate on how, going back to the '50s and beyond, bars served as "places of community and safety, sometimes broken by police violence and often determined by politics of gender and race." The bars only gradually came into the open, going through periods where, for instance, an upside-down beer sign might signify a gay bar to those in the know, as things moved toward more widespread acceptance. He credited a movement that borrowed tactics from the civil-rights era and antiwar activism, sometimes growing out of student protest such as the gay liberation movement at the University of Chicago, but even so much of the activity remained centered on gay bars. "Chicago had a really good balance I think between picketing and protest combined with legal wins," Keehnen said. In New York City, the movement galvanized around the Stonewall riots in 1969, but things were "a little different" in Chicago, he said, where activist attorneys succeeded in winning a couple of key rulings. "But the thing is that feeling of belonging when they went to bars was worth the risks of being busted in one of those raids and having their names listed in the paper." "People were rightfully scared and cautious," Keehnen added. "We'd always been harassed by police, but things really escalated that year.
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"So crackdowns on bars got really intense, the illegal raids and everything," he said. Daley called for a crackdown on gay bars in an effort to "clean up the city" ahead of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. "So really our bars are kind of ground zero for our feelings of self-awareness, community, activism, and through our activism basically our rights."Īccording to Keehnen, Mayor Richard J. "So what you had was all these people coming together, feeling they weren't the only one, and you have them getting a sense of community. "From that sort of self-awareness that they weren't the only one, people began to see that the problem wasn't the fact that they were gay or LGBT, rather the problem was the way society viewed the LGBT community," he added.