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Chicago After Stonewall: A History of LGBTQ Chicago From Gay Life to Gay Lib
St Sukie de la Croix
$28.95
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Description
A History of LGBTQ Chicago From Gay Life to Gay Lib.
Chicago After Stonewall: Gay Lib to Gay Life is a detailed account of how LGBTQ Chicagoans responded to the Stonewall Riots. This book pulls together jigsaw pieces of information from many sources, including a wealth of documents held in the McCormick Library of Special Collections at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, to reveal a picture of a raggle-taggle band of dysfunctional rebels with one cause.
In post-Stonewall Chicago, several attempts were made to publish a gay newspaper, but none lasted. The longest was the Chicago Gay Crusader with twenty-six issues, between 1973-1975. However, the paper was irregular and a hangover from the 1960s hippie underground press in style. It wasn’t until June 20, 1975, when Grant L. Ford published Volume 1/Number 1 of Chicago Gay Life, that Chicago boasted a professional gay newspaper.
However, from the Stonewall Riots until the publication of Chicago Gay Life, there was no reliable source for local gay news, only irregular gay publications like The Paper, Mattachine Midwest Newsletter, or hippie underground/alternative rags, Seed, Kaleidoscope, Reader, and Second City, and college newspapers like Maroon and Roosevelt Torch.
This book begins with Stonewall and ends with the first issue of Gay Life on June 20, 1975, and an impassioned editorial by Valerie Bouchard for the community to “come together, unite, and focus on similarities and not differences.”
About the Author
St Sukie de la Croix has been a social commentator and researcher on Chicago’s LGBT history for three decades. He has published oral-history interviews; lectured; conducted historical tours; documented LGBT life through columns, photographs, humor features, and fiction; and written the book Chicago Whispers (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) on local LGBT history. St Sukie de la Croix, the man the Chicago Sun-Times described as “the gay Studs Terkel,” came to Chicago from his native Bath, England, in 1991. He has had columns in local publications or online news and entertainment sources such as Chicago Free Press, Gay Chicago, Nightlines/Nightspots, Outlines, Blacklines, Windy City Times, and GoPride.com as well as numerous others outside the city. In 2008, he was a historical consultant as well as an on-screen interviewee for the WTTW television documentary “Out & Proud in Chicago.” In 2005 and 2006 he had two of his plays, “A White Light in God’s Choir” and “Two Weeks in a Bus Station with an Iguana,” performed by Chicago’s Irreverence Dance & Theatre Company. A popular and engaging lecturer, he has spoken at a range of venues, from Chubb Insurance to Boeing and from Horizons Gay Youth Services to the Chicago Area Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. His crowning achievement came in 2012 when the University of Wisconsin published his in-depth, vibrant record of LGBT Chicagoans, Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall. With a foreword by noted historian John D’Emilio, the book received glowing reviews and cemented de la Croix’s deserved position as a top-ranking historian and leader. In 2012 de la Croix was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. Two years later he moved to Cathedral City, California, and in 2017 published The Blue Spong and the Flight from Mediocrity, a novel set in 1924 Chicago, followed by The Orange Spong and Storytelling at the Vamp Art Café in 2020. In 2018 he published The Memoir of a Groucho Marxist, a work about growing up Gay in Great Britain, and in 2019, Out of the Underground: Homosexuals, the Radical Press and the Rise and Fall of the Gay Liberation Front. Also in 2019 he published St Sukie’s Strange Garden of Woodland Creatures with celebrated illustrator Roy Alton Wald. It was in 2019 that St Sukie de la Croix and Owen Keehnen launched their Tell Me About It Project, which led to the 2019 publication of Tell Me About It, Tell Me About It 2, and in 2020, Tell Me About It 3. In 2020, St Sukie’s latest work of fiction, The Orange Spong and Storytelling at the Vamp-Arts Café, the second book in the popular Spong Series, was published.