Belmont Rocks: Where Chicago Went Queer in Broad Daylight

A Place for Us: Gay Life at Chicago’s Belmont Rocks by Owen Keehnen brings a lost world of Chicago LGBTQ history vividly back to life. Before rainbow flags, before open-door bars, and before Pride was a season on the calendar, Chicago’s queer community carved out freedom on a jagged stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline at the end of Belmont Avenue. It wasn’t a beach. It was rock, concrete, sun, and possibility. Everyone knew it as the Belmont Rocks.

Often remembered as “a big gay carnival,” “a gay paradise,” and a place where everyone could just relax, the Rocks became an outdoor home base for gay men, lesbians, and the wider queer community. People came to meet friends, flirt, cruise, people-watch, welcome newcomers, and feel, for a few bright hours, unafraid. In an era when many gay bars still had blackened windows, the lakefront offered something radical: visibility, community, and belonging in broad daylight.

Drawn from interviews with more than 100 firsthand witnesses and illustrated with more than 115 photographs, A Place for Us captures the humor, heat, music, codes, courage, and everyday humanity of a beloved “gay beach” that helped shape queer Chicago long before the wider world caught up. Rich in memory and grounded in oral history, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in LGBTQ+ history, gay history, Chicago history, and the places where queer life was lived openly, joyfully, and together.

Owen Keehnen is also the author of Man’s Country: More Than a Bathhouse and Gay Chicago Memories: 1300 N. Wells.