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Out of the Underground: Homosexuality, The Radical Press, and the Rise and Fall of the Gay Liberation Front
St Sukie de la Croix
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Description
While the Mainstream Press was Damning Us, the Underground Press was Praising Us
Out of the Underground explores homosexuality in the radical press. It covers the rise and fall of the Gay Liberation Front in several cities, including Milwaukee, Atlanta, Austin, Detroit, San Jose, as well as gay metropolises like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Before a regular and reliable gay press, the only positive images of homosexuals appeared in the underground rags. In the turbulent 1960s, young gay men couldn’t relate to the stuffy newsletters of Mattachine-era groups. Young lesbians were also drawn to the direct action of the Radical Lesbians and the Women’s Liberation Front, rather than the gab-and-java get-togethers of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). Those young radicals were more likely to read the Great Speckled Bird, the Ann Arbor Argus, the San Francisco Oracle, the feminist It Ain’t Me Babe, and the anarchic Berkeley Tribe, than the Ladder, the DOB newsletter. Out of the Underground is also about the culture, music, politics, and art that radicalized young queers. Clearly, not all LGBT people were left-wing revolutionaries. Some were conservative and worked within established gay groups. The majority were deeply closeted. This book isn’t about them.
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 and online news and entertainment sources, including 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 served as a historical consultant and 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. He is also the author of the popular comic Twilight Manors in Palm Springs, which follows the hysterical adventures of Brian & Stéphane, a retired gay couple. The series includes Twilight Manors in Palm Springs, God’s Waiting Room, and Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Strange Case of Donna Reed’s Missing Wig, Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Peculiar Case of the Follies Dancer, Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Lady in Gray & The Bessie Mae Diamond, Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Great New Orleans Powder Puff Caper, and Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Hunt fo the Hairdo Killer,