Chicago's Forgotten Battle for Queer Rights 1975-80

Chicago’s Forgotten Battle for Queer Rights 1975-80

By Robert M. Katzman

$29.99 Plus sales tax, where applicable.

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“I remain the last witness in Chicago to a time when the right of a free press was denied to Queer people.”
This book tells how I fought for the right to distribute periodicals, starting with one truck and one magazine, Blueboy.

It was similar to the once very popular Playboy, with tasteful, smart articles and glossy photos of nudes posing provocatively. The models were all men and the periodical was directed towards the Queer community.

People I dealt with there were surprised and pleased that a straight man would stand up for them and demand a free marketplace.

The unusual mixture of the Queer community’s population fascinated me when I was a naïve twenty-five with no knowledge of anything about that world or community.

I discovered that the men there - only men - were Irish, Italian, Black, Jewish, Greek, Native, German, Swedish, Danish, African, Polish, Asian, and from every area in America. There was no prejudice among them.

There was a common situation where prosperous older men courted younger very handsome men.

But that is identical to the straight community, too.

The only common denominator among the hundreds or thousands of men in the Boy’s Town area of Chicago where I did my best to distribute a Queer periodical which their stores, bars and bathhouses alone would carry in the beginning, was a constant concern among the men who were closeted (except in that tight community, and around me, too, when they learned who I was), seemed to be their risk of becoming outed to the outside world.

The atmosphere I encountered as first a new distributor and then as their straight friend and ally was of relaxation and humor. A lack of tension when they spoke.

No one ever solicited me in the six years when I was frequently in their midst.

I was no beauty, no alluring prize, at least in my eyes, but at twenty-five, slender and muscular, some of the men I met flirted with me. I soon realized this was acceptance and good will.

Every possible combination of ethnicities went out with each other, sometimes in threes. I asked no questions.

I was invited to some of the parties which occurred, I couldn’t go very often because I worked 16-hour days.

The parties I went to were not drunken orgiastic Bacchanalias, but the rich men who threw the parties had liquor everywhere at no charge.

The area I remember as “Boy’s Town” in Chicago was approximately 3600 North, or Addison Street and 2400 North or Fullerton Street. Lake Michigan was on the East Side and on the west side was Clark Street.

At a very difficult time in my life, I cherished the friendships, good will and business that special world offered me. I never understood the prejudice as I evolved from total ignorance to an intimate of many of the Queer community over a six-year period.

It may very well be that my own lifetime experience with anti-Semitism made me ever more compassionate when I learned of the consequences of prejudice against these many good and kind men I came to know, beginning almost 50 years ago.

Everyone I knew from that time is dead now, from either age or AIDS, a rampage of disease at that time.

Once, someone called me from what the man said was The Blueboy Museum.

He interviewed me by phone five years ago in 2019 in Racine, Wisconsin, but that was it.

As far as I know today, I remain the last witness in Chicago to a terrible turbulent time in America, when the right of a free press was denied to Queer people all over the country.

When an unknown number of men, principally men, were treated like outcasts, denied employment, ostracized in communities, denied volunteering in America’s armed forces, raped by the police with oak nightsticks in their squad cars, unprotected from rape when imprisoned, and were banned from teaching in grade schools.

Consequently, so many Queer men found welcoming arms in the world of entertainment, every branch of it, one of the few fields open to them. Coincidentally, in that part of America, San Francisco and Hollywood, California were two places Jewish people could create and own their own businesses beginning around 1910. It is no wonder the two groups of people found and tolerated each other.

But even that world is one of illusion, where people pretend to be someone else to find steady employment.

Now in my mid-Seventies I feel I have the moral responsibility, but to me also the honor, of recording what happened half a century ago in one of America’s big cities.

These men, dead now, some of them my friends, and that time deserve to never be forgotten.  
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