PRIDE

known as Queer to the Left (Q2L), a small but lively group of like-minded organizers who, over the course of the late 1990s and early 2000s, would raise hell against gentrification, the death penalty, homonormativity, and plenty more. Though their impact is less obvious and more localized than forebears like ACT UP, which many Q2L members were involved in a few years before, the group nevertheless sustained defiantly radical queer politics in the face of increasing conservatism, all carried out on a neighborhood level.

“At one point, the Chicago Free Press described us as some ragtag group, and I got really upset. I thought they were trying to be dismissive of us,” says Joey Mogul, a lawyer with People’s Law Office and Q2L member. “But then I realized we really just were a ragtag group, and in the age of the nonprofit-industrial complex, I’m sort of proud of that.”