not asking for any more than what we are already deserved’

Boystown, the enclave billed as a place where LGBTQ+ people of all stripes are safe to be themselves, faces a racial reckoning decades in the making.

By ADAM M. RHODES

The north-side LGBTQ+ enclave Boystown is known for many things: its promenade of popular gay bars, a rotating roster of talented drag performers, and for what many say is a decades-long underbelly of white supremacy that persists to this day. Last year, a Confederate flag vest was found at local vintage costume and clothing store Beatnix; that same week, a leaked e-mail showed that the owner of Progress Bar had tried to ban rap music, a plan many said was aimed at keeping Black patrons out of the establishment. And multiple business owners in the community have been accused of underpaying Black and Brown employees, making racist comments, and favoring white, male, and athletic employees over others.

Amid ongoing, historic uprisings for racial equity across the globe, the ways that white residents and business owners in Boystown ensure its stark segregation mirror methods used by their predecessors decades ago in the same neighborhood.

Jason Orne, author of Boystown: Sex and Community in Chicago, says the significant racial divide here and in other LGBTQ+ enclaves exemplifies what he calls a “Disneyland kind of gayness” that focuses on a uent white gay men instead of the entire spectrum of the community.

People pushing for change want the neighborhood to be a safe, diverse, and inclusive haven for all LGBTQ+ people as residents, visitors, customers, workers, and performers. But after decades of systemic and rampant racism in the community, some people of color have found safety outside of Boystown. Boystown-focused activists are also pushing the neighborhood to be more inclusive, and that effort includes a recent petition to rename Boystown to better reflect the LGBTQ+ community’s diversity. That petition has been met with criticism that organizers are trying to take away a community that critics say has been “for the boys.”

Revisionist history

They are absolutely profoundly misremembering [the history],” says Reader publisher Tracy Baim, author of Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City’s Gay Community. “But on top of that, they are also playing into the whole stereotype of sexism in the gay community.” Women were instrumental in establishing Boystown as a safe space for members of the LGBTQ+ community, Baim says. And people of color have always been central to advancing LGBTQ+ rights.

The fi rst known gay community center in Chicago was a project of the local chapter of landmark lesbian civil and political rights group the Daughters of Bilitis. And the city’s fi rst feminist bookstore and a related women’s center opened in the early 1970s—in a space now occupied by an Allstate insurance branch, just steps away from where the popular gay bar Sidetrack now sits. The center eventually was renamed the Lesbian Feminist Center, and relocated to a space that’s barely a block away from what is now Center on Halsted, which opened in Boystown in 2007.

Lakeview, the neighborhood that houses Boystown, is predominantly white and a uent, but that wasn’t always the case. In 1980, the neighborhood’s Latinx population was more than 18,300, and fell to just more than 8,100 between 2014 and 2018, according to demographic data from consulting fi rm Rob Paral & Associates. The Black population fell from roughly 6,500 in 1980 to 3,600 between 2014 and 2018. During that same period, the

VERN HESTER

white population steadily increased.

That same data shows that the median income of Lakeview has also nearly doubled since the 1970s. According to the data, which has been converted to 2018 monetary fi gures, the median household income in Lakeview in 1970 was nearly $48,000, but between 2014 and 2018, it had increased to almost $88,000.

Boystown caters to roughly 146,000 adults in the city who identify as LGBTQ+, according to city data from 2018. For scale, according to demographic data released in June, the entire population of the Lakeview community area between 2014 and 2018 was 100,547; the data also states that of those more than 100,500 Lakeview residents, roughly 78 percent are white.

Of course, even in the 1970s, Black and Brown people were met with racism in the burgeoning gay enclave. Black lesbian activist Pat McCombs led a period of activism against local lesbian bar CK’s, which later became Augie & CK’s, over more stringent ID policies that only applied to Black and Brown patrons. McCombs also spoke of what she perceived as a limit to the number of Black people allowed in the bar.

“It was like they had to have a certain quota,” McCombs says. “It couldn’t be too many of us in there at one time.”

McCombs says she formed the Black Lesbian Discrimination Investigation Committee to confront the racism in the community, and as part of her efforts, she reported the bar to the state liquor commission. According to Out and Proud in Chicago, the bar narrowly dodged losing its license after the owner agreed to hold everyone to the same standard and to publicly post the bar’s ID requirements.

But as McCombs recognized, similar tactics are used today.

Different bars, the same discrimination

Jae Rice, a Black queer DJ, is all too familiar with those tactics. Rice says they and their wife, who is also Black, have been forced to open tabs to buy drinks and have faced what they called “oppressive dress codes” and higher scrutiny of their IDs.

As a performer, Rice says Boystown club managers and promoters are reluctant to hire them because of the crowd they think