NEWS & POLITICS

came when several LGBTQ+ organizations cut ties with Walsh Security, a firm owned by a Chicago police o cer with a history of racist brutality.

In late November 2013, officer Thomas Walsh assaulted a Black security guard at the Lucky Horseshoe Lounge and repeatedly used racist slurs against the man during an altercation at the bar, according to a March 2015 report by the Independent Police Review Authority.

After highly publicized activism, Center on Halsted announced in late January 2020 that it had terminated its contract with Walsh Security and had engaged Quantum Security, a Black-owned fi rm with a history of working with LGBTQ+ organizations, as its new security provider.

In a June 12 e-mail obtained by the Reader, Northalsted Business Alliance board president Ramesh Ariyanayakam said the board had agreed not to renew any security contracts with Walsh Security going forward. This marks a significant departure from the alliance’s commitment to Walsh just months prior. In mid-March, Jennifer Gordon, a representative for the alliance, said that the Boystown business group planned to tap Walsh Security as its security provider this summer.

The Northalsted Business Alliance is a powerful group of local business owners led by an 11-member board currently made up mostly of white men. The lone woman on the board, Dr. Robin Gay-Sta ord of Howard Brown Health, is also the only Black person on the board and one of only two people of color.

To help combat the notion that Boystown is just “for the boys,” a recent petition called on the alliance to stop promoting the name Boystown in favor of a more inclusive moniker. “As we all grow and reconsider our roles in perpetuating bigotry, we ask that this board reflect on the growing number of incidents in our LGBTQ spaces,” the petition states. “One form of bigotry perpetuates others.”

The petition’s authors, Devlyn Camp and Jen Freitag, who are both white, say stickers advertising their movement were all defaced soon after they were put up around the neighborhood; and at one point, Camp says that a woman carrying groceries called Camp a “tranny cunt” in front of a photographer taking their photo for an article about the petition.

After the petition garnered national media attention, the Northalsted Business Alliance collected survey responses about a potential name change. After an eight-week period, along with 3,060 comments and 1,350 suggestions for new names the group says it received, the alliance released the results online. Some 80 percent of survey respondents said they did not feel unwelcome by the Boystown name, but the alliance agreed to stop using it in marketing materials nonetheless, though they noted that it would ultimately be up to the city to o cially change the name of the neighborhood.

Camp and Freitag say they want the alliance to go further in their e orts. Both said they felt the board’s gesture was hollow, and say that businesses are still permitted to use the name on their own marketing materials. They want the neighborhood to be renamed Legacy Walk, in honor of the LGBTQ+ history project known as The Legacy Project that was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame this year.

The history project includes names and biographies of a number of groundbreaking and influential queer people of color, including James Baldwin, Marsha P. Johnson, Antonia Pantoja, and Sylvia Rivera, among many others.

Many have also said that the alliance’s choice to use the name “Northalsted” for the neighborhood moving forward is merely a marketing ploy to advertise the business alliance and increase its profits.

Diversity training to nowhere

Freitag also expressed concern about the alliance board’s willingness to change given what she says she witnessed at an early February diversity training for the board and some members. Freitag, who is a general manager at the Chicago Diner, says the alliance planned to hold two trainings, but after the first training on gender went south, the remaining training sessions were abruptly canceled and haven’t been rescheduled. “I cannot explain to you how horrifying that meeting was, to the point that afterwards, I went up to the two people hosting it and I apologized,” Freitag says.

Gordon, of the alliance, says the trainings were canceled due to the pandemic and pushed back on allegations that they were called o for any other reason. But according to Freitag and e-mails obtained by the Reader, the trainings were canceled more than a month before the city’s stay-at-home orders went into e ect.

Jes Scheinpflug, director of operations and outreach at Praxis Group, which facilitated the board training, also rejected Gordon’s claimed reasoning for canceling the remaining trainings. “Praxis Group has never been fi red before so we were ba ed by the quick change of plans,” Scheinpflug said in an e-mail to the Reader. “We are aware that our communities—the LGBTQ2IA+ community and communities of color—have been calling for accountability from cis- and white-led businesses/organizations in Boystown for many years. We were excited to work with them to address long-standing issues of racism, transphobia, sexism and fatphobia.”

In a more than two-hour-long recording of the diversity training provided anonymously to the Reader, one participant repeatedly misgenders Caitlyn Jenner, and another participant laments about the difficulty of changing employees’ personal information in a payroll system, namely names and gender markers. According to legal experts consulted by the Reader, not changing personal information of transgender employees could violate city, county, and state human rights laws, as all three prohibit discrimination based on sex and gender identity.

Lake Alen, the alliance’s acting executive director, can be heard criticizing the word “cisgender,” which refers to people whose gender identity matches their biological sex.

“So I don’t like using the term cis because it feels like an attack,” Alen is overheard saying. “And people use cis as an attack by saying, ‘Oh, you’re a white male.’ It’s an attack. And I guess there’s a lot of like, ‘OK, you have privilege, you should understand your privilege.’ But it’s being used as an attack.”

Alen owns the Chicago Male Salon and is also treasurer at the alliance. Other training participants expressed concerns about their ability to express discomfort in their bars and clubs without being labeled as racist, transphobic, or misogynistic. “So at what point does making someone else feel more comfortable have to make me feel uncomfortable?” Alen asked.

Many have also said that it will be di cult to push the alliance to do anything meaningful to address the issues plaguing the neighborhood considering serious, repeated allegations of racism, misogyny, and transphobia leveled against the organization and some of its board members.

Brave Space Alliance withdrew from a protest march sponsored by the Northalsted

Business Alliance in late June after BSA says it was “being tokenized at the event, and deployed for clout by the organizers.” The event was later canceled, with proceeds donated to BSA and an alternative, trans-led protest. That alternative protest, known as Pride Without Prejudice/Reclaim Pride, took place during the last weekend in June, when LGBTQ+ pride is typically celebrated.

Around that same time, alliance board secretary Mark Liberson, who owns Hydrate Nightclub and Replay Beer & Bourbon, was accused on social media of a number of racist behaviors, including intentionally mispronouncing names of Black and Brown employees, underpaying employees, and removing hip-hop and R&B music from jukeboxes. Liberson’s response to the allegations, also posted on social media, failed to meaningfully address any but one—that he had a habit of not remembering names of the people of color working for him. He says it was due to a neurocognitive disorder impacting his memory.

Neither Liberson nor Alen responded to multiple interview requests from the Reader

Looking to the future

For Boystown to be a true haven for the queer community, many say the neighborhood needs to not only be more inclusive, but to be more than just an affluent promenade of bars and restaurants fueled by profits and not community.

“What would it mean to actually ask you to stand up for the folks who look and identify like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera?” Davis says. “There’s more to this than just parties and bars. This is about making sure that every person and especially the most marginalized people in this community feel welcome in a space that’s supposed to be for all of us.”

As the neighborhood continues to reckon with the rampant racism in its midst, Black activists say they aren’t asking for much of business owners, residents, or elected o cials—or anything that their white counterparts don’t enjoy with sometimes reckless abandon.

“We just want—just as everybody in the rest of the world wants—a level playing field,” Stoole said. “We’re not asking for any more than what we are already deserved.”