John D'Emilio on pleasure and danger in Chicago!

Out gay historian and professor John D'Emilio recently presented a talk on his prospective new book. The event, titled "Love and Sex, Pleasures and Dangers in the Windy City," took place at the Institute for the Humanities of the University of Illinois at Chicago March 2, Windy City Reports.


Speaking to an room overflowing with attendees, D'Emilio began by noting that this project is a significant departure for him because his previous work has focused on social movements (Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America) or activists with a global reach (Lost Prophet: Bayard Rustin and the Quest for Peace and Justice in America), whereas this one will take up a very local topic by focusing on Chicago. He said that he was drawn to this project while trying to come up with a short survey text for students four years ago and looking for material from which to draw examples of Chicago history to illustrate larger points about the gay and lesbian movement in the United States.

Instead, he said he "kept seeing things about gay and lesbian history in Chicago that looked different from what people were writing when they wrote about San Francisco or New York or L.A. I kept finding things beyond 1950-2000 [the time period he had limited himself to] that were too fascinating to ignore." For instance, he found that Chicago declared war against syphilis in 1937. He also discovered a trove of material in the pages of the historically Black newspaper, The Chicago Defender, about female impersonators on the South Side in the 1930s. To his surprise, he said, their stories were not presented as those of "exotic, underground, illicit phenomenon," as might be expected given the time period. Instead, the paper reported on these men as figures of which the larger community could be proud.