House music was birthed out of the black, queer Chicago underground, unwelcome in the city’s discothèques.Īt the Stony Island Arts Bank in the South Shore neighborhood (1-31), records from house godfather Frankie Knuckles’ decadeslong career are played and digitized from noon every Friday, followed at 4 by an open bar with a live DJ. Soon after a drunken mob famously rioted on Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in 1979 - an event often associated with racism and homophobia - a new musical style emerged from 4/4 beats, synthy bass lines and soul. But queer people live in each of the city’s 50 wards. Come to the city of big-shouldered daddies, where, 49 years after Chicago held one of the nation’s first four pride parades, its newly elected lesbian mayor, Lori Lightfoot, will be this year’s parade grand marshal on June 30.Ĭhicago is infamously segregated, and there is no small controversy in the fact that LGBT-oriented services are centralized on the North Side - home to the Boystown neighborhood just east of Wrigley Field, as well as Andersonville, Chicago’s lesbian hub. on Sunday - where gay villages not only exist, but thrive.
Visit the city that gave the world house music, where many clubs stay open until 5 a.m. Chicago is perfect for those not smart enough for New York or pretty enough for Los Angeles. Chicago’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community may not make up so high a percentage of the population as that in Minneapolis or San Francisco, but, in a city so cheap and diverse, there is a space for everyone. And, of course, hardly anybody parties better than gay people, paragons of taste and hedonism. Few cities play as hard as Chicago - that toddlin’ town, where cops and inspectors were once so easily bribed.