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"Massive waves of immigrants from Europe and the American South were arriving in American cities so that white middle-class urbanites became fascinated with exploring the new communities taking place in their midst, whether immigrant, bohemian, black, or gay." "The Pansy Craze was part of the same phenomenon that produced the Negro vogue in Harlem," says the University of Chicago history professor George Chauncey.
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The outburst lasted only until the mid-thirties, when the impact of the Depression and a series of sensationalized sex crimes led to a crackdown. With its wildly relaxed attitudes, Chicago's Pansy Craze, as the brief phenomenon has come to be known, emerged from Prohibition just as homosexuality first came to be recognized in this country as a distinct sexual orientation. High society and the middle class flocked to the cabarets to gawk or to experience the prurient thrill of dancing with one of the "homos." The so-called Bughouse Square in front of the Newberry Library was such a well-known pickup spot that the Chicago Gray Line Sightseeing Company included it on its Chicago-By-Night tour, advertising the promise of "the unusual, strange and different" in "gay night life." The nighttime entertainments did not attract just gays.
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Mexican ‘queers' carved out a space for themselves along Ashland Avenue, and ethnic working-class ‘queens' from the city's North, South and West Sides met at private parties and public drags throughout the city." The historian Chad Heap has noted that the flowering of gay life at that time covered much of the city's ethnic landscape: "African American drag entertainers performed for racially mixed audiences at some of the South Side's most famous ‘black and tan'. By 1930, Variety reported, there were 35 "pansy parlors" in Towertown, the neighborhood named for its proximity to the Old Chicago Water Tower.Ī place called Diamond Lil's, at 909 North Rush Street, was packed so tight with partying gays that people were turned away. "When the drags entered," he wrote at one point, "there was much laughing, particularly about one elderly man dressed in women's clothing, glasses, boyish bob and out-of-date costume, shaved but chin showing growth of a beard."įor a brief time in the late 1920s and early 1930s, similar scenes unfolded up and down the city, as a relatively open gay culture thrived in Chicago, with gay cabarets and nightclubs proliferating throughout the Near North and South sides. Burgess was carrying out the country's first extensive research project into homosexuality. A sociology professor at the University of Chicago, Ernest W. Lurking in the shadows that evening, a nondescript, bespectacled man in a plain suit and tie scrawled notes. Over the years, the old building, at Wabash Avenue and 15th Street, had played host to political conventions and hockey games, but these men were there to dance the night away. As midnight approached on Halloween Eve in 1932, men in vampy satin ball gowns, French-heeled slippers, teased coiffures, and rouged lips crowded into the Chicago Coliseum.