In June, Gender JUST, a local LGBTQA grassroots organization, organized a safe and affirming education community forum spotlighting Chicago Public Schools and the specific needs of LGBTQ students. At that meeting, the group secured a promise from CPS CEO Ron Huberman that he would meet with the group within 60 days. [Full disclosure: This reporter is also a member of Gender JUST.]
Category: Chicago Chronicles
Articles about/reporting on Chicago events, issues, and people.
The history of queer life is captured on the margins of mainstream media, by gay newspapers like this one. Free weeklies like the Windy City Times have a tangible presence in the communities they serve, distributed through curbside boxes and wire racks. But another kind of more ephemeral queer record, the queerzine, has a history and impact of its own, and this was in evidence during the Chicago leg of the Queer Zinester Roadshow.
The annual LGBTI Health Summit was held at the Chicago Hilton and Towers, 720 S. Michigan, August 14-18, and the five-day international event kicked off with an entire day devoted to the issues and needs of bisexuals. According to the organizers, this is only the second event with a focus on bisexuality and health, the first being the Bi Health Summit at the 2003 North American Conference on Bisexuality in San Diego.
Gender JUST (Justice United for Societal Transformation) held its first Safe and Affirming Education Community Forum at Lozano Library, 1805 S. Loomis, June 15. The event highlighted the issues facing LGBTQ/GNC (lesbian, gay bisexual, transgender and queer/gender non-conforming) students in CPS. The group invited Ron Huberman, the openly gay chief executive officer of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), to attend.
The 40th anniversary of Stonewall falls on June 28 this year, the same date of the original riot in 1969. Since Stonewall, the LGBTQ community has seen the formation of the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s, the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and the rise of the same-sex-marriage movement in the late 1990s and beyond. To commemorate the event, the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted, hosted an intergenerational roundtable discussion entitled “Stonewall and Beyond” June 11.
Reports of an event on the night of May 30 have surfaced amidst rumors that a group of straight people marched through Lakeview’s North Halsted Street, and then set upon and attacked a group of gay individuals. What is known is that a gathering involving a large group of people resulted in several arrests.
The Chicago Dyke March moved to Pilsen last year in an historic attempt to take the event to neighborhoods outside the mostly white gay enclaves of the north side. The Dyke March Planning Committee envisioned that the march would rotate between the city’s various ethnic neighborhoods, to show that queers are, indeed, everywhere.
Chicago gay activist Andy Thayer, of Gay Liberation Network, was in Moscow recently, for a May 16 event that Russian gay-rights activists planned as Moscow Pride. In Russia, gay-related events have been stalled by repressive state policies that do not permit citizens to rally in public, and by what many consider to be a climate of widespread social and political homophobia.
