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.
Category: Queer Politics, Culture, and History
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.
Did you really think your love would be enough?
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.
Why build up the power of the state to coerce people into marital relationships they don’t want just so that they can get the basics like healthcare?
Two school students as young as 11 years old recently committed suicide within 10 days of each other after enduring anti-gay harassment. Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover of Springfield, Mass., killed himself April 6 and Jaheem Herrera of DeKalb County, Ga., hanged himself with a cloth belt April 16 after similar taunts. The incidents have created waves of shock and dismay and generated a public conversation about such instances of bullying.
The classic method used to silence a woman: question her mental health and then drag her through what you fondly imagine is the mud of her sex life.
“There is no good reason, absolutely no science.”
Andy Thayer is best known for his work as a marriage activist in Gay Liberation Network (GLN) . However, he has also been a longtime anti-war activist as well as a critic of police brutality in Chicago.
The Reagan years defined a new era in LGBTQ organizing. The community struggled against governmental apathy towards AIDS while forging activist communities that demanded resources and health care for those affected by the disease.
For the most part, historians have paid attention to LGBTQ activism in this decade by focusing on the two coasts. However, Chicago witnessed its own efflorescence of intense activism in this decade, and a May 7 Out at CHM (Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark) panel entitled “surviving Reagan” provided a glimpse at the work of some of the city’s queer activists. The event was moderated by Jennifer Brier, assistant professor of history and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the author of a forthcoming book on the politics of AIDS from 1980 to 2000.
