St. Sukie de la Croix has been a Chicago fixture since the English native moved to this city in1991. He is a former writer for Windy City Times, has been a reporter and columnist for several publications, and is often seen at LGBTQ events, recording people and speeches with his camera and notebook. He currently writes for ChicagoPride.
This month sees the release of his new book, Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall (University of Wisconsin Press), with a foreword by John D’Emilio, professor of History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
According to de la Croix, the book is the result of ten years of research, fact-finding, and interviews. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the book reveals new and unexpected details about even its most familiar LGBTQ figures, like Henry Gerber.
Chicago LGBTQ history has been strangely ignored for many years. But recent years have seen the publication of books such as Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City’s Gay Community, edited by Tracy Baim. Marie J. Kuda is a historian who has written about Chicago gay history for decades. Chad Heap, Jonathan Katz, Tristan Cabello and others have also written about Chicago gay history. In addition, D’Emilio and several emerging researchers have been uncovering the city’s vibrant queer history. De la Croix’s book is part of this emerging history.
Windy City Times interviewed de la Croix over the phone to discuss his new book. Following are excerpts from the interview.
Yasmin Nair: What made you want to write a book about Chicago gay history?
Sukie de la Croix: I wanted to read one. And, in the end, after years of writing for Tracy [Baim, publisher of Windy City Times] and interviewing people, I just wrote it myself. The other thing is: I don’t want to be boring, but I think it’s politically important to hand down to the next generation as much as we possibly can. I was hearing all these great stories, well, [they were] almost like gossip but this was gossip about people that died years ago, so it was old, good gossip. People’s lives interested me and I think it’s very important that we tell our stories. And I think people mostly couldn’t tell their own stories, not their real stories.
YN: What do you mean by that?
Sukie de la Croix: Because I think it’s a book about people with double lives. They have public lives and private lives, and I think often especially with the writers, musicians and actors that public life was well documented but I think their private lives weren’t.
YN: Although Chicago is a major urban area, there has been—till very recently—a dearth of writing about its LGBTQ history, in contrast to San Francisco or New York City. Why do you think that has been the case?
Sukie de la Croix: I think there were people living here who would have liked to have written it but I really think that the best history books are written by people who weren’t there. Because they can look at things objectively. There are lots and lots of books about the city of Chicago that are actually written by people from other places. Now why the people who were here didn’t write books, I don’t know. I do know that some people have tried over the years and I think the task was so monumental and huge that I think a lot of people just gave up. But I’m not someone who gives up; I’m just a very stubborn person.
So I started it and I knew I had to finish it. And I knew it was important because there was nothing written about Chicago [as a single-author book] and I wanted it to be accurate. I think it’s really important that you have accuracy as much as you possibly can when you’re writing about secret lives.
YN: A lot of readers will be already familiar with you as a columnist in the gay press, where you’ve been writing about Chicago LGBTQ history for a while. Is this a compilation of your previous columns?
Sukie de la Croix: Virtually nothing of my columns is in this book. Most of the columns I wrote were oral history; they were interviews with people about their memories. We know how accurate that is—that’s just not accurate. It was fun to do the columns and oral history has a place, but the book I’ve written is factual. There are one or two people I did interview whose memoreis I manage do confirm in news reports.
For instance, there was a raid in 1949 on the Windup Lounge bar and that was confirmed in newspapers but I did interview the bartender who was working that night and so it was interesting to have his perspective on what had happened. But no, this has really nothing to do with the columns I wrote.
YN: This book represents years of archival research. How did you go about organizing the material?
Sukie de la Croix: I wanted to start at the beginning with the earliest accounts of feminine men in the Illiniwek tribe. Because I also wanted to show there was a Chicago before the Europeans came. I mean, people lived here before. I also wanted to show that gay people were not immigrants, they did not come over with the Jewish refugees—we were here anyway. So I wanted to make that clear.
I had to stop somewhere and Stonewall seemed like the stopping point. So I realized that was a vast amount of time—300 years or so—and I realized there would be great swaths of time when I would find out nothing, when nothing would have been written down.
The order of the chapters: I tried to make it a timeline, date-wise, as much as I possibly could but of course there were subjects that crossed into various chapters. It was actually quite complicated. In the end, instead of trying to organize it, I just kept writing and writing and writing and I thought, “I’ll worry about that later,” and it actually all fell into place on its own. But yes, at the beginning it felt it was going to be the most complicated part of the process, like working out what was going into what part of the chapter and trying to keep it in some kind of timeline. But in the end, it just fell into place.
YN: That brings me to the structure. The book is episodic, presenting vignettes of Chicago LGBTQ history, rather than any kind of an overarching narrative or analysis. That’s not a critique, just an observation about the structure. I imagine that was a deliberate choice—what determined it?
Sukie de la Croix: It really chose itself. It confused me greatly, the whole process of writing this book. All I had at the beginning was where I was going to start, in 1673, and where I was going to end, in 1969 with Stonewall. I knew there would be a chapter about Towertown [a famously bohemian area in the Chicago’s Near North neighborhood] and I knew that probably Margaret Anderson and The Little Review [an American literary and arts magazine published by Anderson from 1914 to 1929] was going to be a whole chapter because there’s quite a lot of work about her. Henry Gerber was going to be a chapter, then I realized that he was so linked with the German sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld, it just actually all worked out on its own. Once I stopped worrying about it, really the whole thing fell into place.
One thing I was very careful about: there’s an occasional line that is my opinion on something, but I really kept the book factual. John D’Emilio writes in his foreword that I kept close to my sources. What I really wanted to do was to go to my sources at the time and reproduce them so that the reader could get a feel of what it was like then. I didn’t try to clean up the language or be judgmental about any of it. It is what it is. The thing I’m most proud of is the bibliography.
YN: Could you elaborate on how your skills as a reporter helped you in the research?
Sukie de la Croix: I think it was like hunting a story down. I think a historian would write a book with an academic structure and I don’t have that structure, but I do have that relentless drive to get to the bottom of things; I have to know everything that’s happening. This is not in the book, but I was looking at various newspapers about the time that Gertrude Stein came to Chicago. They sent one cop to meet her, and I was so excited to find the name of the cop. I love those details because when you’re writing, you are trying to conjure up details in people’s minds. And even with a factual book, I’m still telling stories, from real life, but every detail is important and I think that’s where the reporter came in. That and not taking no for an answer.
YN: Could you give an example of that, of not taking no for an answer?
Sukie de la Croix: Yes, Henry Gerber’s arrest, which he claimed it was reported in a newspaper, and it’s never ever been found and I found it. Over the years, everybody’s looked for this in the archives, and no one has been able to find it. I wouldn’t accept that. He named the newspaper. He was an old man when he wrote this and I thought, “You know, this silly old queen probably either made the whole damn thing up or she [sic] got the newspaper wrong.” I went back and the newspaper he was talking about didn’t even exist then—it had gone bankrupt by the date that he was arrested. So I started to hunt it down and I was just merciless. And I did find it.
I phoned up a local historian, and I asked, “1925: What was the nastiest, scruffiest, little, gossipy, trashy newspaper in Chicago?” Because it would only be in there, right? And he told me, and I went down and I found it.
YN: You also write that his report had been that he had been arrested in his home but that in fact he had been arrested somewhere else.
Sukie de la Croix: That’s right. I think there were several things I dug up that actually kind of overturn what’s been written before. Jane Heap was not the first girlfriend of Margaret Anderson to work on The Little Review. She had another girlfriend before that.
YN: This book is a history of LGBT people but there’s a parallel history here, of Chicago’s rich literary and artistic history. Besides The Little Review, a lot of avant-garde artists had their roots in Chicago, even if they did end up leaving for the coasts or for Paris. Without buying into the idea that gays and lesbians are inherently cutting-edge and artistic, could you talk about the connection between the development of the sexual culture/subculture and an artistic/literary one in Chicago?
Sukie de la Croix: One of the most known communities of artists was really around Towertown, One thing I found out that really surprised me is that it’s always been put forward as a place where men could go missing, and I’ve always seen references to men, as in the ditty, “Fairy Town, Fairy Town/That’s where all the fairies go,” for instance. Actually, it wasn’t. That area was started by lesbians. I think what happened is that when women got the vote, you know when you come out of the closets, you go crazy, right, you go to the gay bars. I think that when women got the vote, they went crazy, and why not? I think what happened was, they had a voice all of a sudden, and what happened in Towertown is that it happened to be an area of old landladies and single people, and there were a lot of rooming houses and the young women rebelled because they wanted to have men in their rooms. They could vote now, and so they created this wonderful artistic community—it was [like] Greenwich Village and a lot of big cities have them—Paris, London. There was also lots of exciting things happening in the arts, Cubism and Surrealism and Dadaism and lots of news ways of looking at the world. It was really an interesting time, and that was really a woman’s area.
A lot of literary figures came out of there. People say that Chicago’s dead but I’ve always seen a great literary and political history in Chicago and I think they’ve always been connected, right back to the Anarchists and the Socialists who were here, the beginning of the Wobblies, the Dil [this is the actual spelling in the name of the club, not “Dill” as many people assume] Pickle Club—there’s a marvelous history of the arts. I think it’s still here. I think Chicagoans who complain about this city should just move. Go live in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I think Chicago should be absolutely proud of its art scene now. Try getting a seat at the Lyric Opera and tell me what other Opera in the world you have to stand in line for. They can’t even sell Opera tickets in London. This is a wonderful, wonderful city for the arts and music.
Back in the 1920s, they all ended up going to New York and that was then the stepping stone to Paris, but that was the fashion of the time. And they had salons. That’s where Picasso was, and that’s where all of what some might consider pretentious nonsense was going on. I would love to go back and see Towertown. In the African-American community, there was great work, plays.
YN: Yes, you write about Lorraine Hansberry and others. In many ways, there’s also a history of feminism here, and links between LGBTQ history and the history of women’s rights. Especially in the gender transgressions you write about in the beginning, of women dressing up as men, for instance, in the Civil War, the flouting of gender norms as a way to declare independence and so on. That connection between feminist history and LGBTQ history—was that something that surprised you or you had known about?
Sukie de la Croix: It surprised me how political an act like biking was, that a woman riding a bicycle was an act of political rebellion, and not only because they would have to wear immodest clothing like bloomers to ride the bicycles, but because men were saying that their wives would be able to cycle to different parts of town and engage in vice. So really the clothes that women wore back then were actually straightjackets so the [clothing] rebellion was certainly political.
Even if they didn’t think they were. It’s a politics of clothes. It fitted in with the lesbians who wanted to be butch and wear clothes; wearing men’s clothes was an act of political rebellion. It was only acceptable on a stage with the burlesque performances. Not all those performers were gay either.
YN: You have chapters about the South side and Bronzeville. As I was reading about the blackface performances that went on in the white gay clubs in the early part of the 20th century, I was reminded that many of the Blackface performances we still see in today’s gay bars—in what I think are really problematic ways—actually have this long history, which was interesting for me to discover through your book. In your research, did you ever uncover anything that was in any way a resistance to or a response to such performances at the time? What were relations between white and Black [gay] communities like in this regard?
Sukie de la Croix: Separate. [They were separate]. The Chicago Defender, they wrote about female impersonation, and they were a lot more open to sexual variance than the white papers were. … On the South Side, they glorified female impersonation; for a while it was an art form.
But if you’re talking about blackface, that really began a little before the Civil War, but Black people were never allowed on stage and at the time African-Americans did not go on stage. The white public was fascinated by the African-American “lifestyle,” so men would go on in blackface and pretend to be Black. I think it was Francis Leon who went on as a Black woman, a Black Opera Diva; he had a wonderful voice so he would go and perform as a Black woman in Minstrel shows. But by the turn of the century, 1900-1910, Minstrel shows became quite unfashionable. Whether that was something to do with a backlash against racism or because people got bored with it, I don’t know, but that’s not what I was writing about. …
It was so separate because there were Black theater groups, had Black audiences. African-Americans were not welcome in the gay bars on the North Side, but white gay people went down to the South Side in droves because, obviously, it was more fun, to go to a jazz club.
YN: Which is also about their privilege, about being able to go to the South Side.
Sukie de la Croix: Yes, of course.
YN: One of the constant themes in this book is that of the laws in Illinois and Chicago, and the constant presence of cops, especially corrupt cops and the link between policing and sexuality. What did you find as you did your research about all that?
Sukie de la Croix: Yes, reading the book, it looks like I’ve got it in for the cops [laughs]. But at one point, I thought, “This is beginning to look like I’ve got a vendetta against the cops.” I actually began looking for something nice to say. I thought, “Maybe I can find an article where a policeman helped a transvestite across the road or something, anything to find a redeeming feature about Chicago police, but there was nothing. The times were open for corruption. When you make a law, not only is someone going to break it, someone’s going to make money out of breaking it. You make more money breaking it than you do keeping to the law.
The cops were in such a privileged position. At one point, the cops actually vetted the films that were shown in Chicago, so it was like a triumvirate of the cops, the politicians, and the Mafia. They were actually just being capitalists, being American [laughs]. They were just being human and taking advantage of some very ridiculous laws. You can’t police sexuality we know that now, or some of us do. But back then there was money in policing sexuality, good money, with all the kick-backs. They made a lot of money.
It’s Chicago and it’s what makes the history of Chicago really, really interesting.
YN: What makes Chicago LGBTQ history different from, say, San Francisco’s or New York’s queer history?
Sukie de la Croix: I think it’s the way the authorities reacted to homosexuality and dealt with it that’s different from other cities. I know there were raids in other cities, but there just seems to have been a very strange, almost perverse relationship between homosexuals and the authorities here that made it. … I can’t even describe what it is but I don’t think they had in San Francisco or New York. It’s like they were part of it. I mean, there were supposedly some gay whorehouses on the South Side for Mafia men.
Mafia men often had sex with men because women were not [considered] trustworthy; they talked too much—that was the excuse. [laughs] Not that they wanted to suck dick, but because women chattered and gossiped and knitted.
YN: What surprised you most while working on this history?
Sukie de la Croix: When I went into this, I had no preconceived ideas. I did not know what I was going to find. I jumped in at the deep end of a project I didn’t think at first I was qualified to do. It’s like: this is the deep end of the pool, I cannot swim, I want to jump in. But I was constantly amazed at what I would find and just constantly excited, like a little schoolboy, every time I found out some little tidbit I could use for the book. The whole thing for me was exhausting and exciting. And actually putting the whole thing together, it was hard work and just bloody-minded stubbornness on my part. Because all common sense told me to just give up. I kept thinking, there’s a reason nobody’s written this book before because people have started and given up because it’s too difficult. I had to finish it for me.
YN: You talk about it being a difficult project for a lot of people. I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that most people think of queer history as being comprised of memory and speculation rather than the kind of research you did. What was the relationship between the oral histories you were uncovering and the research?
Sukie de la Croix: The oral histories were my starting point. I’ll give you an example of that. I interviewed a man in his 90s; I think he died a week after I interviewed him. He told me about a drag bar that he got into during prohibition. He couldn’t remember what it was, and how do you find something like that even though it’s a great story. Now, this bar: I was hearing several stories about this bar and I actually knew someone who went to it. So how do you prove this? I started to research it as much as I could and I got really, really lucky because in 1933 or so, whenever Prohibition ended this one drag bar [The K-9] this speakeasy, went legit, and put an ad in one of those scuzzy Chicago gay papers, [The Chicago American] saying there were female impersonators in there. Of course, it was closed down but the name of the bar had the address, 105 E. Walton—and this was the rumored speakeasy I had heard about. Now I had proof that this place actually existed. So the oral history started me on a path and I went back to confirm the story. Memories are wonderful but they’re not factual histories.
Sukie de la Croix will be presenting on his book on the following dates in Chicago. For more information on the tour, go to http://chicagowhispers.com/
June 14, Book Launch, 7 p.m. — The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago.
June 20, 6 p.m. — Harold Washington Library Center, Cindy Pritzker Auditorium, 400 S. State, www.chipublib.org/events/details/id/83758 .
June 21, 8 p.m, Sukie de la Croix and Gregg Shapiro read and sign their books at, Uncharted Books, 2630 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago.
June 22, 7:30 p.m., Women and Children First Bookstore, 5233 N. Clark St, Chicago,
June 27, 5:30—6:30 p.m., BMO Harris Bank’s Lion’s Pride at the Lakeview Branch of Harris Bank at 3601 N. Halsted.