“I didn’t have bars to come to,” Joyce Chow says. Joyce Chow had a very different experience coming out. “I made my own dresses, and I didn’t do pantomime,” Wright says. Wright not only found a home in Chicago’s gay community, he went on to become a legendary performer-Toots Lorraine-in Chicago’s gay cabarets.
Wright’s father came to Chicago and moved him out of one of his first apartments on Chestnut, telling him, “All those men hanging out on the front stoop are homosexuals.” I’d go in and drink one drink-it was a gin and tonic.” “My first bar was the Front Page Lounge at Wabash and Grand,” Wright says. Others remembered such long-gone bars in the area as Dugan’s and Sam’s. A lot of people who were gay went there.”Įd Urgitis adds, “They were all in that area-Clark and Division.” …My first place I found that I was happy in was the old Checkmate on Clark Street. “My partner got sick and died and that’s when I moved here. “I had been in the military and I’d been a restaurant owner in Ottawa, Ill.,” he recalls. If I walked in there, Shirley would pull my shirt up and say, ‘You have a fly in front and you can’t come in.’”īut Chicago’s gay and lesbian scene thrived in the 1950s and 1960s, in bars and other gathering places downtown, in the Gold Coast and elsewhere. They wouldn’t let you in unless you had two pieces of women’s clothes on. “I couldn’t get into the Lost and Found,” she says. In Chicago Sorman found her insistence on wearing men’s clothes kept her out of that era’s lesbian bars. “I came to Chicago in the mid-1960s,” Joey Sorman remembers. Lesbians also had to be wary of certain boundaries. “In those days your name was put in the newspaper,” Ron Helizon says. Police in Chicago raided gay bars and even private parties frequently in the 1960s. There was no dancing and there was always the chance a gay bar might get raided. "The summer I came to Chicago, you had to keep your hands above the bar, and you couldn't buy anybody a drink," Eugene Wright recalls. Yay.It wasn't that long ago that Chicago's gay scene was very different than it is today. As it was, it was annoying to have to follow up on and frankly, I’m over SoFo if this is what the new owners are bringing to the table. If we were some brokies (which thank goodness we’re not), having $ 72 tied up for 6 days in mistakes made by a bartender (who shouldn’t have asked us to close and reopen our tab in the first place) could have been bad news. We were rewarded with a triple charge! It eventually remedied itself… but not for * 6 days*.
While we’ve never been asked that before, we obliged. Lastly, and the main reason I’m downgrading my original review, we were asked to close our tab because the bartender was going off duty. Also, when did it become a bear bar? I walked in on a Thursday at like 8pm and the bartenders were walking around shirtless, their bulging bellies and man-sweaters on display for all to «enjoy». But now it’s got some crappy theme every night. What I loved most about SoFo was that it was like a typical neighborhood/sports bar. WTF happened to SoFo? I know it was sold and all but, man, it’s a completely different bar. I certainly hope this isn’t the expectations of their servers/staff at their new cantina down the block. It’s sad because everything else is really working there. They really don’t care about their customers. I asked for a glass or water and the bartender refused saying he can only sell me a bottle. I bought several drinks and over tipped for them. (especially on the patio), That last straw was really last night. You spend a lot of time standing in line.
#Gay bars chicago on clark street how to
The service is notoriously slow (just like lots of these reviews state), no one has trained their bartenders how to take multiple orders at one time. There used to be a really rude nasty bartender there (who has now moved away) and I complained to the owners about him but nothing was done. On the other hand I have never seen any attempt at good customer service or relation skills there. The back patio is a very fun place to hangout. The new owners really are trying hard to make it something. Overall it’s a fun neighborhood bar with several fun themes nights - Bear, DILF, Otter etc etc and the crowd is good looking if you like older furry men. This is a hard review to write because I have such mixed feelings on this place.