As Tracy Baim, a gay historian and founder of the Windy City Times, described to the outlet, “in the ‘60s gay communities were scattered around the city, with many of the communities … centered around downtown, River North, and Tower Town in the mid part of the last century.” Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood, including the Lake View communities of Triangle Neighbors and Belmont Harbor, was also home to many members of the city’s LGBT+ community in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, the Encyclopedia of Chicago noted.
However, “slowly, as rents went up and other things happened, the community was forced out," Baim reported. Activism at Its RootsĪs LGBT+ communities and individuals were being pushed out of various Chicago neighborhoods in the ‘60s, LGBT+ activism – which derived at least partially out of response to discriminatory treatment from police, politicians, and other city officials, was simultaneously on the rise. The aforementioned Stonewall Uprising of 1969 helped spark some of this activism and, a year afterward - in 1970 - Chicago hosted its first-ever pride parade, Chicago magazine noted. The LGBT+ community in Chicago also began opening its first health centers, community centers, and bars at the beginning of the ‘70s, increasingly coalescing around the area that would eventually be known as Boystown.Īs WBEZ described, the modern-day boundaries of Boystown really began to take root in the 1980s, as a variety of gay bars began to pop up along the neighborhood’s now-famous Halsted Street.
Notably, gay bars not only developed as entertainment venues for the LGBT+ community, but also as essential community spaces and activism grounds as the LGBT+ movement grew. “While numerous organizations, publications, and early protests had helped provide direction and momentum, bars and clubs often served as a gathering place, as well as the stage, for action.” “Across the country, LGBTQ Americans turned to bars and nightlife to provide an escape from pervasive prejudice, and to carve out spaces of their own,” Patrick Sisson wrote in a 2016 Curbed article examining the history of gay bars.