Queer Chicago:

Queer Communities and Queer People Within Communities

On September 6, I went for a walk with two friends in the North Side of Chicago, aiming to explore queer culture and communities in this city. The first stop we went to was Northalsted, a famously known “gayborhood”—as its nickname “Boystown” perfectly indicates— in Lakeview East. On the website of ChooseChicago, the “Why we love it” section of Northalsted proudly describes it as one of the country’s most inclusive LGBTQ+ communities. The introduction then continues with: “It’s known for its welcoming vibe, nonstop nightlife, LGBTQ-owned businesses, and excellent dining options. It’s also the center of some of Chicago’s most popular events and festivals.[1]” The description is more than true. As we walked in the street, the rainbow flags were everywhere: painted on the roads, hanging from nearly every storefront, featured in nail designs at salons, even around the necks of dogs out for a walk. Bars with drag shows are just a few steps apart, echoing with cheers from inside. Such joyful queerness! But is this all that queerness is?

Our second destination was Uptown, a neighborhood only a few blocks away from Northalsted, with a strikingly different atmosphere. While Northalsted presented a cheerful, visible, and sometimes even highly performative queer identity, Uptown showcased a more intersectional landscape. Here, colorful flyers plastered on coffee shop windows advertised events spanning a wide range of social issues: The 43rd Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival; “Dress Your New Body,” an event for trans and non-binary people early in transition; Anti-ICE Block Party, a fundraiser for union members whose families are being detained by ICE; Tanggol Migrante, a composition of organizations that aim to defend and protect Filipino migrants; and several support and fundraising initiatives for Palestine, just to name a few.  The diversity of those local events made it nearly impossible for me to pin down a singular definition of one queer community in Uptown. Rather, queerness here felt more embedded within various communities, as queer individuals of intersecting identities actively engaged in and shaped these public space and social justice movements.

The stark contrast between the two neighborhoods represents two distinct sides of queerness. Jason Orne, in his study of Boystown (Northalsted) in Chicago, identifies what he calls as “two promises of ‘queer.’” The first, exemplified by the sexy communities and Pride celebrations in Boystown, is the promise that “we can be equal yet different.” The second and more radical promise seeks to “destabilize identity to the point of universality among differences. . It then turns to Uptown, exploring how immigrant communities and social justice movements have influenced its character, and how queer people have interacted with and have been embedded with broader struggles.

Queer people have always existed in Boystown—as they have throughout the world—but the first major wave of queer visibility and community in this neighborhood only emerged in the 1980s, as a direct result of the rising gay bars along North Halsted Street. These bars not only created safe spaces for queer people to hang out but also served as organizational spaces during the AIDS crisis[3]. By the 1990s, the North Halsted strip had earned both the nickname Boystown and the official recognition from the city of Chicago. In 1997, after Mayor Daley officially declared Boystown as Chicago’s gay district, the city installed rainbow pillars throughout the neighborhood. These top-down markers of queer identity remain to this day, leaving a strong impression on visitors  like me. However, the reality in Boystown was not always as inclusive as the rainbow flags show.

In 2011, some residents in Boystown launched a “Take Back Boystown” campaign. By blaming the queer youths of color for recent violence and crimes in the community, they sought to exclude those perceived as outsiders from the mainstream Boystown “in group”, a group largely made up of white, male patrons of the local gay bars.[4] This attempt of differentiating “us” and “them” within the queer community revealed the ironic segregation of race and class in Boystown. One year later, controversy surrounding the “When in Boystown” Tumblr blog further exposed the cracks and inequalities within the neighborhood. We can not know the original content of this blog, as it has been deleted, but contemporary critiques made it clear that this blog was“racist, transphobic, and body-negative.”[5]

The public debates and conflicts not only reflected the different opinions within Boystown’s queer community, but also indicated how the community space had been dominated by privileged white gay men—namely,  the owners of gay bars who acquired property in the 1980s and prioritized profit over the welfare of queer community. At the same time, people of color, women and trans people were increasingly marginalized and largely excluded in this neighborhood.[6] Given the problematic dynamics of Boystown,  it is thus understandable that queer leftism (and its engagement with other social justice movements) did not emerge here, but rather in the more racially and economically diverse neighborhood: Uptown.

The neighborhood’s economic development since 1915 can be largely credited to the success of  businessman Loren Miller. The name “Uptown” also originated from Miller’s commercial pamphlet , “The Up-Town Advertiser”[7]. Over the years, as the original Loren Miller & Co. Department Store at 4720 N. Broadway changed into different business and eventually residential spaces; the neighborhood also evolved, giving rise to an emerging diverse population marked by different forms of displacement.

The 1970s marked a crucial period of change for Uptown as new tenants were attracted by the emerging high-rise units. During that decade, federal subsidies were provided to support the construction of high-rise buildings for low- and moderate-income residents. As a result, developers built 4000 high-rise units in and around Uptown, creating the largest concentration of such housing in any community throughout the country. The neighborhood  soon attracted tenants from other parts of Chicago, along with Japanese Americans resettling after the WWII mass internment, and  immigrants and refugees from African and Southeast Asian countries. They all found a new home in Uptown, and many chose to fight for it later in their lives[8]. When Hellen Shiller arrived in Chicago as an activist within the Intercommunal Survival Committee, a support arm of the Black Panther Party, she described what she saw in this way:

“When I arrived in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood in 1972, it teemed with people. A port of entry for immigrants from everywhere, the neighborhood was characterized by unkempt and poorly maintained housing.[9]”

For decades, people like Shiller worked together to preserve Uptown to be  the last North Side lakefront neighborhood south of Rogers Park that is home to a significant population of low income households[10]. In the 1990s Uptown (when, as some of you might remember, Boystown was officially branded as a “proud” gayborhood ), affordable housing activists created the Community of Uptown Residents for Affordability and Justice(COURAJ). Queer leftism played an important role in this movement.

In 1995, Queer to the Left (Q2L) was founded as a radical grassroots organization committed to building solidarity with other social movements in Uptown[11]. From 1995 to 2005, Q2L was engaged not only in low-housing activism and resistance against gentrification, but also in campaigns for abolishing death penalty and condemning police brutality[12]. After 2005, the social justice movements in Uptown never stopped, and I encountered some of them on the window flyers during my Saturday visit on September 6.

From the histories of Boystown and Uptown, two modes of relations between “queer” and “community” emerge: queer people can constitute a community; queer people can also live in and interact with bigger communities.  By exploring the disputes within queer community in Boystown, I have discussed the challenges of building an inclusive place as home to marginalized people. In my view, those challenges are largely rooted in intersecting layers of inequality. Beyond the identities as sexual and gender minorities, queer individuals may also be people of color, immigrants, people with disabilities, or working-class individuals from low-income backgrounds. While critiques of Boystown reveal how its discourses and space have been largely dominated by white male gay, the voices from Uptown appear more diverse, with a queer agenda deeply connected to other social justice movements.

There is something I want to confess. As a first-time visitor and researcher, my observations are destined to be limited and biased. But there is also something I want to believe. I believe that one day, after building deeper connections with the two neighborhoods and feeling more local to Chicago, my view of their seemingly contradictory vibes will shift. I hope to uncover more common grounds, as well as more complexity, within and between different queer communities.  I don’t exactly know what I will find, but I am already looking forward to that day.

 

[1]Northalsted (Boystown), Choose Chicago, https://www.choosechicago.com/neighborhoods/boystown/.

[2] Jason Orne, Boystown: Sex and Community in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 223.

[3] Steben Jackson and Jason Nargis, Making Chicago’s Boystown, May 7, 2017, https://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/makingboystown/.

[4] Tracy Baim, Boystown Violence: Déjà Vu All Over Again, July 8, 2011. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boystown-violence-deja-vu_b_892319.

[5]Kate Sosin, Queer activists talk racism, transphobia at Center event, May 30, 2012, https://windycitytimes.com/2012/05/30/queer-activists-talk-racism-transphobia-at-center-event/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CQueer%20is%20Community%2C%E2%80%9D%20an,%2C%20transphobic%20and%20body%2Dnegative.

[6] Nico Lang, Is It Time to Boycott Boystown?, July 26,2012, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boystown-boycott_b_1704507.

[7] Neil Gale,Chicago’s Loren Miller & Company Department Store. (1900-1931), December 2017, https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2017/12/chicagos-loren-miller-company-dry-goods.html.

[8] Helen Shiller, Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022),3-5.

[9] Helen Shiller, Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), 1.

[10] Greg Hinz, “Battle of Uptown Rages Without End in Sight,” Crain’s Chicago Business, August 18, 2009, quoted in “Helen Shiller,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Shiller.

[11] Steben Jackson and Jason Nargis, Making Chicago’s Boystown, May 7, 2017, https://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/makingboystown/

[12] “Queer to the Left: Intersectional Activism in Action,” Dis/Placements (website), https://dis-placements.com/queer-to-the-left; Deborah Gould, “Becoming Coalitional: The Perverse Encounter of Queer to the Left and the Jesus People USA,” S&F Online 14, no. 2 (March 1, 2017): 1.

 

Works Cited: 

Baim, Tracy. “Boystown Violence: Déjà Vu All Over Again.” HuffPost, July 8, 2011. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boystown-violence-deja-vu_b_892319.

Gale, Neil. “Chicago’s Loren Miller & Company Department Store (1900–1931).” Dr. Loih Journal, December 2017. https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2017/12/chicagos-loren-miller-company-dry-goods.html.

Gould, Deborah. “Becoming Coalitional: The Perverse Encounter of Queer to the Left and the Jesus People USA.” S&F Online 14, no. 2 (March 1, 2017): 1. https://sfonline.barnard.edu/becoming-coalitional-the-perverse-encounter-of-queer-to-the-left-and-the-jesus-people-usa/.

Hinz, Greg. “Battle of Uptown Rages Without End in Sight.” Crain’s Chicago Business, August 18, 2009. Quoted in “Helen Shiller.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Shiller.

Jackson, Steben, and Jason Nargis. Making Chicago’s Boystown. May 7, 2017. https://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/makingboystown/.

Lang, Nico. “Is It Time to Boycott Boystown?” HuffPost, July 26, 2012. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/boystown-boycott_b_1704507.

“Northalsted (Boystown).” Choose Chicago. Accessed September 10, 2025. https://www.choosechicago.com/neighborhoods/boystown/.

Orne, Jason. Boystown: Sex and Community in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

“Queer to the Left: Intersectional Activism in Action.” Dis/Placements. Accessed September 10, 2025. https://dis-placements.com/queer-to-the-left.

Shiller, Helen. Daring to Struggle, Daring to Win. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022.

Sosin, Kate. “Queer Activists Talk Racism, Transphobia at Center Event.” Windy City Times, May 30, 2012. https://windycitytimes.com/2012/05/30/queer-activists-talk-racism-transphobia-at-center-event.