In Chicago, Boystown — with its mix of cocktail lounges, gay bars, nightclubs, parades and drag brunches — has become a well-oiled machine for queer culture in the city.
Long before Mayor Richard M. Daley anointed the area bounded by Briar Place to the south, Halsted Street to the west, and North Broadway to the east as the nation’s first official gay village in 1997, the community had already made that roughly triangular patch in Lakeview East its home decades before. That’s because Chicago is, and always has been, a very queer town. It’s where the seat of our community’s culture exists in the city today, but it is certainly not the first place in Chicago where identity, politics and partying for the community collided.
