Talking to Steve Starr …
The first gay bar I ever went to …
'It was the Annex when it was on Clark, maybe two blocks north of Diversey. That was probably around 1972. How did I hear about the place? There was a whole bunch of guys I was hanging out with, or maybe some guy took me there that first time, who knows! It was just like any bar today. Not as crowded and wild as Big Chicks, but it was like that.
'At the time, my store was a few blocks from there. Actually, my first store was at 6970 N. Sheridan, then I moved to 2654 N. Clark St. in 1970, so I was there when the very first Chicago Gay Pride parade came by the store. Some people say it was later, but it was the very first one. The parade was small, but they had some floats. I remember I tied balloons out front of the store on the lampposts.
The Revue: Vanity …
'It all started when a customer told me about this vintage clothing her aunt had. So she brought it into the store, and I got interested and started selling vintage clothes. I had all these gorgeous clothes and I thought, 'Well, they should be presented and seen.' As a kid I always wanted to put on a show, like in the old movies ... . I needed a theme, so I started with fashion through the ages. A lot of people came to the first show at the Athenaeum, and it was free. It was a fashion show revue. We had a pianist, and one of the singers, the main singer, got drunk behind the stage and she was falling all over.
'The show obviously advertised my store, but it was mostly a creative thing. Then I wanted to do it better and so I did it again the next year. It was more professional. Then the third year we had a full orchestra. I don't know how we got that big. I think when you're 22, 25, you don't know you can't do something, and somehow it all gets done. Nowadays, the cost alone would be outrageous.
'At the last show there was a singer sitting on a star singing 'Blue Moon,' and I always did a walk-on, and I had this white tux jacket on and I rode out to meet her in the middle of the stage floating. But they rode me out really fast and I was pretty pissed afterwards, and then we started arguing, and …
' … that was one of the things I didn't like, the arguing behind the scenes, and that's why I stopped doing those shows. Most people were nice but, you know, we'd done it for five years.
'The last show we did ran for a few weeks and we had thousands of people, with standing room only at the back. I'll tell you a secret; the very first show, I didn't know what to call it, so I called it Erection; I thought it would be fun for people to say, 'Did you see Steve Starr's Erection last night?' I had a poster that said, Erection, the Reconstruction of Social Forces Influencing Fashion … or something. It had a picture of Jean Harlow with a big smile, and it was on silver paper with light brown ink, and it was very pretty. It was framed.
'Well, my dad came in the store and he said 'Erection!! What's this poster?' So I said, 'Oh I don't know, I couldn't think of a name so I called it Erection.' Then I thought, 'Well, that's not a very classy name,' so I called it Vanity.
'It turned out that Vanity was a good name because it was all about people being vain. One of the lines in the show I wrote for a fashion commentator, and she said: 'A full life means a full closet.' Everybody loved that. If you're vain and shallow like sometimes we like to be, it's true.
Bowling in 1975 …
'There were five of us and we decided to go bowling at the Art Deco bowling alley on Clark across from where my store was at the time.
'The next week we invited some friends and then more friends, and we decided to have a name, and since I got it going we called it StarrStrikers. It was really unorganized, but we did have meetings, and we had officers, but we weren't competitive, we did it for fun. We played in prom dresses, nuns, all kinds of costume things.
'One night there was 110 people there. In the end it got too big and out of control. And then in '77 I got the bright idea to do a fashion show revolving around bowling. It was one of the worst ideas I ever had. My idea was to glamorize the sport. I had a model in a gold satin evening gown with white pearls and a gold bowling ball. We put her in the alley and photographed her.'
If you have memories to share, contact Sukie de la Croix at Windy City Times. Voicemail at (773) 871-7610, or e-mail sukie@windycitymediagroup.com .
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