"Second City was a motorcycle club that we formed in the early days of the leather movement. It was quite popular for a while and we had a lot of runs outside of town. To be a member you had to be gay and own a motorcycle. Two people could join having one motorcycle, in other words the lover could ride on the back of the bike.
"In later years it changed and you didn't have to own a bike. I left after five or six years because I was president and I also owned the Gold Coast, so I didn't think that was fair. We did a lot of fun runs, we went out to a place called Curly's Farm one time...for the runs we would invite other people along, and not just members of the club...but there were maybe 60-70 people out there for this big orgy, and we almost burnt down the barn. Curly's Farm was in Illinois somewhere, but I have no idea where, we're talking about something that happened in the '60s." ... Chuck Renslow
Club LaRay
"It had to be around '83, I had just got back from Vegas and I was working at the Holiday Inn out in Oakbrook. One of the guys I worked with called Curtis, he used to go to Club LaRay's all the time. He was a Black guy, and me and him used to go down there. The place was absolutely huge. You would walk in and there was a huge dancefloor off to the right corner, a big circular bar, and then level after level walking back of different rooms. There was a room off to the left when you first walked in, little tables and stuff, and if you went back a little farther there was a pool table room, but I don't remember anyone ever playing pool. You walked back even farther and I think there was another bar back there. There was a lot of dark corners where people had sex.
"Where was it? You know where the bank is on Belmont and Halsted, that parking lot, that used to be Club LaRay. The bar was 99 percent Black, there would be me and three or four other white people in there. Mostly male. At the weekend it was packed." ...Anonymous Man
Charlie's Angels ...
"That was in the suburbs and was a little neighborhood bar in a strip mall. I think it was in Elk Grove Village and it was like Temptations before they remodeled." ... Anonymous Man
Hideaway ...
"I went there before all the fires. I remember, they had at least two fires. They were apparently having problems in the neighborhood. It was the Hideaway, then they had a fire and it closed down and reopened as Hideaway II, then they had another fire and they reopened as something else. It may have been Oz, and now it's the 7301 Club. I think they were having a lot of problems with a straight biker type bar across the street." ... Anonymous Man
Touche ...
"Touché on Lincoln. Oh that was fun. I used to go upstairs, and they had a pool table there, and there again I never saw anyone playing pool. I don't know why these places used to have pool tables. They had an interesting bathroom. When you walked up to one side of the bathroom there was a big picture window that was a one-way glass and you could see in, but people in the bathroom couldn't see out, so you could look in and see everyone urinating. They also had a big piss tub there. No, I never sat in the piss tub. There are some things in life I can do without, and sitting in a piss tub is one of them." ... Anonymous Man
Normandy ...
"The Normandy was where Deeks used to be. They had drag shows there, and it was a rough Hispanic bar, much like El Gato Negro is today. The stage was at the far end of the bar where Deeks had there dancefloor. It was an interesting place. Hardly anybody in there spoke English and they didn't care to speak English either. You would go in there, watch the show and dodge the bottles. That was a rough bar, and I saw a number of fights when I was there, but I could have just gone on the bad nights." ...Anonymous Man
Drugs in the early/mid '80s ....
"It's definitely changed, the type of drugs we took. We used to do acid and speed back then, and now it's all crystal meth and ecstasy. I don't think the drug problem is any worse, just more people know about it now. We took just as many drugs back then, but now they've got different names and people do them at circuit parties." ... Anonymous Man
NOTE: Readers interested in the history of AIDS and ACT-UP/Chicago may want to attend "Post-mortem," a presentation by Mary Patten at the University of Chicago's Center for Gender Studies. Patten is a visual artist, videomaker, educator, writer, occasional curator, and political activist.
"For several years, I have been writing and making work about the dilemmas of preserving the activist experiences of the AIDS movement of the late '80s and early '90s," she writes. "There is, of course, a sharp irony in having a recently extinguished mass movement historicized and archived. The vehicles through which so much of this activism was performed, documented, and recorded are themselves at risk...not only the ephemera of stickers, T-shirts, buttons, posters, broadsides, and the like...but also the notoriously unstable and fragile medium of analog videotape. 'Post-mortem' is a visual/aural meditation on the 'imagined community' of ACT UP/Chicago."
"Post-mortem: Analog Bleed, Digital Ghosts," a presentation by Mary Patten is open to the public and takes place on Friday, May 18, 12:15-1:30 p.m. at Judd Hall, Room 110, 5835 S. Kimbark. Call ( 773 ) 702-9936.
