The Hippie years ...
"I'm from New York, and I moved to Chicago in '79 or '80. It was the year of that huge snowstorm. I grew up in New York City. I was a hippie when I was a teenager and I went out to San Francisco and did all that stuff. Then I went back to college in New York. I was living with a guy then, and he got a job here in Chicago, that's why I came here initially."
First gay environment in Chicago ...
"It depends what you mean by environment. The thing that comes to mind is His 'n' Hers. If you want to call that a gay environment, it was, but there were a lot of straight people who hung out there too."
Blazing Star ...
"Almost as soon as I arrived in town I got involved in the newspaper Blazing Star. I saw an ad in the Reader that said they were looking for writers for a women's newspaper. I answered the ad and found out it was far more involved than that. It was a leftist women's newspaper, and basically a lesbian paper. I was out to myself at that point, but I wasn't sure I was interested in getting involved in the New American Movement, which was a big left wing movement; although I was a leftist ... kind of.
"But I wasn't really that big on singing Bread and Roses and all that kind of shit. Blazing Star was run out of the New American movement office up on Clark Street. Judy MacLean and I went out to lunch and she explained what the magazine was, and was I interested? And I was. So I started writing for them.
"I then became involved in the 'collective' ... ( Laughs ) ."
The first thing I wrote ...
"First I wrote a short story and in retrospect it was really terrible, but I guess they wanted to encourage me to write for them, so they published it. Then I started writing nonfiction. A book about Renee Vivian had just come out, it was a Naiad book, about Natalie Barney and Renee Vivian. It was a cool book. So I started doing reviews and interviews."
The end of Blazing Star ...
"It's hard to tell when the end was, it depends on your perspective. Some people would say the paper ended when it merged with GayLife. It was a section in GayLife for quite a while, I was one of the editors of that, along with Suzanne Klug. And Christine Riddiough was part of that for a while.
"I came in on the tale end of the whole project with Blazing Star, and most of the women who had been doing it for a long time were burnt out. They were already having their typesetting done over at GayLife. Then Grant Ford, who owned GayLife at that point, offered to have a women's section in the paper. That was pretty attractive to some women, and other women thought it was copping out to the boys, but Grant was very sweet and everybody trusted him. Then maybe three weeks after we decided to 'merge,' GayLife was bought by Chuck Renslow, and that was a whole different kettle of fish. At that point the paper had two editors: Sarah Craig, who died some years ago, and Steven ( Kulieke ) , so there was a male and a female editor, and they let us do what we wanted."
After the paper was sold ...
"The tenure of the paper really did change. It was obvious. Chuck Renslow was interested in promoting his bars, so the bar ads became more prominent. That's fine too, but the women were not happy about that. I stayed on for a while as one of the two Blazing Star editors, then I drifted away from the whole thing when I noticed the men were all getting paid for their writing, and the women were getting nothing. We had been doing it for nothing all this time, as a free women's paper, but then once we were a part of GayLife, it was the male writers who were getting paid.
"So I thought, 'What am I doing this for?' It was around the same time that I started doing open mic's. I did that for quite a while, but I was still interested in writing. As I remember, I kept writing articles here and there for GayLife, but they were about performers I had seen. I did a lot of reviews of local performers. I interviewed Trish and Lori, and then I did a piece on Dev Singh. He was a singer who played the dulcimer, a folkie type ... very nice person. Very talented. He was often the host of the open mic nights at His 'n' Hers. So I did a piece about Dev Singh for GayLife, and because it was the first thing I'd written about a guy, they apparently decided I was a good writer and they offered to start paying me for my work.
"At that time GayLife had its offices up at Chuck Renslow's corner of the world on Clark, just south of Foster, near Man's Country. That was OK, and I did articles whenever I felt like it. Then Tracy ( Baim ) showed up [ in 1984 ] . When Tracy took over as editor she was encouraging more women to write for the paper. Then we had our little revolution and went off with Bob Bearden and Jeff McCourt to start Windy City Times [ in 1985 ] ."
His 'n' Hers ...
"His 'n' Hers was a part of the open mic circuit. There were different bars in Chicago that had open mics on different nights of the week. His 'n' Hers had theirs on Sunday, and that was the only one that was gay-owned. Marge Summit was really visionary in trying to create a bar environment that was for everyone, gay and straight together.
"I was singing and playing guitar and sometimes playing the piano. I was writing my own songs, and that's the reason I did the open mic's. I had been writing songs and nobody was hearing them. I had terrible stage fright at the time and I thought: this will be very good for me to get over it. The open mics were pretty schlocky anyway. I had somebody who was also doing them with me, and the two of us would be so nervous, but we gave each other moral support. At most of these folk bars-;not at His 'n' Hers, but certainly the others-;usually the only people there on open mic nights were the open mic people. A lot of it was very bad, but there were a lot of good performers, too, who I was able to meet through those things."
Book Note: Jorjet Harper's Lesbomania and Tales from the Dyke Side are both published by New Victoria Publishers. Her column starts again soon in WCT.