"Quearborn and Perversion" gets gay Chicago history straight

Here's a fact that many Chicagoans, and certainly few people living on the coasts, seem to know: In 1961, through legislative action, Illinois became the first state in the country to strike down its anti-sodomy laws. It would be a full decade before Connecticut followed suit (California didn't repeal its laws until 1976, while New York state waited until 1980). In Quearborn and Perversion, Ron Pajak's 2007 documentary on Chicago's LGBT history, screening Sunday 18 and Tuesday 20 at the Music Box, we discover that our city's role in gay rights isn't too shabby.

The film begins during the roaring twenties with a figure named Henry Gerber (after whom Gerber/Hart Library is partially named) who, in 1924, chartered the first gay-rights organization in the United States, the Society for Human Rights. Although it disbanded shortly thereafter, it set the stage for gay visibility in the Midwest. Fast forward to 1928 and gay life flourished among the bohemians and artists in a neighborhood called Tower Town (what we now call Streeterville).

The 105-minute doc uses a digital map of Chicago to document the places where the LGBT community thrived, mostly in the form of seedy taprooms including Benny the Bum's and Volli-ball on north Clark Street, the Patch in Calumet City and lesbian hangout Big Lou's on North Avenue to name just a few. Pajak has rounded up a fascinating circle of people including the late Studs Terkel, activist Vernita Gray, the late Valerie Taylor and many others to illuminate the story of Chicago's queer past. We learn, for example, that Chicago's own leather granddaddy Chuck Renslow played a key part in the burgeoning physique pictorial magazines that thrived during the 1950s. We later see his foray into early gay erotica with giggle-worthy film titles like Rubdown and Forced Entry. We learn about the epicenter of black gay life at establishments like Omar's and the racism gay blacks often faced (needing 4 to 5 pieces of I.D. to gain entry into white gay bars, for example), and we learn of the pioneering work of lesbian attorney Pearl Hart (the other surname in Gerber/Hart).

There's much to enjoy here. The film comes alive during the 1960s when rampant bar raids and New York's Stonewall riots eventually led to the formation of an organized gay civil-rights movement in Chicago. Pajak spends a robust amount of time interviewing the people at the center of the movement—which had its first public expression on June 28, 1970, when roughly 200 activists gathered in Bughouse Square (at Clark and Oak) and took to Michigan Avenue, declaring their rights for the first time in the Midwest.

Unfortunately, the documentary ends there. Given its running time, this seems fair enough, but I found myself wanting stories of the Belmont Rocks and the Rocks parties, the emergence of Lakeview and Andersonville as gay ghettos, the evolution of Pride, Mayor Daley's outreach to the LGBT community and so much more.

Pajak appears in person at both screenings.