In this remembrance, I want to reflect on our efforts in Gay and Women’s Liberation in Chicago in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I want to focus on the issues we collectively struggled with during those early ventures into queer power and liberation. The death of my long-time friend Kathleen Thompson in the last week of December 2024 prompted me to make this reflection.
In 1966, when I arrived in Chicago to study for my PhD at the University of Chicago, I started working on feminist and social justice projects in Hyde Park and elsewhere on the South Side with my friends Lucina Kathmann and Marjorie Witty. At the same time, the gay consciousness-raising group I was part of at the UChicago had begun organizing “actions” on the North Side and was considering relocating there.
I pursued this tug by the ‘Zeitgeist’ to the North Side by pulling up stakes and moving north. I was already visually familiar with the CTA Red Line neighborhoods on the North Side because I worked at the Loyola University Lake Shore Campus.
During my commutes, I began stopping at various neighborhoods along the route to explore possible places to live. Kathleen lived on Webster in the DePaul area, so I started there. But after considering DePaul, Uptown and Loyola, I chose the Belmont area.
Walking along Halsted Street from Belmont to Addison, I found an entire building for rent at 3322 N. Halsted St.for $250 a month. The two-story building, which included a second-floor apartment and a first-floor storefront with a small living space in the back, became home to our living collective and Kathleen Thompson’s Pride and Prejudice bookstore. The year was 1970—long before Halsted became Boystown, let alone the current “Northalsted.”
In both the UChicago gay consciousness-raising group and our Halsted Street living collective, we grappled with issues still relevant today: gender, sexuality, roles and identity. We believed gay liberation and women’s liberation were intrinsically linked, rooted in the power structures and dynamics of human sexuality. Despite serious objections that sometimes irreparably damaged friendships, we maintained in belief and practice that men and women—gay, straight and other—could live and work together toward shared goals.
When separatism began fracturing gay liberation, we worked to prove that lesbians and gay men could collaborate respectfully and effectively. We debated the terms to describe ourselves and our work, opting for inclusive language. We affirmed names that were inclusive, because we understood the revolutionary value of queer individuals—gay, lesbian, and the whole diverse, splendid sexual panoply—working together to discover and release the creative power of human sexuality.
This same spirit of inclusiveness was manifest in the Gay Liberation Center on North Avenue in Old Town run by Gary Chichester and Chuck Renslow, with which I worked for several years.
In my work at the Old Town Gay Liberation Center, I met many young men from Ohio and Iowa and Michigan who came to the Center not so much because they were “gay” but because they were struggling to find out what their sexuality was all about.
At first, I was surprised at this sexual confusion, because I always intensely felt my own homoerotic feelings so deeply I could not even imagine not knowing my sexual orientation. It would have been most destructive to ask these young men to choose or decide what they were when the whole purpose of their leaving their states and cities and their families was to find out what their sexuality meant to them as individuals.
Even today, the failure of society and family structures to provide teens with a “safe space” to understand their sexuality is a principal cause of homelessness, emotional illness and drug abuse among young people.
In my experience, the leather bars demonstrated the kind of mutual affirmation and acceptance that should be hallmarks of our common effort to affirm everyone, regardless of sex, gender, roles, preferences, color or costumes.
We all need to explore our sexuality in order to discover what sex/sexuality means for each of us. We need to live out that discovery as best we can, to see both what it has to teach us and how it contributes to our whole existential project to be good human beings.
I always self-identified as QUEER—way before it became fashionable to do so—because that word means simply that I do not fit any of the categories the state, church, medical profession or merchants would shackle me with.
The effort to describe our sexuality should not be used to prescribe or proscribe. Naming our experiences should not splinter and isolate us. It must unite us instead.
I hope that these musings of an old queer man will rekindle the relationship of the exploration of our sexuality to the quest for equality and social justice for every member of our civil society.
January 2025 © nicholas.patricca@gmail.com
NICHOLAS A. PATRICCA is professor emeritus at Loyola University Chicago; member, PEN International, San Miguel Center; member, TOSOS theatre ensemble NYC; president of the Chicago Network for Justice and Peace.