Daniel Williams is fascinated by the stories of queer Chicagoans in history, and he’s sharing that fascination with others through his Chicago Queer History walking tours.
He isn’t a professional historian—he’s a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an adjunct professor at Loyola University. His specialty is studying the ways that politics influences how LGBTQ+ people use the city. In doing that research, he’s come across a lot of history.
“Most of the time when I’m doing my academic research, I am building these giant data sets, and I’m throwing math at them,” he said. “But what I kept finding as I was building these data sets were these little stories of queer people in the past in Chicago doing some of the most mundane things you could imagine, just living their lives. And there’s no place for that in the math, but they’re such cool, vivid stories.”
He wanted to share the stories, so he started an Instagram channel a few years ago, with each post including a 90-second video where he visited a Chicago site and talked about what happened there. It eventually attracted 10,000 followers.
Three summers ago, he mapped out the locations and realized he could “connect the dots” between them, and so the walking tours were born. He usually does two a month, but there will be three during June for Pride Month.
He has stories about famous queer Chicagoans, such as activist Henry Gerber and lawyer Pearl Hart, but he’s particularly taken with stories of ordinary people.
One of them comes from 1865 and involves John Wing, a 21-year-old printer who’d just moved to Chicago from Buffalo, N.Y. “He arrives with three great passions: books, jewelry, and handsome young men,” Williams said.
Wing soon met Union soldier Tommy Phelan, who told Wing he was 18, although he may have actually been the older of the two. Wing became his sugar daddy, buying Phelan new clothes and taking him to restaurants and the theater. But several weeks into their relationship, Phelan disappeared, apparently to start a new affair with a young woman who was a maid at a Chicago hotel. He returned two weeks later and begged Wing to take him back, and he did, with them spending the night together at Wing’s boarding house.
The next morning, however, Phelan was gone again, and so was some of Wing’s jewelry. In Wing’s diary, he reported that Phelan had given him something—head lice and crabs. Wing had to douse himself in quinine every day for two weeks.
“I love that story because it is so mundane, right?” Williams said. “Somewhere in Chicago last night, someone took back his ex, even though it was a bad idea, and woke up this morning with unexpected houseguests. And that was 1865, right? We are more than a decade before the invention of the word ‘homosexual’ at this point. And yet we have people in Chicago living their lives.”
Another of his favorite stories is about Annie Miller, who was arrested at least three times for wearing men’s clothes in the 1890s. Miller was bold, each time telling the judge that friends dared her to do it and she didn’t want them to think her cowardly. The third time she (or they), having added a fake mustache, even asked a police officer for directions to the Palmer House.
Williams’s next tour is Saturday, June 13, starting at 1 p.m. at the Water Tower, 806 N. Michigan Ave. Titled “Public and Private Queerness,” it’s inspired by historian John D’Emilio’s observation that the rise of industrial cities allowed queer people to form their own spaces and culture. It will include the site of the 1920s drag bar Diamond Lil’s, named for the eponymous proprietor’s favorite Mae West play; a federal judge’s disappearance in the 1950s after visiting gay bars; Shoreline 7, a gay bar linked to at least three mysterious deaths; and one other raucous lesbian bar from the 1960s.
June 20 will bring “Dive Keepers on North Clark Get Warnings,” also starting at 1 p.m. at the Water Tower. The name comes from a 1948 Chicago Tribune headline about a police captain’s mandate that gay bars remove window coverings so that officers could see what was going on inside.
The inciting incident happened when a Northwestern University student picked up another man in one of the bars and they went to the other man’s car in Lincoln Park for a tryst. When the police knocked on the window, the driver pretended to cooperate but instead ran the car up Clark Street at a high speed and started shooting out the window at the cops. The chase ended with the car crashing into a trolley. No one was seriously injured, but the crackdown came as a result.
The June 27 tour will trace the route of Chicago’s first Pride parade, which was the first Pride parade anywhere, beating the New York and San Francisco parades by one day. It will begin at 1 p.m. at Washington Square Park, a.k.a. Bughouse Square, 901 N. Clark St.
“It’s a new experience every time,” Williams said of the tours. Thanks to the support of UIC’s Gender and Sexuality Center, the tours are free. “Knowledge should be free,” he said. “Knowledge should be accessible.”
A native of central Arkansas, Williams moved to Texas for college at age 18. He became a political activist in Texas, worked for a state legislator, then was a freelance journalist and eventually was legislative director for Equality Texas. “I don’t understand how anyone who came out in the ’90s could not be drawn to politics,” he said. He moved to Chicago in 2019, at age 37, to work on his doctoral degree.
He and his husband, computer programmer Jason Brunelle, live in Edgewater, convenient to the beach and their favorite bar, the Anvil. They have been together 26 years.
This fall, Williams will teach two courses at Loyola: Inter-American Politics and Introduction to Queer Politics. This will be his third time teaching the latter. “It’s always very popular and I think a little bit shocking and eye-opening for some of us,” he said.
He also hopes to open eyes with his tours. Find the full schedule here.