June 2024 | Volume XLII, Issue 2 »

Invisible Threads: Tracking Illinois LGBT History

June 3, 2024
Robert Ridinger, Northern Illinois University

The diverse information landscape of publication on American LGBT history often centers attention on the communities of major cities and their political and social lives. Less attention has been given to the histories of local and rural communities, although since the 1990s this situation has begun to change. Illinois has long been the focus of LGBT activism, from the days of the homophile movement in the 1950s to contemporary times and witnessed one of the pioneering (if short-lived) efforts at establishing an organization during the 1920s. This article will present a review of sources on the state’s LGBT past in both print and nonprint formats.

The earliest records of Illinois gay history are associated with the work of Henry Gerber, a German immigrant who founded the nonprofit Chicago Society for Human Rights (modeled on similar organizations in his homeland) in 1924. On December 24th, the State of Illinois issued a charter to the new group, which “ decided to concentrate…efforts on the State of Illinois and to focus on reform of those laws criminalizing homosexual acts” (Katz 1976, 390). In his groundbreaking compilation Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the United States editor Jonathan Katz profiles both the Society (suppressed by the Chicago police in 1925) and Gerber’s subsequent involvement with the struggle for homosexual rights. A notable feature of the entry is the reproduction of the original charter for the Society (together with a statement signed by the founders) and a photograph showing a copy of the group’s publication Friendship and Freedom. No copies of this periodical are known to have survived. In 2023, Angel in Sodom: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the Gay Rights Movement by Jim Elledge appeared from Chicago Review Press and provides a detailed biography of Gerber’s life and significance to LGBT history.

In 1955, the American Law Institute, a group composed of law school faculty and practicing lawyers, issued a body of recommendations for the reform of criminal law, which would be further developed and formally adopted in 1962 as a model penal code for the nation. The draft form of this code influenced a major revision of the Illinois state criminal code signed into law by Governor Otto Kerner on July 28, 1961. Among the measures enacted by this revision was the repeal of extant sodomy laws that criminalized consensual homosexual acts, making Illinois the first state to enact such a reform.

The homophile philosophy espoused by Gerber came into fuller existence in the United States a quarter century after the suppression of the Chicago Society for Human Rights with the foundation of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950. By the 1960s, chapters of the Society were being formed across the country, one of which, Mattachine Midwest, appeared in Chicago in 1965. Its publication, the Mattachine Midwest Newsletter, initiated a series of publications serving the gay and lesbian community of Chicago whose overlapping coverage created an unbroken journalistic record which is now approaching its sixtieth anniversary. Titles such as Chicago Gay Crusader (June 1973–1976), GayLife (June 20, 1975–Jan. 30, 1986), Windy City Times (September 26, 1985 to date) and Chicago OUTlines/OUTlines (June 1987–2000) offer a frank look at the city’s LGBT communities as they evolved and changed.

In recent years, more comprehensive books on Chicago’s gay and lesbian past have appeared. The first, assembled by Tracy Baim, co-founder of Windy City Times, appeared in 2008 from Surrey Books as Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City’s Gay Community. It was followed four years later from the University of Wisconsin Press by Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall by journalist and historian St. Sukie de la Croix. Jim Elledge explores the city’s past in The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago’s First Century from the Chicago Review Press and published in 2018.

But the lands lying outside the Chicago metropolitan region were also home to LGBT communities with a very different geography and history from their urban cousins. An important thread of Illinois LGBT history can be found on the campuses of the state’s universities, with the chartering of organizations serving those members of the academic community (faculty, staff, and students) who identified as other than heterosexual. In 1969, a local chapter of the Gay Liberation Front formed at Illinois State University, later renaming itself as the Gay People’s Alliance. Taking their cue from the University of Michigan, where a local chapter of the Gay Liberation Front had been established in March 1970, students at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb formed a chapter of the Front in April 1970. The name of the group was later changed to the Gay and Lesbian Union. Across the state, similar efforts took shape, with the formation of the Gay Liberation Organization at Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale campus in April 1971 and another chapter of the Gay Liberation Front on the campus of the University of Illinois in August 1972 (the forerunner of the Gay Illini [1975] and Illini Pride [1977]). For researchers, the campus newspapers of these institutions and the towns they were embedded in provide valuable context for how LGBT communities evolved on a local scale. In some cases, the organizations themselves created publications which can be traced in university archives.

While many of Illinois’ LGBT citizens subscribed to such nationally circulated periodicals as The Advocate or picked up copies of the Chicago papers as available, there was also a stream of local journalism that chronicled the events of smaller communities and tracked their issues. One example is the Rock River News, founded by Steve Wheeler in Rockford in 1990 and published monthly from May 1990 to July 1996 to serve the stateline area. A more ambitious publication picked up the thread the following month, when the first issue of the monthly newspaper Prairie Flame appeared in Springfield. For the first six months, its stated area of coverage was Decatur, Springfield, and Jacksonville, with Bloomington, Carlinville, Champaign, Normal, and Urbana added in March 1997. During its nearly twelve years of existence, it declared itself to be “A newspaper of iinterest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered people of downstate Illinois and those who support them in their quest for equality.”

With the rise of the Internet, access to information of local importance for Illinois’ LGBT communities outside the Chicago region became both significantly easier to obtain and more in demand. In 2010 journalist Tom Wray created the Windy City Banner as an LGBT news outlet for the city and subsequently left the Chicago area and created an online successor to the Prairie Flame with the transformation of the Banner into the Illinois Eagle. The statement of purpose for the new organization noted that “our mission is to serve as a forum and voice for the LGBTQ communities of Illinois at the local level and to inform the community of events and issues across the state.”

In 2019, the Queer Oriented Rural Resources Network (QORRN) was founded in response to the findings of a report issued jointly by the Movement Advancement Project, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the National Black Justice Coalition, and the Equality Federation. Entitled Where We Call Home: LGBT People in Rural America, it noted that between 2.9 and 3.8 million people living in rural America are LGBT and that they face higher rates of discrimination due to “the social and political landscape of rural areas…the greater social and geographic isolation of rural areas means there are fewer support structures available to LGBT people in rural areas. When LGBT people in rural areas face discrimination, or even simply are struggling with acceptance or coming out, there are fewer places to turn for social support, legal support, or even just basic information.”

Among the projects of QORRN is a survey of local and state resources available to rural LGBT communities; as of 2023, Illinois was one of two states for which such information had been assembled, the other being North Carolina.

The diversity of past and evolving primary sources of iinformation created by and for the LGBT communities of Illinois poses ongoing challenges for the state’s libraries, particularly in the areas of collection development, local history, reference services, and archival preservation. In both rural and urban settings, the chief question is not whether new historical information will be found and made available, but how soon and at what level of detail, and the social and political changes it will mirror.

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