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It was just a "simple restaurant serving tea," Collier insisted. It was the latter who coined "snugglepupping." Old newspaper stories describe the two defending the inn against all complaints, including one from a neighbor about "syncopated blues piano" sounding at all hours. Managing the inn was a circus performer named Lillian Collier (whose name is sometimes spelled differently) and her "aid" (sic) Virginia Harrison. "At a time when respectable women didn't smoke cigarettes, the women of Towertown strutted through alley smoking cigars and openly advocating 'free love,''' he writes in "Chicago Whispers." To de la Croix, the Wind Blew Inn underscores the pivotal role of women in creating the surrounding neighborhood, Near North now but called Towertown then. "Read between those lines," laughs de la Croix of the Times' description of the inn, which once stood where the southern façade of the Eddie Bauer store is now. Whatever else was going on in the "Stygian darkness" of The Wind Blew Inn when police famously raided it in February 1922, the proprietor's assistant insisted to a judge there was no "snugglepupping" - whatever that means - going on among a crowd later described by The New York Times as "a score of university students, together with numerous long-haired men and bobbed-hair women." Soldiers' and Airmen's Home in Washington, D.C. Gerber died in 1972, at age 80, at the U.S. Gerber also started a correspondence club called "Contacts," de la Croix writes, which served as a meeting place for homosexuals. He moved to New York City and rejoined the army where he remained until retiring in 1945. The arrests shut down the society and resulted in Gerber's discharge from the postal service. No one ever found that newspaper account." "No one knew how or where he was arrested until I wrote the book ….
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"His story came out when he was an old man,'' de la Croix says when asked about the discrepancies. De la Croix's account of the arrest is based on a July 13, 1925, story in the Chicago American newspaper, and it differs, as he notes in the book, from Gerber's own version, which has become the accepted re-telling of the story. But de la Croix chose instead for the tour this Near North spot because it is where he claims Gerber and other society leaders were arrested by police. Crilly Court in the Old Town Triangle district, is a Chicago landmark. Henry Gerber was an army veteran turned postal worker in the early 1920s who founded the Society for Human Rights, the nation's first gay rights organization, and published its short-lived newsletter, "Friendship and Freedom," which de la Croix describes as the "first known homophile publication" in the United States. Then: Residential property Now: Fort Dearborn branch office, U.S.
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He spent years compiling and researching the stories found in this book, which traces LGBT men and women from the Native Americans who lived here before there was a "Chicago" up through the city's founding and explosive growth to Stonewall, the 1969 police raid on a New York City gay bar and subsequent demonstrations that is considered the spark of the modern gay rights movement.īut de la Croix tells the Windup's story to show how a bar raid could impact a life, as the names, addresses and occupations of those arrested were publicized. Men and women who lead double lives, lying to the world by day, then turning up their collars to hide their frightened faces as they dart down litter-strewn alleys into unmarked bars at night."ĭe la Croix, inducted in 2012 into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, started listening to these "Chicago Whispers" in 1997, six years after arriving here from Britain. These voices belong to lesbians and gay men locked in the closet of Chicago's past. "Stand on the corner long enough," he adds, "peel away those cries of the past like the layers of an onion, and underneath you'll hear the whispering of ghosts as they tell their untold stories.