Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago's First Century
Starred review from May 1, 2018
In this fascinating history of Chicago's queer past, Elledge (Henry Darger, Throwaway Boy, 2013) has created, from its striking cover to its provocative subtitle, an eye-popping portrait of the inhabitants of Towertown, Bronzeville, West Madison Street, and other bohemian neighborhoods from Chicago's incorporation in 1837 to the mid-1940s. These were the places where the city's homosexual population lived, loved, and worked. Elledge's rich narrative describes the Jazz Age as a time when queer men owned businesses and patronized the same establishments as nonqueers, and female impersonators performed in drag shows at cabarets. More important, these easily identifiable and transgressive figures were so integral to the mainstream that the whole phenomenon became known as the Pansy Craze. But the stock market crash in 1929 and the subsequent wave of sociopolitical conservatism, Elledge maintains, put an end to all that. Retrieving the lives of mostly unsung people, with the exceptions of homosexual rights activist Henry Gerber and pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey, Elledge also chronicles such bohemian haunts as the Dil Pickle Club, Bughouse Square, the Fine Arts Building, the Plantation Caf�, and many other venues as well as masquerade and costume balls taking place generally within a carnival atmosphere. A thoroughly researched, invaluable, and vastly entertaining tale of lost Chicago.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)