BijouBlog

When the Bijou Theater opened its doors in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago 46 years ago, let's just say that area was pretty much the Haight-Asbury of Chicago. Think hippies. Head shops. Art house cinemas. Think, according to one nostalgic online poster, a place where one might (and it did happen) actually see a woman walking a goat down the street.

Now, some claim that by 1970s its glory hippie days were over, but the gay places, including the new Bijou Theater and a bar called Glory Hole (self-explanatory) were glorying (literally) in the newly liberated gay sexual revolution (think lines of guys waiting to get in). Old Town, always raw and raunchy and funky, was becoming the gayborhood.

This new gayborhood was still the home of what are now legendary Old Town places.

This article pretty much says it all:

Chances R (1528 N.; occupied today by O`Brien`s Restaurant). The old saloon and hamburger joint was said to have started the Wells Street revival when it opened back in the early `60s. Customers were encouraged to toss their peanut shells on the floor. The restaurant`s name reflected the uncertainty of the location. ``Chances are we could go broke,`` the owners reportedly said among themselves.

Ripley`s Believe It or Not Museum (1500 N.). Ripley, which opened in 1968, was part of a chain of international Ripley`s museums. The Chicago branch contained 13 galleries, including the circus room with its various freaks and mutations as well as replicas of Cleopatra`s barge, of a man who lived to be 160 years old and of a mummified monk. The museum closed in 1987 and auctioned off its exhibits.

London Royal Wax Museum (1419 N.). Another popular stop along Wells, the museum included lifelike figures of Chicagoans Ernie Banks, Hugh Hefner and Al Capone. The dungeon featured replicas of Dracula, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein while the fantasy room contained Pinocchio, Cinderella, Rip Van Winkle and Alice in Wonderland.

The Earl of Old Town (1615 N.). The fabled club that came to epitomize the Chicago folk scene and honed such home-grown talent as Steve Goodman, John Prine and Bonnie Koloc opened in 1962. Owner Earl Pionke didn`t introduce music, however, until 1966.

On June 8, 1974,the Lambda Rising Bookstore opened its doors in Washington, D.C., with a stock of three hundred titles and average sales of about $25 a day.

By 1987, it had opened a second store, established a thriving mail-order business, offers more than twenty thousand titles, and has annual sales of $1.5 million.

“We really didn't expect it to make any money,” said owner Deacon Maccubbin in retrospect.

Maccubin opened up a second store in Maryland in 1984, but it closed in the spring of 2008, as part of the trend toward LGBT bookstore (in fact, practically all brick-and-mortar bookstores) closures in the early 21st century.

Lambda did try to save one famous LGBT bookstore: The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the United States' first gay and lesbian bookstore. Craig Rodwell in 1967 at 15 Mercer Street in Greenwich Village, later moving to the corner of Christopher and Gay Streets in Manhattan. Lambda Rising got the store going on again financially, but then sold it to the long-time manager.  

Other famous LGBT bookstores that have closed include A Different Light in Los Angeles and San Francisco and Giovanni's Room in Philadelphia.

Specifically, Maccubbin announced in 2009 that his stores would close in 2010. He said:

61b5310b3bed3The phrase 'mission accomplished' has gotten a bad rap in recent years, but in this case, it certainly applies. When we set out to establish Lambda Rising in 1974, it was intended as a demonstration of the demand for gay and lesbian literature. We thought ... we could encourage the writing and publishing of LGBT books, and sooner or later other bookstores would put those books on their own shelves and there would be less need for a specifically gay and lesbian bookstore. Today, 35 years later, nearly every general bookstore carries LGBT books.61b5310b3bed4
 

What “general bookstores?” In Chicago, I've witnessed the disappearance of Kroch's and Brentanos, Crown Books, Barnes & Nobles, Barbara's Bookstore (where I bought my first gay book, 61b5310b3bed3The Sexual Outlaw61b5310b3bed4 by John Rechy) and Borders. Unabridged Books, a local (now it's trendy to be local) icon, in the Boystown area still thrives, but it is not exclusively LGBT, but does carry quite a bit of stock in that area.
 

Emily Litella of Saturday Night Live fame might have got this term wrong and called it something like “tanspread” or “manshead or even “sandwich spread;” I am waiting for this term to perhaps get into the Oxford English dictionary in a few years.

So what is it? Is it a noun, a verb? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? Bigger than a bread box? It actually could be all of these.

Here's a pic which shows, not tells, what it is, and it mostly takes place on the subway or other forms of public transportation, perhaps making it a more urban image:

Was the Will and Grace duo (gay guy and his “BFF” straight woman) that epitomizes, for many heterosexual audiences, a slice of gay life really that much of a groundbreaking novelty? Yes it was, because the show was aired on national TV, so it created a lot of discussion about that type of relationship. But believe it or not, in a late-sixties publication called Sex Play: A Marital Guide for the Gay Male (from our extensive collection of gay sexual history materials) there is an hilarious article on the gay guy and his “BFF” straight woman.

In the late sixties, once the Post Office lifted censorship restrictions about showing full frontal nudity, homoerotic publications started showing not only cocks, but couples in a variety of sexual positions (still rather risky for that time period). In order to continue to cover their asses, these publications advertised themselves as “how to” or “guide to” material, and often included articles on various aspects of gay life that may or may not have had anything actually to do with the sucking and fucking going on in the pictures. Thus, this supposed marital guide, though offering relevant articles about gay couples getting married (yes, they did at this time period) and why it is beneficial to be a homosexual, is billed as “educational material not to be sold to minors.”

But why is there material on, as the term on the street labels them, “fag hags,” in this publication? In accordance with its educational mission, the article “Living It Up Together” purports to offer a heterosexual reader a glimpse of the “homosexual life,” which includes feelings of love which can result relationships not dissimilar to “straights,” the author claims (including marriages in “homosexual churches”). But the author also claims to offer insights into some a special relationship prevalent when gays and straights mix in social settings (apparently a more common occurrence during that time period, though either group would be in the minority depending on the party). That relationship is the gay man-straight woman. The article proclaims:

Many “straights” get a tremendous charge out of the company of inverts and actually prefer associating with them rather than their own crowd. Older women are constantly added to the list as patronesses or benefactresses because they adore the flattery and attention lavished up them after the “normal” society has given up complimenting their fading egos. They are caught up in the gaiety and effervescence (more sham and pretense, but usually convincingly so) of the seemingly light-hearted, brilliant conversationalists and exhibitionists of which this (gay) crowd is comprised.

Pretty heady, campy stuff! I won't get into the use of the term invert (now an old-fashioned word for gay, meaning that somehow the usual sexual attribute and desires of one's gender are inverted, turned around, even reserved in gays and lesbians), but what I find really interesting is the now-offensive stereotype here in full force, one that was assumed, hinted at, but not necessarily shouted from the rooftops for many years. For example, gay icon Joan Crawford surrounded herself with gay men (her best friends were a gay, by all practical purposes married, couple, William Haines and his lover Billy), but the darker side of this relationship also applied to her. According to some of her biographers, a few gay men, then called “starfuckers,” supposedly took advantage of her good will as she aged.

I think there's more going on here than “times have changed” since the late sixties. Straight women apparently (so I've heard from private sources) can hang out in gay bars with their gay friends and not be derided as “fag hags” as the core parts of what used to be the “homosexual lifestyle” become assimilated into the mainstream. But is the stereotype totally dead? After all, there is a show on the LGBT Logo channel called "1 Girl 5 Gays," in which five “outlandish, fabulous” gay men tackle topics ranging from love and sex to celebrity pop culture, with a female host acting as “ringleader.” Is this show more like entertainment or reality, I wonder...

Whatever the reality, I wonder if we finally are starting to realize that whatever relationships end up coming our way, we need to see ourselves as whole persons, not get so bound up in dualisms that lend themselves to potentially harmful stereotypes like gay guy/straight woman.

I am of a “certain age” that remembers prank phone calls, heavy phone books, payphones (do any exist anywhere these days?), and calling the operator.

And, gasp, rotary phones. We had two rotary phones, one on the kitchen wall, and one down in the basement. You had to obtain phones ONLY from the phone company at that time. If you screwed up a number, redialing could be quite painful. I wonder how many people just dialed the operator and had her (yes, they were invariably of the female gender) to connect them.
 

I worked at one place, before the days of voice mail, where the switchboard was required to page people they could not put through. The woman who worked evenings, Helen, used to be an operator for the phone company, and I could swear her voice was exactly like the female voice you used to hear when you dialed a disconnected number: “The number you have reached, 555-555-5555, has been disconnected. No further information is available.” I wonder if they used her voice for that recording …

Now, prank phone calls are still alive and well and have adapted to the new technology (check out the Judge Judy and Dr. Phil soundboards), but ironically, such technology, especially caller ID, makes it quite easy for such calls to be traced. In the days before caller ID, it was open season for bored suburban kids whose parents were not home. Once my mother started working in order to make up for the loss of income that occurred during the rampant inflation of the seventies, we were sometimes at home, unsupervised. Supposedly too old for a babysitter.

We didn't do the usual, “Is there a John there? No. Then where do you go to the bathroom?” ones. One of my brothers and I prided ourselves on our geeky esoteric knowledge of Star Trek and Greek mythology. We would call people (and organizations; for some reason, we liked to call The Church of the Nazarene) asking for characters in Greek mythology like Zeus and Agamemnon or obscure Biblical figures like Miriam the sister of Moses.

We found a guy who had an answering machine (still a rarity at that time) and left messages that Troy was falling or that Lieutenant Uhura was trying to obtain a signal from his number. Nothing obscene (I did call someone once and make a farting noise into the phone, and one time we held the phone up to the flushing toilet, if that qualifies).

At least we weren't doing drugs or having sex or going to the bathroom outside (a major social evil in our house) when Mom was at work. I consider our activity, actually, quite creative, though I'm sure, to our prankees, incredibly annoying.

One time we almost got busted. On one episode of The Brady Bunch, Jan, poor Jan, is trying to fake she has a boyfriend, George Glass. In order to orchestrate her ruse, she calls the operator and asks her to ring back the number, claiming she though something was wrong with the phone. The phone rings (no one is there; I would think it would the operator), and she fakes conversations with George.
 

My brother and I decided to duplicate this ruse. My brother was always able to pull off the more elaborate ones (I would tend to start laughing). He put on his “sexy woman voice” (hear Ginger Grant on Gilligan's Island, but slightly deeper and huskier) and dialed the operator. Instead of compliance, the operator began asking questions. I could hear my brother saying, “Well … um … it's not just working properly.... I think it is the bell.” My knees felt weak. I asked him after he completed the call what had happened, shaken. He looked perturbed, his face flushed. “She was asking me all these questions, like, what seems to be wrong with it?” For God's sake, it worked on The Brady Bunch!

No more prank calls that day. I thought the operator would call back when Mom got home. We would be so totally in deep trouble. Deep. Mom got home from work, in her usual crabby mood, and about ten minutes later, the phone rang three times, then stopped. She looked at both of us. “Have you two been fooling around with the phone?” she barked. “No,” I replied, trying to sound perplexed. Mothers always know. She had no evidence to convict us, other than a certain look in our eyes (she always claimed she could spot liars that way).
 

In hindsight, I dread to think what we would have concocted if we had been able to use youtube or other media for our outlandish pranks. I laugh about the incidents now, but then I think also about the horrific harm caused by cyberbullying and the like, in many cases, by unsupervised kids.

For unsupervised men who want to have sex and use pre-cellphone technology to contact other unsupervised men who want to have sex, check out some of our classic porn films.