BijouBlog

I was there. It was humid and crowded, and luckily I was standing near some hot shirtless guys with cute asses. Nothing terribly exciting or, to be honest, much different from previous years, even if it was celebrating 50 years since Stonewall.
 

I left early to cool down in a friend's apartment, and soon the floodgates opened. Literally. Severe thunderstorms moved in, accompanied by torrential rains. To obtain updates, I was following CWB Chicago on Twitter as the drama was occurring. Attendees were ordered by the police to first shelter in place, and then evacuate. Ultimately, the parade was, to use the unfortunate language of the police, “terminated.” In the 49 years of its existence, as far as I know, this parade was never rained on. Never.

Luckily, my friend and I were ensconced on the couch watching the delayed broadcast of the parade during the monsoon.

We waited until the sun had emerged, about 4:30 p.m, to emerge ourselves to check out the situation.

I already knew from the updates that this unprecedented event causes situations of violence, and, according to a witnesses, overall “weirdness.”

For example, a local Walgreens and CVS wanted to lock their doors because of the onslaught of persons fleeing the rain. In the parking lot of the Walgreens, persons were jumping on cars (this behavior has happened before at events), but in the case, the crowd was larger and overall more violent.
 

Police said two people were arrested in separate incidents for slapping police horses after the parade had stopped. For example, acccording to CWB Chicago, Wagdi Elgosbi, 28, approached a police horse in the 3200 bock of North Clark around 5:20 p.m. and asked the officer riding it if he could pet the animal. When the officer denied his request, Elgosbi slapped the horse in its face, police said in an arrest report. (Unacceptable!)

And, something both violent and, to be truthful, weird occurred at Chicago Comics (complete story available here). A woman burst into the store, begging for someone to call the police. A gang of twenty plus teenagers burst in, vanadalizing the store, and they sprayed the woman with pepper spray. The group fled when they heard the sirens. The police arrived, and the woman was taken away in an ambulance.
 

Now, just listing incidents in this fashion doesn't really prove much specifically. Violence has occurred in the wake of this event before (and tends to occur at public celebrations, no matter who puts them on), but the above behavior appear to be more noteworthy, whatever that means.

And certainly noteworthy was the twerking trend occurring this year. Any object could be “twerked,” according to this compilation.

I realize for some time there's been much controversy, mostly racially-charged, around claims about groups of teenagers not from the local area creating problems in the Boystown area.

I also think one could gain a more accurate and perhaps even inspiring context for this situation by recounting what happened to my friend and I after we left the apartment.

In a quest for food, we stopped at a casual joint called Windy City Gyros. The place was full of openly gay teenagers, racially diverse. Yes, openly gay, girls holding hands, one guy with his arm draped around the shoulder of another guy. This was a place where they could be open, safe. I can't imagine that behavior occurring when I was in high school in the 1970s, anywhere.
 

 

And, I do understand the serious issues with police presence at such events, especially at an event which commemorates a movement that began as a protest against the police, but a couple police guys casually went into the place to sit down and eat. Imagine how different this situation might have been in the 1970s and 1980s. During that period, the police might have been there because the owners would be calling them about the deviants.

The boundary between celebration and violence, and self-expression and psychological disturbance, is fluid, especially at events whose purpose and history, however that history may be subsumed or diluted, is a stand against repressive hierarchies.

I decry the violence that occurred in a place previous generations built to be safe and open (including for twerking) for the future: LGBTQ youth.

Perhaps, 50 years after Stonewall, we need to realize that it's not justice or rights in the abstract we need to work for, but with persons in all their moment by moment, often messy, complexity.

My first major experience riding a bicycle was finally being able to ride a two-wheeler, and the fashion then was a banana seat bicycle. The seat was shaped like a banana. Mine was purple. (How gay was that?) I got yelled at by my dad because I was coasting to a stop rather than using the breaks. At that time, kids rode their bikes all over the neighborhood, without helmets (gasp!), and often without adult supervision.
 

When one of the kids across the street was missing (a common occurrence in that chaotic household), I don't even remember the police being called. Kids on bicycles were sent out as search parties by the adults. At that age, it was liberating, to be able to travel long distances alone.

I grew dependent on bicycles through my college years, as I was not able to drive and afford a car. When the suburban bus company went on strike one summer, I wrote my bicycle nine miles each way to my job. I resented it. At that time, a car was a status symbol; it showed independence, being an adult. If you were still having to ride your bike everywhere, you were trapped in a sexless adolescence. You were a nerd. You couldn't take someone on a date, especially in the car-dependent suburbs.

Now, it seems, the bicycle is a status symbol in certain urban areas. Riding a bicycle means you are “green.” I see bicycle shops that sell expensive bicycles from Europe, where riding one has always been pretty much a norm, even among adults. One shop in Chicago, Heritage Bicycles, builds custom-made bicycles also sells expensive coffee. Cool hipster grad student types ride their bicycles everywhere (I see several getting off their bikes at the university where I work).
 

The bicycle is almost like a symbol or even a stereotype of the urban “blue” culture that voted for Clinton, as opposed to the “red culture that voted for the vulgar boor (they drive gas-guzzling pick up trucks, or if they were white suburban soccer mom Republican types, gas-guzzling SUVs).

And, given that I thought of the bicycle as somehow for me representing sexlessness or even confinement, it's interesting that when bicycles became a more prominent mode of transportation in the late Victorian period, there were concerns that the riding position was unladylike. In order to do so, a lady had to abandon the heavy corsets and other confining garments. According to one article, some women were even harassed, pelted with stones, for wearing pantaloon or bloomer. The article claims that the bicycle actually helped liberate women, paving the way for a woman presidential candidate.
 

The rise of the bicycle also directly coincided with the birth of the New Woman, an early feminist idea that pushed against the limits of patriarchal oppression. New Women were free-spirited, educated, economically independent, and wholly uninterested in being hidden away in a drawing room under a mound of needlework.

In the world of gay sexuality, it's also interesting that the bicycle hasn't been much of a background for gay sex, especially in porn movies. Cars, trucks, motorcycles, yes, the bigger, the better, macho, manly ... but a bicycle? No, not masculine enough. Kind of corresponds to how I felt when I was stuck riding a bike rather than driving a car.

In our Bijou Classics repertoire, reflecting the above dynamic, there's paucity of sex scenes involving bicycles. In M.A.G.I.C., one of the fantasy game show contestants in a cute bicyclist who performs a blow job on the lead, Gene Lamar. A scene involving a bicycle occurs in Hot Truckin' is much more prominent. The humpy truckers (Gordon Grant and Nick Rodgers) entice a redheaded bicyclist, who eyes them while seductively licking a popsicle, into the back of their truck for a three-way. Woof!
 

I tried riding a bicycle again in my late adulthood. I bought one used, and I got it refurbished. Someone stole it from a supposedly secure bike room.

Now I just fantasize about hot young bearded guys I see riding around wearing tight shorts.

Just think: not too long ago, Chicago's landscape was covered with filthy, lumpy ice.

Now, in the Middle Ages, people really celebrated spring: so many songs about flowers blooming and animals and people screwing:
 

That was a time when life was much more precarious, and so when the inevitable cycle of nature began anew after a long winter (often a time of deprivation but also semi-hibernation, depending on the state of the autumn harvest). When spring arrived, the people celebrated, but they also had to participate in that cycle by literally sowing seed: a cycle of work and pleasure.

We've lost that intimate working connection with the land; thus our bodies and souls can't really hibernate or prepare to rejuvenate the way nature intends.

Sex in front of a fireplace in the dead of winter is wonderful, but if one is exhausted from commuting across windswept tundras, a cup of steaming hot tea is more enjoyable. (I wonder how the inhabitants of lands near the Arctic Circle fare with their long, sunless winters and short summers.)

T.S. Eliot claimed April is the cruelest month. I might say March is more cruel, which lately seems like the last, often vicious in-your-face blast of winter rather than a harbinger of cute lambs, bunnies, baskets of pussy willows, sprouting crocuses, and dewy grass. The weathermen Tom Skilling on WGN-TV Chicago actually called the month “schizophrenic” because of its extreme weather contrasts.

But there's one day, usually in early May, when I wake up and it everything has bloomed, like it happened overnight through some miraculous intervention.

It's unexpected, like the best sex. I want it to happen, but I won't know it has happened until it actually has happened!
 

 

I always wondered what the phrase “skeletons in the closet” really meant. I found out it was coined in England in the 19th century. Since then the word “closet” has become used primarily in England to mean “water closet” that is, lavatory - a possible hiding place for a skeleton I guess, but not one with much potential! 

Now, lest you think my secret is about some shameful sexual peccadillo (which, given I work for a porn site, really wouldn't be much of secret anyway), it isn't. There is a secret, in a sense here, because how most people don't know about the drowning of 800 people on the Eastland, one of the deadliest maritime disasters in United States history. 
 

Why? The story itself can't compete with all the hype about the Titanic, as the lives of the rich and famous supposedly make better copy. The people who drowned on the Eastland could be your neighbors or employees, the people who pick up your garbage, make your light bulbs, or mop the floors at night in office buildings. And one of these people was my grandfather's sister. 

On Saturday, July 24, 1915, the employees of Hawthorne Works, Western Electric in Cicero, Illinois, and their families and friends, boarded the S.S. Eastland in downtown Chicago, for the annual company picnic.

Every year Western Electric, at that time one of the largest manufacturers of electrical engineering equipment, including telephones, hosted a massive celebration involving a boat ride to Michigan City, Indiana, and, once there, a picnic, a parade, and related festivities.

These hardworking people didn't possess the means to take vacations. For many of them, Bohemian, Polish, German, Italian, and Irish immigrants, this was the only time they ever left the neighborhoods where they lived and worked. 

According to the Jay Bonansinga in The Sinking of the Eastland, the Eastland had already experienced some problems with balance or “listing,” and the replacement of the original deck flooring with concrete added problematic extra weight. The excited picnicgoers boarded, all 2,572 of them, to the point where the boat was at full capacity.

At 7:28 a.m., the Eastland, still moored to her Chicago River dock, began to list to one side. Attempts to stabilize the boat failed. With one sickening, swift inexorable movement, the boat rolled onto one side: 

“The noise shook the riverfront: the chorus of screams ringing out along the dock, the pitiful splashing of those who had been tossed from the deck into the water, and the frantic rush of the quicker-thinking onlookers. It was though a vast bucketful of people—helpless babies included—had been emptied into the water...Even skilled swimmers had a hard time of it.” 

In 1915, the heavy layers of clothes these women wore (they were all dolled up in their Sunday finery) especially did not help matters. Many people at that time did not know how to swim. Even though this was the case in some instances, many of the victims did not actually drown, but actually suffocated, not because of the clothing, but from the weight of the bodies falling on top of each other and from debris. 

Even more disturbing, according to Bonansinga's account, chivalry died that day. Men pushed drowning women out of the way. The women, however, often sacrificed their lives so their children might live.  

Bonansinga's account tells of one woman who managed to place her baby on a crate, blew it a kiss, and succumbed to the filthy, poisonous waters of the Chicago River. 

There so many bodies that they had to lay them out in Marshall Field's. 

As I mentioned above, my grandfather's sister, one Katarzyna Grochowska, drowned that day. With the assistance of the Internet, I found her record on the passenger list. What was really interesting is that she did not even work for Western Electric. She worked for a candy factory. I would guess she was attending the big event with one of her friends.

And based on what I garnered from the limited oral history of our family and from a couple of websites, she was seventeen and extremely outgoing and popular, and had not one but two nicknames, Kat and Kitty—her death remains truly heartbreaking. 

As I noted above, despite the tremendous loss of life (neighborhoods in Cicero were devastated as whole families literally disappeared), the event still remains strangely tied to its local, working class origins. Some national publicity occurred when the employees of Harpo Studios of Oprah fame, formerly the site of the Second Regiment Armory which served as a temporary morgue for the victims, reported hearing moans, seeing women dressed in their 1915 Edwardian finery, and smelling their flowers and perfume. 
 

The Eastland was finally scrapped in 1947 after being used for some time as a training vessel for the U.S. Navy. The Hawthorne Works Western Electric plant closed in 1983.

A new wave of immigrants from Latin America now live and pursue the American dream in the bungalows of Cicero, doing much of the same types of work their predecessors did. 
 

 

For more information on this event, check out the Eastland Disaster Historical Society website.