That was all true before the coronavirus pandemic put an unheard-of strain on the country’s hospitality industry, and believe it or not, that didn’t make collecting and preserving these vital American drinking histories any easier for the career scholars, authors, filmmakers, and hobbyists across the country trying to do so. Patrons’ recollections have gotten foggier photos and fliers have faded funds for preservation work are perennially tight.
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But archiving the history of the LGBTQ+ community’s beloved third places across the country hasn’t gotten any easier since de la Croix began his work some 30 years ago. The mob may have relinquished Chicago’s gay and lesbian bars from the vise-like grip it established on those businesses (and their New York City counterparts, too) during Prohibition. When you get picked up by a very famous mob leader in Chicago, and you give him a blowjob in the back of his car… I mean, it hurt me not to put the story in the paper.”
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“I had some great stories I couldn’t print. “I had to be careful with some of the things I actually put in the paper,” recalls de la Croix. And when the self-deputized historian found himself too close to a source, things could get complicated. Turning barflies’ memories of the city’s shuttered gay and lesbian bars into publishable reports posed challenges, and de la Croix often found himself trying to reconcile conflicting contributions. A book, “Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall,” followed in 2012. For six years, the British-born de la Croix published weekly 1,000-word columns documenting the Windy City’s gay nightlife scene for local paper. “I went to my publisher and said, ‘Can I do a column?’” That was 1997. “I was listening to these two old guys in a bar, and they were wearing this old leather and they were arguing about the exact address of some old bar that wasn’t there anymore,” he remembers.
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Sukie de la Croix didn’t set out to be one of the prolific custodians of gay bar history in Chicago.