Chicago’s Played A Key Role In LGBTQ+ History. Here Are 9 Historical Sites

CHICAGO — Chicago has played a critical role in LGBTQ+ history.

And this Pride Month, the Illinois Office of Tourism has highlighted a number of LGBTQ+ landmarks in Chicago that illustrate the many voices and movements crucial to the infrastructure and community, however imperfect, that many queer Chicagoans enjoy. These buildings, parks and places, found all across the city, represent important chapters of queer history — not just for Chicago, but for the nation at large. 

These landmarks are an important reminder that, despite a surge in anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in recent years, the movement plays a deeply important role in American history, and much of it started in the Windy City.

Here are nine historic sites in Chicago connected to gay history to check out:

The Legacy Walk

3245-3704 N. Halsted St., Lakeview

Stretching a half mile in Northalsted, the Legacy Walk features 20 art deco rainbow pylons with bronze plaques honoring prominent LGBTQ+ figures including James Baldwin, Jane Addams, Alvin Ailey and Matthew Shepard.

The Legacy walk was the brainchild of Victor Salvo alongside Lori Cannon and Owen Keehnen. The project was unveiled in 2012, with more honorees added each year. 

“Victor was looking for a monument to queer figures who had come before,” Keehnen said.

Inspired by seeing famed gay mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing on the cover of “Time,” the three conceptualized the notion of bronze plaques studding the pylons that run down the Halsted Street corridor from Barry to Grace. 

“It’s a walking tour of LGBTQ+ folks through history and the amazing contributions we have made,” Keehnen said.

AIDS Garden Chicago

3003 N. Lakefront Trail, Lakeview

Centered around the 30-foot sculpture “Self-Portrait” by Keith Haring, the AIDS Garden, which opened in 2022, is a community collaboration project between the Park District and Chicago Parks Foundation to commemorate the queer people who were lost in the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chicago. 

Starting in 1960, the Belmont Rocks were a place gay community members claimed as their own, with gay parties and picnics.

“This was happening at the time when our bars still had darkened windows,” Keehnan said.

While the Rocks were demolished in 2003, the location was chosen for the AIDS Garden as a memorial to the queer people taken by AIDS. 

“The Belmont Rocks was a place of celebration and community, and also a lot of loss,” Keehnan said. “It was the natural place to put it.”

Jeffery Pub

7041 S. Jeffery Blvd., South Shore

South Shore’s Jeffrey Pub is one of few Black-owned LGBTQ+ bars in Chicago. It has been a community staple for gay South Side Chicagoans — and especially queer people of color — for decades.

Places like Jeffery Pub are especially notable as Black-owned LGBTQ+ bars vanish across the country.

Owner Jamal Junior told Block Club in 2021 that the bar draws people of all ages who appreciate having somewhere they can be themselves.

“Every time I see them, they say, ‘Hey, man. Thank you for keeping this place open for us,’” Junior said. “Because a lot of a lot of them don’t feel comfortable in other places. And they feel that they’re not respected in other communities. But I try to let them know this is a safe haven for them.”

Lorraine Hansberry House

6140 S. Rhodes Ave., Woodlawn

The acclaimed author and playwright of “A Raisin in the Sun” drew from her experiences living in her house in Woodlawn to craft her acclaimed Broadway play — the first written by a Black woman — which illustrated the struggles of redlining and racially discriminatory housing in Chicago.

The landmark 1940 Supreme Court decision in Hansberry v. Lee came as a result of Carl Hansberry, Lorraine’s father, suing to reverse the discriminatory housing practices that prevented their family from moving into the neighborhood.

On top of that, Hansberry’s work and writings were informed by her avowed feminist politics and her queer identity; she described herself as a “heterosexually married lesbian” in a newsletter for The Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization in the United States, of which she was a member.

The house was designated a Chicago Landmark in 2010. 

Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

800 S. Halsted St., Near West Side

Sitting on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus, Hull House honors the life and work of Jane Addams, a trailblazer in social work and women’s activism in Chicago. Addams, along with college friend Ellen Gates Starr, opened Hull-House in 1889 as a settlement house to house and help thousands of recently arrived immigrants, building a communal living space among 13 buildings. There, denizens could take arts classes, study English, work toward citizenship and find employment. 

While Addams never self-described as a lesbian, her relationship with longtime partner Mary Rozet Smith was long understood as committed and romantic, and Addams referred to her with great love in letters written to Smith. Academic Shannon Jackson has also described life at the Hull-House Settlement as a “queer domesticity,” with its rhythm of peaceful, cooperative living. 

Addams was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 2008.

While most of the buildings from Addams’ original settlement were demolished in the 1960s by Mayor Richard J. Daley — despite much protest — two buildings remain. They became the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, which functions as part of UIC’s College of Architecture, Design and the Arts and hosts various exhibits, events and other gatherings. 

The Warehouse

206 S. Jefferson Ave., West Loop

House music is one of Chicago’s key contributions to the musical landscape. But there would be no house music without the Warehouse, a venue opened in 1977 by club promoter Robbie Williams. It was a members-only gay club in which Black and Latine queer Chicagoans could congregate and dance without fear of discrimination. 

The creation of house music, and its positioning as a cultural signifier for queer Chicagoans of color, lies at the feet of the late, great DJ Frankie Knuckles, the Warehouse’s first musical director. The artist blended R&B and disco with electronic music to create what became known as “house” music — propulsive beats that fueled the dancing and sexual freedom that proved so liberatory for generations of Black Chicagoans.

“It was incredibly important, especially for a lot of queer African-American Chicagoans,” Keehnan said.

In 2023, the Warehouse building was designated a Chicago historical landmark. 

Bughouse Square 

Washington Square Park, 901 N. Clark St., Near North Side

Sitting across from the Newberry Library, Washington Square Park was known in the mid-20th century as “Bughouse Square,” so termed for the many lively political debates among political radicals, socialists and a variety of free thinkers who would congregate in the square to share ideas and proselytize to the public. “Bughouse” is an antiquated colloquial term for a mental health care facility.

The park also holds a significant place in queer history as the starting site for what’s been called the world’s first LGBTQ+ Pride Rally and March. On June 27, 1970, about 150 activists gathered in the square for a political rally, then marched down to the Water Tower at Chicago and Michigan Avenue, ending at the Picasso statue across the street from City Hall. On the way, marchers passed by the United Artists Theater in the Loop, which was playing the seminal trans film “Myra Breckinridge.”

The march began as a protest of reaction to the Stonewall Uprising, which had happened one year prior, and presaged the first Pride marches in New York City and Los Angeles by one day. 

Bughouse Square was chosen as the step-off point because of its history as a pickup spot for gay men in Chicago, Keehnen said.

“We were moving from the darkness and shadows and the tawdry nature of what being gay had been, into something else,” Keehnen said.

Henry Gerber House

1710 N. Crilly Court, Old Town

The Henry Gerber House was the site of the first chartered gay rights organization in the United States, the Society for Human Rights. 

Founded in 1924 by Gerber and operated out of Gerber’s home, the Society for Human Rights was short-lived, and its incorporation was followed by many police raids at Gerber’s home in which members were arrested and documents confiscated. Gerber also started the first American publication for queer people, “Friendship and Freedom,” there.

Gerber wrote the organization’s mission statement, which was “to promote and protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence and to combat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of factors according to modern science among intellectuals of mature age.”

Though the Society for Human Rights disbanded the following year, Gerber spent the rest of his life advocating for queer rights in various queer publications, making his home, and the site of the society, is a key site in the history of queer liberation.

Pearl Hart’s Home

2821 N. Pine Grove Ave., Lakeview

Known as the “Guardian Angel of Chicago’s Gay Community,” Pearl M. Hart (1890-1975) was a Chicago attorney and lesbian who spent her career advocating for oppressed minority groups, including immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community. 

One of the first women to practice criminal law in Chicago, Hart defended queer Chicagoans in cases of police harassment, as well as advocating for rights to privacy laws and anti-entrapment laws, which were typically leveraged against queer people by law enforcement.

“Chicago has been so blessed with this series of lawyers who have stood up for the rights of the downtrodden,” with Hart, Renee Hanover and Ralla Klepak, who also represented gay men fighting public indecency charges in Chicago, Keehnan said.

Hart also co-founded the Midwest chapter of gay rights organization The Mattachine Society with “Return to Lesbos” author — and Hart’s lover — Valerie Taylor. She used its newsletter to disseminate legal advice and tips for queer people looking to defend themselves against discrimination in the workplace and military. 

Hart and Gerber are the namesakes behind Rogers Park’s Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, the largest circulating library of gay and lesbian titles in the Midwest. 

Check out more of Chicago’s iconic queer spaces here.