If I walked in there, Shirley would pull my shirt up and say, ‘You have a fly in front and you can’t come in.’”īut Chicago’s gay and lesbian scene thrived in the 1950s and 1960s, in bars and other gathering places downtown, in the Gold Coast and elsewhere. They wouldn’t let you in unless you had two pieces of women’s clothes on. “I couldn’t get into the Lost and Found,” she says. In Chicago Sorman found her insistence on wearing men’s clothes kept her out of that era’s lesbian bars. “I came to Chicago in the mid-1960s,” Joey Sorman remembers.
Lesbians also had to be wary of certain boundaries. “In those days your name was put in the newspaper,” Ron Helizon says. Police in Chicago raided gay bars and even private parties frequently in the 1960s. There was no dancing and there was always the chance a gay bar might get raided. 'The summer I came to Chicago, you had to keep your hands above the bar, and you couldn't buy anybody a drink,' Eugene Wright recalls. It wasn't that long ago that Chicago's gay scene was very different than it is today.
