States of Desire Revisited by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White [White, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

No one leaves Chicago in the summer. There’s no need to, since the weather is beautiful and the lakeshore is one of the nicest beaches in the country—and certainly the most accessible to city-dwellers. Mile after mile of highrise, luxury apartments line the Outer Drive and face Lake Michigan. This is the famous “Gold Coast,” which might more accurately be called the “Gold Mask,” since it has been fitted carefully and cosmetically over the decaying slums that hide behind it.

Because Mayor Daley and the Machine ruled Chicago for so long, there is virtually no grass-roots political activity in the city. Chicagoans have simply never acquired the habit of organizing—and this passivity is as true of gay Chicagoans as it is of any other constituency. To be sure, gays have formed a self-protection league in New Town, the gay ghetto, to defend themselves against the attacks of marauding teenagers. But gay liberation is a feeble affair in Chicago; few prominent gays have come out, and the best known gay personality in the area is Charles Renslow, the owner of Man’s Country, the gay baths. Typically, when the American Psychiatric Association was planning a gay conference in Chicago in the spring of 1979, it could locate only two avowedly gay psychiatrists in the whole city.

After Cincinnati, however, Chicago comes as a relief to the gay traveler. Chicago is a huge, sophisticated, wealthy city. The main gay thoroughfare, Broadway, is busy night and day; its boutiques and bars are always crowded. For the cultivated gay woman or man Chicago is certainly the chief oasis between the two coasts. The symphony is one of the three or four best in the nation. The Lyric Opera season, though short, is innovative and frequently presents new or neglected works and always hires the greatest international stars. The Art Institute contains an outstanding collection of French Impressionist paintings and Japanese prints; it is also the home of Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist and El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin, among other treasures. Architecturally, the city is a showcase of every innovation of the last hundred years, beginning with the delicate friezes of Louis Sullivan’s 1899-1904 Carson, Pirie, & Scott building and continuing through Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses, Mies van der Rohe’s 1000 Lake Shore Drive apartments, the John Hancock Building and the recklessly tall Sears Towers—serious tourists can be seen, guidebooks in hand, working their way through block after block of architectural masterpieces. The Richard Daley Center is a massive new building intended to rust gracefully, as indeed it is doing. In the plaza stands a Picasso head that has, perhaps symbolically, two mouths to talk out of and lyre strings for a brain. (A bum was asleep in front of it.) Nearby, the eternal flame lit for war veterans looks incongruously low and pedestrian, something like hell’s version of a public drinking fountain.

After my parents divorced my mother moved to Chicago, and there I grew

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