Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall

19. The Night Life

218 19 The Night Life From the mid­1940s until the mid­1960s, Dearborn and Division Streets were “Queerborn and Perversion,” a gay nightclub area controlled by mobsters. It was in these “homosexual haunts,” and others around the city, that skirmishes took place between the Mafia and the Chicago police force, including the raid on Cyrano’s Tavern after the murder of Richard Miller in a South Side park; the bizarre cast of characters at the Shoreline 7; the wheeling and dealing of Nathan Zuckerman at the Front Page; the raid on Louis Gager’s Fun Lounge; and why Chicago’s premier “fag hag” Kitty Sheon was immune from prosecution. And then there were the lesbian bars. The Chicago Sun-Times on July 8, 1951, noted that in spite of the new Near North Side police captain John T. Warren, the area was still a “cesspool of wickedness.” This “cesspool” included a gay neighborhood of bars and low-rent rooming houses around North Dearborn and West Division Streets, or “Queerborn and Perversion” as it was known. On December 31, 1951, police raided Cyrano’s Tavern, 8 East Division Street, “a reputed hangout for homosexuals,” Captain Redmond Gibbons of the Hudson Avenue station told the Chicago Tribune. Fifty-eight people were arrested for being inmates of a disorderly house, and the owner, Howard Blencoe, and two bartenders with serving liquor to intoxicated persons. The raid The Night Life 219 waspartofanongoinginvestigationintothemurderoftwenty-nine-year-old Richard Miller, a man fatally shot on the South Side of Chicago. On April 13, 1951, at 5:00 a.m. the police found Richard Miller’s body in Jackson Park at Stony Island and 63rd Street, shot in the stomach. The park was a notorious homosexual cruising area. Miller, who was a navy veteran and choir singer at Paul Union church, worked at the National Fire Insurance Company, where his colleagues described him as a quiet man who lived with his mother and kept to himself. Police questioned Rosario Eccesso, a male friend of Miller’s who owned the Artistic Beauty Shop at 1613 East 67th Street. He told police that after the two dined at a restaurant that night, they stopped for a nightcap at Cyrano’s Tavern, then returned to the beauty shop, where they parted ways. An hour later Miller was dead. Looking for the killer, the cops began arresting and questioning homosexuals in Jackson Park. On August 10 Rodovan Lazarevias, a thirtythree -year-old steel-mill worker, was shot and wounded in the park after propositioning an undercover cop and then making a run for it. The outcome of the Miller murder case is unknown to the author, though Miller was included in an October 1951 list of unsolved murders. One popular gay bar from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s was the Shoreline 7 at 7 West Division Street. The liquor license was in the name of Johnny Campbell, a tiny ex-boxer. Ralph Marco, the manager, is rumored to have once owned a bar in Chicago for dwarves; in 1946, there was a midget bar in Chicago at 355 East 79th Street, owned and staffed by little people. One feature of the Shoreline 7 was Smiley, Marco’s Harlequin Great Dane, and in 1950 the Chicago Tribune reported this den of iniquity had two goldfish bowls behind the bar. Blondina, a bartender, remembers Marco as “a big hammy man. He had bluish eyes and was chunky, muscular and big. We always called him father, and everyone who worked there he called his daughters. He was a loving man.” The Shoreline 7 was “syndicate-owned.” A back room at the bar was used for card playing and meetings among police captains, mobsters, and politicians. Although gay bars never advertised as “gay” back then, ads for the Shoreline 7 appeared in Night Life in Chicago, a sleazy publication focusing on stripper bars, restaurants, and drag shows. One ad for the Shoreline 7 read: “An interesting spot in the heart of the Gold Coast, with unusual entertainment nightly. A ‘must’ stopover for visitors.” Among the characters at the Shoreline 7 was Fran Wilson, who worked the “26” dice table, exploiting a loophole in the gambling laws. Wilson was The Night Life 220 famous for having a mouth like a trucker and selling Benzedrine out of her bra. Drag queen Dee LoBue recalls Fran Wilson as having “flaming red hair, a heavy...