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120 12 Gay Life in the 1930s The K-9 Club, Chicago’s drag speakeasy, was hopping until prohibition ended and it went legit; that’s when Mayor Edward J. Kelly shut it down, as he later did with Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour. However, homosexual books began to be seen in libraries, and “temperamentals” still met at the bars, restaurants, bathhouses, beaches, and masquerade balls. In the “Roaring Twenties” Chicago was hot for jazz, and smoky speakeasies, ballrooms, and dancehalls thrived in spite of prohibition, or in the case of speakeasies, because of it. The Volstead Act handed vice over to Al Capone and the profiteers; alcohol, gambling, and sex, including homosexuality, was controlled by the Mafia. It’s rumored that one of Al Capone’s cousins was homosexual and ran a mixed-race “buffet flat”—a brothel—on the South Side that hosted liquor and orgies. The late gay activist Jim Wickliff shared a story told to him: “I met one older guy and he really had a life, I suppose now we would call him a street person. He told me about a guy who owned a house maybe one block east of Lake Park in the 45th, 46th Street area, and he had a lot of Mafia friends, and he talked about going to parties there, and he said the whole house was fixed up like Arabian Nights, all kinds of brass things, hanging candles, and absolutely fantastic. And just about every night there was an orgy of some kind there. He would drop in and there were cops and Mafia guys.” Gay Life in the 1930s 121 Another story relates to an incident at a speakeasy, the K-9 Club at 105 East Walton. The female impersonators who worked there included Li-Kar, Billy Herrera, Johnny Mangum, Del LeRoy, Billy Russell, Art West, Billy Brennan, Billy Richards, and Earl Partello, with Sylvia Rose as the emcee. One night the club was raided by prohibition cops, and the “girls” fled the stage, out the back door, and down the fire escape. At the bottom a solitary cop waited to scoop them up, but Herrera whacked him over the head with a beer bottle, and they all lifted their skirts and escaped down an alley. When prohibition ended, the K-9 Club went legit as a drag bar/restaurant with Chinese cuisine and music by Bill Lyles and his orchestra. In June 1934 the K-9 advertised in the Chicago American as Chicago’s “Oddest Nite Club” with a breakfast show every morning at 5:00 a.m. Five months later an ad read “PaLeeeze!! WHY SHOULD I BE MANNISH!” alongside a camp cartoon figure daintily waving a handkerchief . On December 8, 1934, Mayor Edward J. Kelly revoked the K-9’s liquor, amusement, food, and cigarette licenses; the Chicago Tribune called the club an “eccentric night life rendezvous.” Unable to find work, the performers scattered. In the early part of the twentieth century, books on the subject of homosexuality were not available to the public, only to the medical profession . That changed in 1925 when the Chicago Tribune advertised Homosexual Life by William J. Fielding in the social hygiene section. You could only order the book through the mail from Haldeman-Julius Company in Girard, Kansas, purveyors of atheist and freethinker literature. By the late 1920s gay-themed books began to appear in Chicago’s libraries and for sale in bookstores: The Well of Loneliness (1928) by Radclyffe Hall, Strange Brother by Blair Niles (1931), and A Scarlet Pansy by Robert Scully (1932). In 1930 Chicago’s Eyncourt Press published the memoir The Stone Wall by Mary Casal. The book is a surprisingly frank account of a poor New England country girl and her life as a lesbian; on one of her partners she writes: “We decided that a union such as ours was to be made as holy and complete as the conventional marriages, if not more so.” One intriguing mystery is why the book was published by Eyncourt Press in the first place, as their other books were on the history of printing. Also available for purchase were under-the-counter French postcards. In his biography of Ben Reitman, The Damndest Radical, Roger A. Bruns writes that on August 5, 1937, Reitman, the syphilis doctor, took four public officials on a tour of sex spots: to Bughouse Square to lecture on VD, then [18.219.112.111] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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