Rainbow-colored pylons stand at attention along North Halsted, marking Lakeview as the city’s official gay neighborhood. The street’s watering holes do a booming business year-round, but that’s nothing, says University of Chicago history professor George Chauncey. “There were probably more gay bars in the 1950s than there are today,” he says. “But they closed, or were closed, with greater speed. Bartenders would move to another bar, and their fans would follow. There were a lot of floating gay bars in those days.”
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These days Chauncey is busy working on his highly anticipated sequel, Making of a Modern Gay World: 1935-1975, due out next year. But right now he’s in the throes of delivering his latest baby–this weekend’s conference, “The Future of the Queer Past.”
“We want to take the pulse of this rapidly expanding field, access where it’s going and determine what its future is,” he says. “For nonhistorians it’s going to be a complete revelation.”
Within a year of arriving Chauncey founded the school’s Lesbian and Gay Faculty and Staff Organization, created in part to lobby for domestic-partner benefits for faculty, staff, and students. In 1992 the U. of C. and Stanford became the nation’s first two institutions of higher learning to offer fully equitable domestic-partner benefits to same-sex couples, a move copied by hundreds of American universities since.
