At 9:30 on a Friday night, things are just starting to roll at Hunter’s in Elk Grove Village. There’s a mannerly array of mostly male customers around the big, cozily lit bar on one side of the L-shaped space. On the other side, a lone muscled man-boy in tank top, baseball cap, and jeans gyrates to “Dancing Queen.” A few singles and couples perch at the small tables lining the darkened dance floor, their eyes raised to the images flashing on a dozen video monitors–tarted-up no-talent kids lip-synching to bad music. No one pays much attention when a caricature of a 1950s bombshell in platinum wig, white fur stole, and XXL white gown pays the $4 cover and flounces to the bar. “When people ask me who comes here,” says owner Mark Hunter, “I say we’ve got one of everything.”
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The northwest suburbs were a lonely place when Hunter was a gay teenager there. He lived in Arlington Heights, went to Wheeling High School and Harper College, and trekked into Chicago “to do anything.” What he did best was dance: jazz, tap, ballet, “but my forte was ballroom dancing,” he says.
“I was gay,” he says. “But when I was married I made a commitment to my wife that if I was going to want to be gay or have gay sex, I would get a divorce. I made a commitment and I was very happy while I was married. We did everything together. We were with each other 24 hours a day. And I had, you know, heterosexual sex as well.” Dudley passed away in 1995, Hunter adds. He still lives in the house they bought together in Barrington, but his hiatus from the gay life is over. The bar is going great guns, drawing a mostly suburban crowd, including people from as far away as Elgin and DeKalb, and he’s opened an outpost, another bar in the booming gay resort and retirement area of Palm Springs.
