St. Sukie de la Croix: "Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago before Stonewall", June 5, 2012

Publisher's Description

Chicago Whispers illuminates a colorful and vibrant record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people who lived and loved in Chicago from the city’s beginnings in the 1670s as a fur-trading post to the end of the 1960s. Journalist St. Sukie de la Croix, drawing on years of archival research and personal interviews, reclaims Chicago’s LGBT past that had been forgotten, suppressed, or overlooked.

Included here are Jane Addams, the pioneer of American social work; blues legend Ma Rainey, who recorded “Sissy Blues” in Chicago in 1926; commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker, who used his lover as the model for “The Arrow Collar Man” advertisements; and celebrated playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun.

Here, too, are accounts of vice dens during the Civil War and classy gentlemen’s clubs; the wild and gaudy First Ward Ball that was held annually from 1896 to 1908; gender-crossing performers in cabarets and at carnival sideshows; rights activists like Henry Gerber in the 1920s; authors of lesbian pulp novels and publishers of “physique magazines”; and evidence of thousands of nameless queer Chicagoans who worked as artists and musicians, in the factories, offices, and shops, at theaters and in hotels.

Chicago Whispers offers a diverse collection of alternately hip and heart-wrenching accounts that crackle with vitality.

From the Foreword by John D'Emilio

“Chicago Whispers is very much a pioneering work. As much as de la Croix’s source materials permit, he has them speak to us directly [so that] as readers we get to encounter the evidence in a way that gives us a great deal of freedom to draw our own conclusions, to ask our own questions, and to imagine the lives and the worlds that produced these written records. I came away from my reading of Chicago Whispers noticing connections across time that speak beyond the Chicago experience to the larger field of GLBT history.”—John D’Emilio, author of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970

Will Fellows Comments

“Culminating years of inspired, passionate labor by de la Croix, Chicago Whispers is especially valuable for its substantial inclusion of a broad and culturally diverse swath of the GLBT spectrum.” --Will Fellows, author of Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest

Kathie Bergquist Comments

"A groundbreaking book. Chicago Whispers connects LGBT life in Chicago to national historical events and firmly places the city in the social/historical spectrum of gay life in America before Stonewall." —Kathie Bergquist, editor of Windy City Queer: LGBTQ Dispatches from the Third Coast

The Author

St. Sukie de la Croix is an internationally published journalist, columnist, fiction author, playwright, and photographer. In Chicago, he has written for Outlines, Windy City Times, Nightlines, Nightspots, Chicago Free Press, and Gay Chicago. As a historian, de la Croix has published dozens of articles about Chicago’s gay history, scripted and acted as tour guide on the Chicago Neighborhood Tours’ gay history bus, and written a ten-week series on Chicago’s LGBT history for the Chicago Tribune. Visit the author's site: chicagowhispers.com

Publication Data

Paperback: 312 pages. Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; First edition (June 5, 2012). Language: English. Paper ISBN 978-0-299-28694-1. E-Book: ISBN 978-0-299-28693-4 Hard Cover ISBN-10: 0299286940. ISBN-13: 978-0299286941. For more information regarding publicity and reviews contact our publicity manager, phone: (608) 263-0734, email: publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu