EARLY 1900s: A WOMAN’S PLACE
by Marie J. Kuda



In the early 1900s, a bar called the Sappho, run by Amy Leslie at 2159 S. Dearborn St., next door to the Everleigh Club, may have been a lesbian establishment or may only have furnished “shows” for brothel customers. You could get anything in the Levee district. Circus clubs occasionally featured “acts” with prostitutes and animals. A club in the 2100 block of Armour Avenue ( today's South Federal Street ) had window shades printed “Why Not?” Called a ”vicious resort,” it may have been, among other things, the first S&M club in Chicago. A “resort” designated a bar, a brothel or semidetached cribs, usually with a dance hall or crude entertainment. Gay bars continued using names such as “Paradise” and “The Why Not Club” into the 1970s and '80s.

Girls working in factories would be lucky to make $1 a day. Prostitutes could make many times that amount, and strong-arm women ( those who “protected” the prostitutes ) , who generally worked in pairs or gangs ( sometimes of mixed races ) , could bring in cash in the mid-five-figure range annually. Reformers had their work cut out for them.

In 1895, Pulitzer Prize-winning lesbian author Willa Cather ( 1873—1947 ) made the first of many train journeys across the plains to attend opera performances in Chicago, a city she would feature in two novels, Lucy Gayheart and The Song of the Lark. The latter title was drawn from a painting of that name that she saw at the Art Institute. The book's heroine, Thea Kronborg, is patterned after Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremsted, whom Cather first heard in a Chicago performance. Fremsted and Emma Calvé, whose tour de force was Bizet's Carmen, were quite fond of the ladies and numbered prominent lesbians on two continents among their admiring coteries.

Mary Gourley Porter, born in Chicago in 1884, was raised in Evanston and inherited a considerable amount of money through a great-uncle whose business, the Deering Harvester Company, merged with the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company to form the International Harvester Company. Her career in social work led her to cross paths with Mary Williams Dewson in 1909. In 1912 Polly Porter and Molly Dewson, 10 years her senior, entered into a 52-year “partnership” detailed by biographer Susan Ware in Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism and New Deal Politics. The women would become great friends and political mentors to Eleanor Roosevelt. Dewson became absorbed into the Roosevelt political organization in 1928 and was an active participant in the New Deal through the 1940 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which nominated FDR for his third term. As director of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, she worked to obtain positions for women in government and to effect social changes to benefit women and children. Ware notes that the important career decisions made by Dewson were “based upon the impact they would have on her relationship with Polly Porter.” She even relinquished positions that required their separation for any period of time.

Loïe Fuller, later dubbed “the electric fairy,” was born in Fullersburg, Ill. ( where Oak Brook and Hinsdale are today ) , in 1862. After an unremarkable career as a fledgling dancer, she created a Serpentine Dance using colored silks and electric lights that would take her to the capitals of Europe and make her the darling of artists and royalty. Fuller, whose dancing career preceded Isadora Duncan's, premiered her creation at the Auditorium Theatre in 1894. Many tried to capture her swirling silks and electric gyrations. In a commemorative exhibit at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in the late 1970s, contemporary interpretations of her dances were staged near a hall filled with representations of her in sculpture, art-deco lithographs, paintings and photographs. Her diary was on display, turned to a page about her intimate friend, Queen Marie of Romania. Fuller lived in Paris with her lover, Gabrielle Bloch, returning to the U.S. on several occasions, once to organize an exhibition of Rodin's—his first one-man show in America—and later with Alma de Bretteville Spreckels to found the California Palace of the Legion of Honor as a museum for Rodin in America.

Havelock Ellis' Studies in the Psychology of Sex is a gold mine of data on Chicago gays and lesbians. Unfortunately, his case histories are not cross-referenced by city, but the search is made simpler when you check the author index in all the volumes for contributions submitted by Drs. J.G. Kiernan and G. Frank Lydston, who practiced in Chicago and wrote copiously for various medical journals around the turn of the century. Ellis' wife, Edith Lees, was a lesbian. In 1915 she lectured to a packed house at the Auditorium Theatre on “Sex and Eugenics.” The historian Jonathan Ned Katz records Margaret Anderson's response to this speech as “the earliest defense of homosexuality by a lesbian documented in the United States.”

Copyright 2008 by Marie J. Kuda

From Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City's Gay Community, edited by Tracy Baim, Surrey Books, 2008.

Chicago Gay History
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