'When the drags entered,' he wrote at one point, 'there was much laughing, particularly about one elderly man dressed in women's clothing, glasses, boyish bob and out-of-date costume, shaved but chin showing growth of a beard.'įor a brief time in the late 1920s and early 1930s, similar scenes unfolded up and down the city, as a relatively open gay culture thrived in Chicago, with gay cabarets and nightclubs proliferating throughout the Near North and South sides.
Burgess was carrying out the country's first extensive research project into homosexuality. A sociology professor at the University of Chicago, Ernest W. Lurking in the shadows that evening, a nondescript, bespectacled man in a plain suit and tie scrawled notes. Over the years, the old building, at Wabash Avenue and 15th Street, had played host to political conventions and hockey games, but these men were there to dance the night away. As midnight approached on Halloween Eve in 1932, men in vampy satin ball gowns, French-heeled slippers, teased coiffures, and rouged lips crowded into the Chicago Coliseum.
