Our story
A century in the making
Our history didn’t start with a hashtag. Scroll through a hundred years of Black same-gender-loving people who shaped Chicago, the country and the world.
The Empress of the Blues
Bessie Smith becomes one of the biggest-selling recording artists of the decade. She loved women as well as men, and her songs didn’t hide it.
Bessie SmithFinnie’s Ball
Alfred Finnie, a Black gay South Sider, throws the first of Chicago’s most famous drag balls in a tavern basement. Admission: 25 cents. It runs up to five times a year until 1943.
A Raisin in the Sun
Chicago’s Lorraine Hansberry, 28, becomes the first Black woman to have a play on Broadway — drawn from her family’s fight against housing discrimination on the South Side.
Lorraine HansberryThe March on Washington
Bayard Rustin organizes the march where Dr. King says “I have a dream.” Kept in the background because he was openly gay, he receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously, in 2013.
Bayard RustinLiberation
Marsha P. Johnson stands at the center of the Stonewall uprising. Back home, Chicago’s Vernita Gray joins the city’s gay liberation movement and runs a support hotline from her Hyde Park apartment.
Marsha P. JohnsonHouse music is born
Frankie Knuckles takes the decks at the Warehouse, a club for Black gay Chicago. The music took the club’s name and went around the world. In 2004 the city named the block “Frankie Knuckles Way.”
Frankie KnucklesUBUNTU is founded — and history keeps moving
Charles E. Nelson II founds UBUNTU Center of Chicago to keep this history alive. The same year, Vernita Gray and Pat Ewert become the first same-sex couple legally married in Illinois.
Sources: OutHistory · Mississippi Today · Frankie Knuckles · Vernita Gray
