Happy Pride!
At the Chicago History Museum, a new exhibit “Out in Chicago” explores the stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Chicagoans who shaped the city and various communities over the past 150 years. In 1958, Chuck Renslow and his friends had an affinity for leather that was too much for a Chicago gay bar called Omar’s. Tossed out, he decided to open his own nightspot, the Gold Coast Bar, the country’s first leather bar. Now 82 years old, Renslow recalls of the bar, “I was just trying to bring the leather community together. It was a place where leather men could meet and know each other.” A mural of Renslow and his bar buddies painted by Dom “Etienne” Orejudos in 1973 is part of the new exhibit.
