“It was the disco, right? I remember everyone talking about it like it was some lost arcadia.”
“Well, yeah. It’s just that it was such a happy place. Not that there weren’t other places, but I don’t know if we were ever that happy again. This was the day they knocked it down.”
She took a step closer. There was sound to the film, although you had to be standing right in front of the speaker to hear it.
A man in the crowd saying, “It was the biggest place, it was the best place.”
Another man: “It was our Studio 54. No, wait. It was our moon. It was our moon!”
Another: “Is someone going to tell him about the Bearded Lady? Someone explain about the Bearded Lady.”
And there, dear God, were Yale Tishman and Charlie Keene. Charlie with his open bomber jacket and pins. Yale in an oxford shirt, hopelessly preppy. So incredibly, impossibly young. Had anyone ever been that young? Moving easily, their limbs loose, faces full. And there now, right behind them, was Nico. His hair tousled in the wind. Fiona held her breath.
Yale saying: “I keep waiting to find out it’s a joke.”
Charlie to the camera: “This is where I brought him when he was new to the city.”
Yale: “I couldn’t believe it existed.”
Charlie: “You want to know the state of this city, you want to know whose pocket city hall is in, look at this. You think this isn’t political? You think this is an accident?”
Yale: “They had these glitter cannons, and they’d—one time, the cannons shot foam stars. I don’t even know how they did that.”
Nico: “I’m still hung over from the closing party, and it was four days ago.”
His voice.
It traveled down her neck and arms.
The building, small and undefended.
A voice off camera: “It’s mob bosses tearing this place down.”
Another: “Well. I don’t know.”
Charlie: “They’re making a bloody parking lot.”
Yale: “Watch.”
But nothing happened. A shot of the building, just standing there. Static.
Nico: “Now. Look.”
The wrecking ball swinging, colliding. Not the topple you’d expect, not a skyscraper’s collapse. Just a cloud of obscuring dust and, when that cleared, a hole.
Then another.
Someone shouting “Whooh!” as if out of obligation.
A slow, awkward minute of wrecking ball, and faces reacting. Yale’s face. Charlie’s face.
Fiona felt Julian take her hand. She’d forgotten where she was, forgotten the gallery and the museum and all of Paris.
The film cut forward; time had passed.
The building, destroyed. The entire place downed, the dust clearing. People leaving.
The sound of wind.
Charlie’s voice: “Better be a hell of a parking lot.”
Yale: “Oh my God, look.”
Yale on his knees, digging in the gutter.
Yale surrounded by the remaining people, showing them something in his hands.
Yale showing the camera: a handful of dust.
“There’s glitter in it!” he said.
A man Fiona didn’t know peered over Yale’s shoulder. “That’s not glitter. Where?”
It just looked like dust. Yale turned and smeared it down Charlie’s shirt.
Yale and Charlie and Nico laughing hysterically. Charlie rubbing the dust between his fingers, sprinkling it on the sidewalk. Nico rubbing it into Charlie’s jacket sleeve.
A man smearing it on his cheeks, a woman saying, “That’s asbestos, I’m sure.”
Charlie, laughing still, giddy: “We’re gonna take it home with us!”
A shot of the gutter filled with dust. True, there were glints of light there, but they could have been tiny shards of fiberglass. Surely they were. Fiona tried hard to believe it was more than that.
Nico’s voice one more time, disembodied: “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Campo!”
The gutter, and a long silence.
She expected the film to end right there, but instead, as the laughter died down, the camera lingered uncomfortably on a man collecting his long black hair into a ponytail. On a mother walking by through the last gawkers, pulling her young son by the hand. On Yale and Charlie walking off down the sidewalk, so clearly a couple—inches from each other, but not touching. Around them, a silence as big as the city.
Then the whole film looped again. There they all stood, the Bistro whole. Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin.
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
While these characters and their lives are fictional, I’ve stuck as closely as possible to actual places and public events, taking liberties only when necessary. A few of those liberties: In order to avoid writing about real people, I reimagined Chicago’s gay press scene; none of the publications mentioned here are real. While the fictional Brigg Gallery shares some characteristics with Northwestern’s Block Museum, it is not the same place. The Wilde Rumpus was not an actual theater company, but gay companies such as Lionheart did operate out of other theaters. Some of the events of the 1990 AMA demonstration have been compressed. And while the restaurant Ann Sather has been a constant source of support to Chicago’s gay community, and was host to many fundraising events, there was not, as far as I know, a benefit there for Howard Brown in December of 1985.
I’d feel bad if I didn’t say that the new penguin enclosure at the Lincoln Park Zoo is spectacular, and the penguins look happy; there is nothing grimy or depressing about it now.
There isn’t as much in book or film form about Chicago’s AIDS crisis as I’d hoped when I began this project. Fortunately, I can recommend a few excellent sources if you want to learn more. MK Czerwiec has written a beautiful graphic novel, Taking Turns, about her time as a nurse on Illinois Masonic’s AIDS Care Unit 371. She’s been a friend to this book as well, and was an invaluable early reader. The documentary film Short Fuse, about the life of Chicago ACT UP founder Daniel Sotomayor, is hard to find but absolutely worth watching. Two writers, Tracy Baim and Owen Keehnen, have done much of the heavy lifting in recording Chicago’s gay history. I found their journalism and books incredibly helpful, and am additionally grateful to both of them for giving me their time. Owen was also a brilliant early reader for the novel; if you’re in the city, stop in and see him at Unabridged Bookstore.
The online archives and oral histories available through the Windy City Times—archives Tracy Baim is largely responsible for—are a treasure. The Windy City Times itself began publishing in 1985, and I’m grateful to the Harold Washington Library for keeping those earliest issues available. (Speaking of Harold Washington, a tangential acknowledgment: The words he speaks in this book at the 1986 Pride parade are his own.) The Gerber/Hart Library is a wonderful resource on LGBTQ issues and history and provided me with essential assistance and materials. There is footage currently available on YouTube of the April 1990 march on the AMA, and I recommend it highly. The best written account I’ve found of the protest is “The Angriest Queer,” from the August 16, 1990, issue of the Chicago Reader. Photographer Doug Ischar’s series Marginal Waters beautifully documents gay life on the Belmont Rocks in the ’80s; while I imagine Richard Campo’s fictional work to be quite different from Ischar’s, I’m thankful to him and to the other photographers, both artistic and journalistic, who brought the era to life for me.