It may be hard for young people to imagine today, but a queer bar was the only place we could see each other back then. If only for a fleeting couple of hours, I left Planet Cis Heterosexual behind. The minute the door opened and I stepped inside that smoked-filled bar, I crossed over into the world of my people. It existed only within the confines of that space and did not exist anywhere in society outside of it. Behind the door of the Lost & Found was the entire queer world, to me. No one who looked straight got in–and no cops, either. The locked and heavy wooden door had a small, circular window out of which the bouncer checked before letting you inside.
Storme delarverie windows#
The windows on the place were dark so no one could see inside. It was a blue-collar, heavily wood-paneled dyke bar but gender non-conforming stones like me from the poor class, gay men, drag queens and kings all sought community there. This bar, the Lost & Found, had opened on Chicago’s north side in 1965, just after I turned 15.
I started going to lesbian, gay, leather, and drag bars before I could legally drink, searching for someone–anyone–who was like me: a semi-homeless, working-class transgender boy completely alone with no words yet for who I was. Who tells our queer and trans stories? Let it be we and let our stories be true.Įver in my memory is an incident in the late 1960s in Chicago when I was in my teens. Johnson, Storm é DeLarverie, and Sylvia Rivera!īy: Ben Power*/Special to The Rainbow Times. The “Holy Trinity” of Stonewall–Marsha P.
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