A Chicago History Vignette

I keep telling myself that someday I’m going to write a book about Chicago gay history, and maybe I will. But I keep getting mixed up in my head about my own experiences there that and my own memories, that I can’t separate the two. I have tried to tell both of these stories many times in many different ways. I have written academic papers on the history, and I have written poems about my gay experiences. I have also rewritten a novel at least four times that intermingles all of the above with my first romance and her later suicide. I find it hard to fictionalize the novel enough so that it doesn’t still come out like someone else’s life story I shouldn’t be writing. And it’s never good enough. How can I reproduce a real person who had real struggles, whom I dearly and completely loved? How can I put that on a page and make it be at all legitimate? And who do I think I am, anyway?

            I can’t separate them because they were always enmeshed for me. She took me to my first gay bar, and she showed me around Boystown, and she introduced me to the man who would later write the best book on Chicago gay history. And so many other things. I went to my first International Mister Leather with her, which was held in a swanky hotel just off Michigan Avenue. I went to my first Pride Parade with her. And her girlfriend, the one she broke up with me for. But that’s lesbian culture for you. She was my first kiss, my first love, and my first broken heart. And I grieve her still.

            That’s the other problem, every time I try to write about gay Chicago, it turns into something about her, whether a poem, a blog, or a novel that I will completely love while I’m writing it but hate immediately once it’s finished. I think I have a problem. I also keep telling myself that someday I WILL write a book about her, whether fiction or non that I will be happy with and will be able to release to the world. But I probably won’t. Maybe she’s best left to the realms of poetry. At least there I’m not bound to reality, just the truth.

            The problem is that she was such an awesome person that I want others to know of her, know about her, know she existed and what she meant to me. She is my Nora Barnacle, and she is in everything I write. You can call her Joker. In fact, she would insist on it.