Zych's former partner, who opened the bar, borrowed the name from Tina Turner's song about her hometown in Tennessee. Inside, the lights are dim and regulars start gathering in the afternoons. There is a door out in back for those who, in the past, wanted to slip in without being noticed.
It is a nondescript wood-and-brick structure, its windows bricked in to provide the privacy and safety its customers once demanded. Located on Harlem Avenue a block south of the Green Line `L' station, the Nutbush presents a poker face to the middle-class community around it. "So what they've done really is quite amazing." "The Nutbush has been going it alone for a long time," Johnston said. Where such bars have succeeded, they have tended to be surrounded by a large gay and lesbian clientele, as on North Halsted, which has become "the Main Street of gay Chicago," Johnston said. Twenty-five years ago, gay bars tended to last little more than four years, facing pressure from police and other authorities, said Art Johnston, an owner of Sidetrack, which opened on North Halsted Street in 1982. It's not so unusual for a male couple to live openly in a small city or a suburb, whereas 10 years ago that was unusual and 20 years ago, if it happened, it was very hidden." "There are obviously still people in the suburbs who are very closeted and leading double lives," Brekhus said, "but much less than before. Now such establishments are more commonplace, though they tend to be more generic-like the Nutbush-and less focused on a particular theme or ethnicity.Īlso, suburban gays live more openly than they once did as stigmas wane, said Brekhus, the author of "Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity." Once it was rare to find gay bars outside urban centers. Wayne Brekhus, a University of Missouri-Columbia sociologist who has studied suburban gays, said the situation has changed radically in recent years. "It's the kind of place where, if you don't show up for a week, someone will call and see how you're doing."Īdded customer Eddie Messina, "I'm a 16-year regular, and I've always felt comfortable here. "I call it `Cheers' for queers," said Matulionis, who raises money for AIDS and HIV victims through the bar. Wayne Matulionis, a regular, compares the Nutbush to a bar in a sitcom of the 1980s and '90s.
There's a softball team, and the Nutbush competes in a Forest Park dart league against other bars, something patrons say they never would have done a few years back. But it is the tavern's more ordinary qualities that its customers emphasize. The bar has its bawdy side: It sometimes hosts "leather nights" and strippers, and its newsletter contains a photo of the backside of a man dropping his pants. Bottles over my head outside in the parking lot."ĭespite the assaults, the Nutbush became a rare haven in the western suburbs where an openly gay couple could sip a beer without worrying some bully across the bar might pick a fight or lob a verbal stink bomb into their evening. "Nowadays, pretty much everything is open and people can go where they want to go. "Don't forget, back in the early years, gay people didn't have no place to go," said Zych, a no-nonsense saloonkeeper in a white shirt and black vest. This week the Nutbush celebrates its 30th anniversary-and a history that coincides with sweeping changes in the way gays are perceived, both in the nation at large and in the suburbs where homosexuals long lived closeted lives and had few public places to socialize. Zych, a Vietnam veteran and South Sider, says he persuaded them to move along by smashing the headlights of their station wagon with his bat. Once, a group of teens showed up yelling slurs and menacing customers in the parking lot of the Forest Park tavern. Gay bar thrives in suburb - Forest Park tavern marks 30th anniversaryīack when owner Mike Zych first started at the Nutbush City Limits, he kept a Louisville Slugger under the bar to chase off punks who threatened his gay clientele.