Chicago gay bar the coast nyc2/10/2024 “They would phone first to say they were raiding the bar, so they would get people out. “Even when the cops would raid the bars, the bars would know ahead of time,” Karlin added. “That corruption actually gave gay people a space in Chicago.” “The other thing I think that helped is a weird thing to say, but the Mafia owned all the bars, and the cops took money from them,” de la Croix explained. “All the obvious homosexuals in the Midwest living in small towns, drag queens and things, they all thought, ‘This is great,’ so they all moved to Chicago.” “Illinois was the first state to decriminalize homosexuality, in 1961,” de la Croix said. So what happened is when people got tired of running their business or they ran out of money or whatever, they just let somebody else open a bar in their same address.” That led to a number of locations that were home to a series of gay bars and clubs over the years. “If you had a liquor license and you wanted to move your business three doors away, you couldn’t do that - but you could let your liquor license be used by somebody else in your space. Until recently, a quirk of the city’s liquor laws meant that licenses were connected to an address, rather than the owner of the bar.
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