[ Water running ] ♪♪ -Good morning.

-Good morning.

♪♪ Oh, my God.

My hair.

[ Laughter ] -I'm never able to make omelets the way you do.

They're always impressive.

-You just throw them in there and walk away.

-I know.

I know.

I know.

I know.

I watch you do it.

They're simple and delicious, and mine never come out like that.

Today, let me look and see what we're doing, or what I'm doing.

I know I always have to write everything down, and I'm jealous that you remember what you're doing and I don't.

-It's just a sign.

It's all here.

♪♪ -When you look across at this enormous place, it's remarkable to think that in 1982, we were... -One storefront.

-We were one storefront of all of this.

Every one of these businesses we're looking at changed in the street after we did.

So we're suddenly very, very old.

-[ Laughs ] -Thanks.

♪♪ [ Crowd chanting ] [ Laughter ] [ Indistinct conversations ] Welcome to Sidetrack's 38th annual holigay party.

On my left, a man who has shared my life and made my life a wonder for forty... 46 years.

[ Laughter ] As we approach a new decade, take a moment to remember the progress we have made.

Take a moment to remember that the only people that we gay people can really rely on are each other.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ In the '70s, the vast majority of gay people came to Chicago from small towns, from other parts of the Midwest, largely, and, for the first time in our lives, were free.

-Everybody was discovering the freedom of being gay and sex was, like, everywhere, basically.

-We were living in that crucible of time, kind of the post-Stonewall, post-Harvey Milk, and everything just seemed to feel more electric.

-In the typically accepted sense of coming out, that really happened when I came to Chicago for a sabbatical.

I had somebody whom I loved and who loved me in college, and I thought that I was done for my life.

Didn't expect to ever fall in love in that way or more so again, but we both knew that I would always be gay and he would not.

-Lakeview, in the early days, was very Hispanic, Latino.

And for many people, Hasa Street was a community, a street that you didn't want to venture down because there were gangs, there were people of color.

The neighborhood on Broadway, beginning at Diversey, that's where a lot of bars opened up.

In fact, that's where Art and Pepe met at a local bar.

-I always had my eye on this one particular bar that was on Clark and Surf, called Shari's.

I got hired, and before I knew it, I was a bartender.

This is going to sound so corny, but all I remember the first night, the first time I met him was his smile.

He was a customer at the bar and I was kind of protective of him.

I always made sure that if he was going to go home to somebody, I wanted to make sure that the person was okay.

You know, I always felt like he was like a new kid in town and needed some guidance.

-I didn't know much, but I knew that whenever I saw him, I was happy.

All the people at the bar were all just crazy about him.

Like, you could just see it.

He was performing just by being himself.

So I went back many nights to his bar, ordered a beer, and chatted with him.

He had a boyfriend named Arthur -- what are the odds?

And one night, he said to me... And I let an appropriate amount of time go by, about a minute and a half, and said, "So what are you doing after work tonight?"

-I was about to enjoy the '70s.

I was breaking up with my situation just because I wanted to be in the middle of all this celebration, but he was more important.

I thought, I mean, if I don't do this, what if this is the one?

And it turned out he was.

He was the one.

-He came home with me that night to my student apartment at Evanston and never left.

♪♪ -Sidetrack was one storefront.

That beam in the middle of the room, that was a wall, and from that wall to that brick wall, that was it.

That was the space.

-We've got around 15,000 square feet now, having started around 800, so we have grown a bunch over the years.

-A bit.

And this is almost done.

We're a couple of weeks from opening.

We're in final inspections.

Maybe three weeks.

And I think every decision we make involves more than just the two of us.

-Indeed.

And although away from here, in community stuff, I'm the guy with the big mouth who never says no to going up on stage, but actually, in the business, I'm the quieter one.

I'm less well known, by far, than Pepe, which is rightly so.

And we're excited about this space, but our customers don't know much about it.

So we're trying to be careful not to sort of over praise it and over promise, and let it just kind of be what it's going to be, and our customers will let us know.

-I've been coming to Sidetrack since 1982.

-I've been coming to Sidetrack's now going on maybe, like, 30 years.

-Three times a week, sometimes.

-At least three-four times a week.

-Sidetrack is home away from home.

-It's not so much of a business.

It's more like family.

-People have often traveled from the south side to come to Sidetrack.

And that only happens because Art and Pep understand the importance of building an inclusive space.

-Sidetrack is -- it's a long-standing, positive element of the community.

And it's the only place I've drank booze for 29 years, so.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Can I take your con hat with me?

Because I think that's what I'm gonna be.

-You can have it.

-It was a long, complicated process, how we ended up being bar owners because we were the least likely bar owners.

-The original idea for Sidetrack came from a friend of ours, Rocco di Verno.

Rocco lived in San Francisco, and he was familiar with a bar called The Midnight Sun.

He was convinced that something like that would work in Chicago.

And when I saw this place, I was blown away.

The programming was all videos.

-In days before video was -- -Before MTV, before anything.

And he looked at me and said, "You think you can do this?"

And I said, "Yeah."

[ Laughs ] What got into me?

But I always loved music.

I always loved movies.

-Rocco knew who were the great bartenders in our community, none of whom would work for him, but they would all work for Pepe.

-I went to a bank two days before we opened and bought enough money to put up a big projector.

It was all shoestringed.

-Smile.

-Hi.

-♪ Nobody else here, nobody like me ♪ -Let's rewind.

Let's catch up here.

-Yeah.

What?

Talk to me.

-Let's rewind this and catch up.

-We were told by some people that that would never fly.

This is not California.

This will never fly in Chicago, dah-dah-dah.

So I thought it would be a slow process and we're going to open and then we're going to have to build this up.

It was busy from day one.

-I had been a regular at Sidetrack from the night it opened, literally, from the night it opened.

I know a lot of people say that like they were at Woodstock.

I actually was there the night it opened.

-Music videos were one thing.

But these videos that I saw here were like, okay, this is the first time I've seen videos that are collected with a queer sensibility.

And again, it was another form of welcoming.

-Opening night, you couldn't get in.

So we'd run out of beer by 10 o'clock.

I remember getting in my car and going to a bar on Lincoln Avenue, Touche's, and having asking them for, you know.

I called them and said, "Could I borrow some beer?"

They said, "Sure."

So I filled my car with cold beer from Touche and took it back to Sidetrack and finished the night.

So even from day one, we were depending on other bars and other people.

It's always been a community effort, in many ways.

-Sidetrack was a postage stamp.

It was this one storefront, but it was the go-to bar.

-Gay bars were the only place we could socialize, but it was also extremely dangerous.

And then when we began to see bars that were owned and operated by gay people themselves, with roots in the community, and a genuine concern for the community, that changed things profoundly.

[ Cheers and applause ] All right.

-Welcome to Outspoken LGBTQ Storytelling.

-So we create community here.

So we have storytellers who take the stage, who share a little bit of who they are.

We want to honor their words.

-Part of the reason we started Outspoken was to help us all learn more about our own history.

[ Cheers and applause ] One of the thrills for older folks like me has been to watch the rise of new young members of our community.

-I am a healer.

It's amazing how a head massage can magically take away the stress of a long work week.

For a young trans woman, the beauty shop provided a safe haven for my transition.

-It's the continuation of this monolithic narrative that all trans people come from this inherently traumatic background and experience.

And when we continuously project that narrative, it really checkers the views of other individuals and has them see us through a very narrow lens.

-A year later, I became the manager of the Trans Life Project.

And today, I am a program director at Howard Brown Health and a member of the executive leadership team.

Thank you all so much for listening.

[ Cheers and applause ] -I feel like a little kid when I'm around him again and Art will go into one of his many war stories.

He's just such a wealth of information.

I can listen to him talk forever.

Those are the things that we all walk away from Art being better for.

-I think people should be paying more attention to the history of bars in our community because the bars are the anchors of the gayborhoods, and the gayborhoods are vanishing.

-How about a little show, girls?

-What do you want to see?

-Whatever you want to show.

-Now, many people will tell you, "Oh, it's going away because we're so accepted.

We can live anywhere we want.

And I think I would like to have whatever you're smoking, because that is just not true.

-Going up to north Halstead in my twenties and seeing people living unabashedly, unapologetically a gay life was eye-opening for me because it gave me a sense of what the possibilities for my own life could be.

-It's when we live in geographic proximity to each other that we have political power.

We can elect our own and we can defeat our enemies.

[ Crowd chanting ] -This is Chicago in the time of the COVID 19 pandemic.

This is a public health crisis that's unprecedented in modern history.

-I've never lived through anything like this.

-The corner bars and restaurants, the city's cornerstones, they all close to the public today.

[ Gate rattling ] -Owning a bar, managing a bar, working in a bar is a very social experience.

It's really tough.

So we've been trying to create things that are a substitute for what we're able to do in person, but not trying to recreate what that exact experience would be like, because all of these virtual experiences that try to be a replica of what you get in real life don't do it for me.

-Please follow us on our social media pages.

We will throw up little tidbits, little treats, little memories to get us through this time.

-I think we're starting to see a simple push crowd.

I think people are -- I think businesses are getting tired of playing nice.

-Our citizens are not immune to quarantine fatigue.

-That's a good phrase, quarantine fatigue.

-We know how difficult it is to see one of, if not the most vibrant strips in the city, completely dead.

-I feel like this whole year is lost, business-wise, and -- it's -- I'm hoping that next year will be a whole different experience, but we're concentrating on surviving right now.

-Our community, when we went through AIDS, we ended up teaching the world how to live and love in the time of plague.

And if we have to teach the world those lessons again, we'll do it.

♪♪ -It appeared a year ago in New York's gay community, then in the gay communities in San Francisco, in Los Angeles.

No one knows why.

-Just like this pandemic now is changing a lot of people's perspectives on what's important and what's not, I think AIDS did that to us in a major, major way.

-Chicagoans, I think there were probably more cases than we were consciously aware of because they weren't getting the kind of newspaper coverage that they were in New York, and that was sort of a double edged sword because we did feel insulated against it.

-When I was 29, I didn't know anybody that was even HIV positive.

By the time I turned 30, six of my friends were dead.

-I was diagnosed with HIV at Howard Brown at age 24.

And so that was terrifying.

♪♪ My doctor said, "Well, you should probably wrap up your affairs.

You've only got six months left."

So I went out and spent all of my money and a lot of a couple banks' monies on my credit cards, figuring, oh, well, what the hell?

-We were convinced we had it.

We went to the test, and it came back that we were both negative.

And the first reaction you get is, like, this elation.

It's like this weight's been lifted, and you feel so, so incredibly lucky.

And then a few minutes later, you realize that you're the exception.

That most of your friends are not going through that.

And then the guilt comes in.

It hit us both at the business and in our personal lives.

Some of our closest, closest, closest friends.

Considering the number of employees we had at the time, I would say about 50% gone.

-We were living through a pandemic.

Nobody would help us, no government support.

-I think many of you may be surprised that I'm here tonight.

There are some who said I wouldn't come for political reasons.

There are some who say I'm out of touch with the gay and lesbian community.

-He set us up to expect that he would follow through on AIDS funding and on appointing real, openly gay and lesbian people to boards.

He's not following through on his commitments.

Please -- -Mr. Mayor -- -Don't ever do that to anybody in this city.

-Mr. Mayor -- -Because you're really doing a disservice to the entire city.

-Mr. Mayor, it's not going to help -- [ Crowd shouting ] -The folks you saw today are not people who normally beat their fists on desks and make a lot of noise.

But there's great anger and frustration that the real state of things in our community is simply not being communicated to city hall.

-When I got pulled into this gay rights work, the group of us who came to be known as -- it was a moniker thrown at us -- the Gang of Four.

At this time, we were working on passing an ordinance.

-The Gang of Four, which was Laurie Dittman, Jon-Henri Damski, Rick Garcia, and Art Johnston, they all four were pit bulls for gay rights, right?

-They all did it in their own different way.

And somehow, during that window of time where it was important to work together, they figured out the magical mix to do that.

You had Laurie Dittman, who was the quiet female of the group.

-You could not deter Laurie from her chosen path, no matter what.

-When they keep saying, "Be good little queers, be quiet, be patient and wait outside the door," don't let them.

-Then you had Jon-Henri Damski, a character unto himself, who was a writer, just a really kooky individual, I have to say.

-Every reporter loves a person who gives you a good quote, and Rick Garcia was a quote factory.

He was just made for television, made for journalism.

-You wanted somebody to be outrageous and be outraged, you called up Rick.

So he was one of my go-to sources for many years.

-Undoubtedly, Rick was the most politically savvy of any of us.

-This administration is inconsiderate.

It is outrageous, and we no longer have the appropriate channels to go through.

This is what it's come to.

-And then you have a bar owner who was an educator.

Art was the motivator, and to some extent, the money and the power behind the organization.

-My role in Gang of Four, I got there because I proved that I could organize.

There was a wonderful idea to start a big rally in Daly Plaza on the Sunday before the first vote in the Chicago City Council.

There had been some disagreements or sort of lack of ideas on how to move forward.

And one of the ideas was to ask all the bars to close.

That's when I became involved with the work, because I didn't think that was a good idea.

In our history, whatever progress we've made has been funded, if funded at all, by bar owners.

Why would we want to piss off the only people who've ever carried water for our community for all these years?

But what ended up happening was my ideas about how to get people to the rally, by having them go first to the bars and having bar owners pay for buses, turned out to be a very good idea.

Although it was one of those ideas I swear I must have pulled out of my ass because I have no idea where it came from.

I did feel that part of my role was to continue to remind folks that bars are an important part of a community, that Stonewall began with a bar.

I viewed my work as part of the continuing line of activist bar owners.

[ Crowd chanting ] -The movement for black trans rights is very close to our community.

[ Crowd chanting ] There was a time when all gay people were treated the way black trans people are treated today, and we as people of privilege need to remember how we got here.

And we got here by protesting, by working, by fighting.

The gay community understands what over-policing is like.

Now, if you looked today at the way white gay people are treated by police, you would not know that it was ever any different.

There's no question that trans lives, they are under such attack from the president on down.

-They were there from the beginning.

So there wouldn't be a Stonewall without them.

They started the whole movement.

So this march is what gay pride in 2020 should look like.

I have never been prouder of my community than I am today.

This is remarkable.

We got to have more of this.

-Fight AIDS!

Act Up!

Fight back!

Fight AIDS!

Act Up!

Fight back!

Fight AIDS!

-The movement of the AIDS epidemic in Chicago really brought out the best of our community.

-Back then, it was just a group of average people just struggling every day to do our best to save our friends.

-Act up!

Fight back!

Fight AIDS!

[ Whistle blows ] -Act Up was an entirely new force.

Nobody kind of knew what to do with them, which is what they wanted.

And they did get many of us more mainstream, traditional lobbyists to take off our suits and ties and join them in the streets.

-The most well known person in Chicago area and Act Up was Danny Sotomayor.

-City Hall says "get back," we say, "fight back!"

-Gather there, block out that street, do speeches.

Once that's over, we can go back to the intersection.

Do the circle again.

-Like so many folks, I would've done anything Danny asked me to do, and when he asked us to come to marches and lie down on the street in front of the police horses, we gladly did it.

♪♪ In the midst of all the horror, there was life in the affirming strength of fighting back.

No, Art and Pepe's skill at mixing fun and serious business, it was always really an art.

They would get people packed into their club on the weekend, but then they would follow up and make sure that they also took political action.

-You'll have an opportunity through this week to meet many other lesbian and gay candidates from around our country, the kind of folks who are going to make sure that lesbian and gay rights become a reality across our country.

♪♪ -There started to be a movement for gay rights protections through the law in the early 1970's.

One of the alderman in Chicago, his name was Cliff Kelley, was the first person to introduce.

He was an African American Southside alderman.

He was one of the first really to understand gay rights.

-Alderman Majerzyk, do I understand you correctly in effect to say that laws exist already in which if a homosexual person felt that he or she were discriminated against that they can go in and get something done.

Is that your position?

-I believe so.

Yes.

-You think that comes out of the 1964 US Civil Rights case?

-I think it does, yes.

Right.

-And that's federal law.

I'd like to know what provisions those are.

-Well, I'm not prepared at this time to bring it on me.

-That's because they don't exist, alderman, that's the whole problem.

-The ordinance was introduced in 1974.

It languished there until the eighties.

The first vote was in '86.

The chambers were packed.

The vote came up short.

-All of us in city hall were pretty depressed, and somebody started singing, and they were singing "we are a gentle, angry people."

It's an old universal hymn.

And I tell you, I hate that song.

-We are not a gentle, angry people.

We are an angry people, and we're not going to do kumbaya and sit around and hug each other.

We're going to get the work done, the political work done.

And at that moment, everything changed.

-We put together a strategy.

We are going to talk to regular Democrats, independent Democrats, Republicans.

Everybody is a potential yes vote.

-What you are trying to do is deprive the broad mass of Americans of the freedom to make decisions regarding their own private behavior and their own associations on the basis of their morality.

-In the state of Illinois, it is perfectly legal right now, right today, for a person to be fired from a job simply because that person's perceived to be gay or lesbian.

It's our country, too.

-Chicago area politics is about muscle and it's about power, and it's about bringing people to your side.

Sometimes you have to do some horse trading, and sometimes you have to make some promises.

-Alderman supporting the ordinance said it was a necessary extension of the Civil Rights law.

-It is the next logical step for the protection of our individual freedoms.

-The opponent cited their religious beliefs.

-Homosexual activity is known to be characterized by the most dangerous of sanitary practices, the right to spread f-- [ Crowd chanting ] Go ahead, animals.

-We got criticism from the progressive element in the LGBTQ community.

They said, "Well, he would be a dirty vote."

Mother of God, any vote that gets us to 26 is a good vote.

I don't care who they are.

-When you bring in what would seem like the least likely allies, people pay attention, and it can be a force for change.

-I am a Roman Catholic, and I have connections with religious sisters and brothers all over the country and in the city.

-Rick understood brilliantly that nuns do not take their directives from the local Archbishop Cardinal.

They take theirs from the leaders of their order, usually in Rome.

-I called sisters that I knew here in Chicago, and we put together the Catholic strategy, because in Chicago, at that point, very, very Catholic.

-When an alderman would say, "Oh, I can't vote for this.

I'm Catholic," the nun would say, "I'm Catholic too."

And the nuns convinced many an aldermen to vote yes on the gay rights ordinance who otherwise would've been opposed.

-This was the third time the measure was called up for a vote.

Two previous times it was voted down.

-We were expecting the whole thing to fail again.

-Roll call is 28 yeas, 17 nays.

The ordinance is adopted.

[ Cheers and applause ] -The mayoral candidates have realized that the lesbian and gay community is a strong community, is an important community, and they had to deliver.

-We had done what we had been told over and over we could not do.

A week didn't go by that some political reporter wouldn't seek me out or Rick and say, "What are you guys doing?

This will never pass here in Chicago.

You're not in Seattle or San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York."

So it was needless to say even sweeter when we had been told over and over, it could not, it would never pass.

Interesting side note to show our own naivete is after we passed the city ordinance, we had a meeting where we declared gay rights a reality in Chicago, and we publicly burned the bylaws of our organization.

It wasn't long after that when of course the reality struck all of us that gay rights work was not complete, we needed to do more.

The group and its name morphed into Equality Illinois.

-So this, for a statewide organization, is where it all happens.

-At Equality Illinois, when we think about the policies we have to pursue, we focus disproportionately on schools, healthcare and criminal justice reform.

-I want to start tonight off on a personal note.

So this happened this year.

[ Cheers and applause ] This is my daughter Josephine, born in May.

So let me tell you about our home.

The home I rock Joey in, sheltered against the cold Chicago winter nights, the foundation which grounds us, laid by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnston.

The floors upon which we stand proudly set by Danny Sotomayor, Rick Garcia, and Vernita Gray.

The walls that hold up our home against the January winds erected by Tracy Baim and Greg Harris, Mona Noriega, and Mary Morton.

Every nail and flak holding our home together put in place by the work of thousands of people, too many to name.

And finally, the door.

The door through which we enter this home carved out by my dear friend and mentor, Art Johnston.

[ Cheers and applause ] -There is nobody I know in the world who is as good at channeling righteous anger and soft compassion as Art.

-All: To equality and full justice for all.

-Cheers.

[ Cheering ] -We've been closed for almost exactly three months, but it feels like a lot longer, and we'll make it work.

-Thank you guys for joining us.

-We missed it.

-I don't know that Sidetrack is making money right now, but it's really nice to be open the little bit that we can.

But a lot of people are scared and broke.

-Sometimes I wonder if we should stay open or not until we can fully open.

Well, first of all, we don't have a crowd on the floor, singing and reacting to the videos.

I'm playing to an empty room.

So that's a big difference.

You get a lot of energy from the crowd.

You feed off the crowd and you cannot do that anymore.

♪♪ Show tunes, show tunes, show tunes, it's one of the things that defines Sidetrack.

-♪ You can't stop the beat ♪ ♪♪ [ Cheers and applause ] -Of all the things that have to do with Sidetrack, that's the one that I feel the closest to.

-Do you need anything?

-No.

-Okay.

-No, I think it'll be fine.

-Okay, great.

-It's been imitated all over the country.

I don't care where you go, there's always been a bar that does show tunes on Mondays.

-[ Lip syncing ] -We've been doing show tunes since 1983.

Our slowest night was Monday night.

I thought the idea of doing a night -- Monday night, there will be nothing but musicals.

It became this huge thing.

I had to learn really fast, because I didn't know much about show tunes.

I mean, I'd seen a few musicals in my life, but I wasn't really into it.

With time, the crowd started reacting.

They liked to sing along because they all knew the lyrics.

It became like a sing along kind of thing.

And then they started changing the words in the songs, and some were really funny.

[ All singing ] -I feel like I'm also keeping some tradition alive.

I have people ask me, "Who's that woman singing?"

I'm like, that's Judy Garland.

Not everybody knows who she is, especially youngsters.

[ All singing ] Because when you go to a movie in a theater, when you leave the theater, you have a connection with the people around you who also saw, had the same experience.

And that's what I think was happens every time we do a show tune.

♪♪ [ Indistinct conversations and laughter ] -Love your t-shirt.

-Tonight, we are having dinner with some friends, Jackie and Ann, and their son, David.

-I appreciate the sommelier as well, because Jack really outdid himself.

-We were with Art and Pep for dinner.

Two days later, I was on a conference call and I saw a Pepe had called, and I couldn't get the call.

But then I heard Ann's phone ring since we're all working from home.

And I heard her say, "Oh boy, well, I hope he's doing okay."

-A multinational... -He got up in the middle of the night, was beginning to get very weak and having problems with his balance.

And he fell and hit his shoulder and part of his chest, so we decided to go to the emergency room.

They did testing for COVID-19, and he came back positive.

So they took him right upstairs to a room, and that's where he is right now.

[ Monitors beeping ] He's been through a lot.

I mean, he had a triple bypass.

He had throat cancer.

He beat all of those things, he came out fine.

I miss him every morning.

I miss him every night.

I miss him constantly.

I get sad.

I get depressed.

I get angry.

I'm scared.

It's a million different feelings.

If anybody would beat this disease, it's Art.

-I never seen a yellow ambulance before.

-I need some kind of a shirt or a pullover or something.

-This should be fun.

I'm going to try to go up the stairs.

-You want to go now?

-Yes.

I want to try to get this out of the way.

-All right.

-If I can.

You want to sit down for a minute or do you want to keep on going?

-Yes, yes.

I want to sit down.

-Okay.

-We're starting to be realists about we've begun to think about those things you must think about.

We've been together 47 years, and this is nothing morbid, it's just that there are average lifespans and all of this.

-You did it.

♪♪ -I made him swear to me that he would do some things about funerals, not that I expect to die now, nothing like that.

But the realization that we need to be ready for whatever comes in life.

-Serious now.

-Come on.

Get serious.

Get in bed.

-Okay.

-Come here.

-I'm not going anywhere.

Not in your condition.

♪♪ -I'm leaning on you, which I've done forever, and I'm still doing.

-Now, at the desk, I couldn't even get your whole last name out.

This is my brother Art.

Art Johnston.

-Hi.

-Nice to meet you.

-So in case you didn't have enough reading, I brought you some reading.

-Great.

-This week's.

I'll pay super, all this stuff.

Now get this, someone from the health department showed up.

-Wow.

-Yeah.

To our meeting, because I mean, I'm sure before they didn't really understand the significance of Act Up.

I think now they will, or they do, and now the press knows who we are, and it's no longer, "Act Up who?

What's that?"

I think.

-I'd love to talk to you sometime about all those trade offs.

I mean, obviously, it looks to me like that's been a good trade off.

-After Danny died, my good friend, Richie Daley, approached me.

I go, "Yeah, what do you want?"

He said, "I always admired this deep and special friendship you had with Danny.

No matter what, you were right there."

-Mayor Daley often said he became a better mayor because of Danny.

-He did.

-And you.

He became an incredibly strong and supportive person for our community.

-In the nineties, there definitely had been some gains made.

I think it really wasn't until the mid-2000s that I kind of realized that, oh, I am going to survive.

-Like almost everyone else I know died, and I didn't.

I do think about why us and not them.

I have no idea why some people lived and most everyone else died.

♪♪ -My community saved ourselves, and all the things we learned about how government operates, how the very reasons why 20-25 years later, we have something called gay marriage.

-Marriage now the law of the land.

-That was at Sidetracks in Boystown, its trailblazing owner, Art Johnston.

-Being married for a gay person was about as likely as going for a walk on Mars.

-Amongst all the articles that were written about, "oh, my God, gay marriage, how fast this happened," so rarely did they mention that we paid a very heavy price.

The tuition that we paid to learn those lessons about the way government works was a price too much to pay.

-Pepe, I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.

-Arthur, I love you not only for what you are making of yourself, but you're making of me.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Mazaltov!

-Mazaltov!

[ Cheers and applause ] [ Indistinct conversation ] -Stop pushing.

-No, it's fun.

I like pushing you.

-We are on our way to a meeting with two of our representatives in Springfield, one state rep and one state Senator.

Now we're going to talk about the building of a gay business area around where this new black gay center will be.

The state senator is somebody I've known for many years, Mike Simmons.

Mike was just appointed to an open seat as a state Senator.

-We got 200 vaccines to immigrants, Ethiopians, we're reaching those people from the Middle East... -Art Johnston is a mentor of mine.

Art and I met in 2009.

So it was an immediate friendship.

I just think Art is a fountain of wisdom.

-In some ways, it must be easier not to have lobbyists on you every moment of the day.

Because that's what it always was.

-I had the joy of talking to various other committee, and many of whom are people I've known for the years, making points as to why Mike would be great.

And he's already proving himself to be an amazing Senator.

-In my first four months in the state Senate, I got six bills passed.

One of the bills requires that the state start collecting data for LGBTQ people so that we can know, for example, how the coronavirus has affected people that don't have health insurance.

-We had a colleague of mine tried to dog it with -- so he referred to sex education as perversion.

And I knew what he was talking about, so I got up and I called him out.

Against the counsel of some of my colleagues on the democratic side of the aisle who wanted me to just sit quiet because we had the votes.

I said, "I don't give a damn if we have the votes."

-I find the word "perversion" to be deeply offensive and would ask that it be stricken from the record.

-I'm not going to sit here and let him sell out my community and talk about the people I represent who've never had a voice in this chamber like we're animals.

-I do feel like I am a torch-bearer because I'm literally next generation, standing on the shoulders of these local giants -- people like Art Johnston and the Act Up coalition.

I also think it's important for me to say, some of our queer folks are creating something altogether new, and I think it's exciting.

It is laced with liberation when it's intersectional, and that is literally the thing that is going to save our society.

So you asked if I am in this new role, I seem like I'm brave and unafraid and everything else.

I may be.

I may be very good at hiding it.

[ Laughs ] -You've had a hell of a past year.

COVID almost -- -Yes.

-It almost killed you.

-Yeah, that's true.

COVID did almost kill me.

It tried hard.

-Eight months later?

-Eight months later, still doing some follow up with doctors a couple days a week, messed up a lot of my insides.

A lot of my internal organs got infected and that's been hard to deal with that, but I've got great doctors, so I was very fortunate.

I made it through.

-In a word, pride is?

-Both: A celebration.

[ Laughter ] -A celebration, for sure.

-A celebration.

-What has this month been like for you guys?

When reopening of the city and all during pride month has to be huge.

-Yeah, we thought that it would take off slowly.

Oh, my lord, no.

Within a couple of days, we were so packed, better business than we've ever had.

People in our community and our friends are so anxious to get out of the house.

-Okay.

So I'll just need to see proof of your vaccinations.

Great, wonderful.

Now I need to see both of your IDs.

-Chicago announced that if a business could guarantee that a space was only filled with people who were completely vaccinated, that social distancing guidelines didn't need to be followed anymore.

And so last night was our first night of doing that.

A lot of people were very emotional about it.

It just was the first real, like if Sidetrack can be normal again, the world can be normal again.

-You see the way people are coming back in, and the way they react, and that's a reminder of what the bar means to people.

Like somebody said, this is where we come to celebrate our victories.

-He wanted Barry Manilow's "Welcome Home."

-Or where we come when something horrible happens.

-Lionel loved deeply.

-We're here this evening to celebrate my husband, Lionel Smith.

Because we didn't have a test, we can't say the Lionel died of COVID, but Lee's body was fighting something and having a really hard time and just couldn't go on anymore.

[ All singing along to ballad ] ♪♪ -All: To Lionel!

-We all suffered, we all lost, and this will not be over until we can really figure out how to turn it all into something of value.

And I don't know what that is yet.

♪♪ -I'm trying to see if I recognize anyone.

-I recognize her.

-Olivia Newton John, "Physical."

That's a big hit.

-Oh, right.

Of course it was.

♪♪ You know, I mean, sitting here, watching the opening night, 1982, I just came to the decision that I'm thinking about retiring.

-What?

-I mean, from the business, and I mean, I still want to be connected, but I'm thinking, once we get over this pandemic and once everything goes back to normal, that's what I like to wait for.

I don't know how long that's going to take, if it's going to take a year, maybe two.

But I would like to -- -So at this moment, when you're thinking of retiring, what does that mean?

-It means that I have complete trust in the people that we have running the place, the business, and I don't see any need for me to be there, which I think is a great thing.

-Wow.

So are you saying that you would give up your VJ shifts?

-I may still do one once in a while, but I don't want it to be a regular thing.

-Yes.

But...

But -- Wow.

I've never thought that there would come a time when you actually thought about -- -It's time.

♪♪ -For us, being in love and having a relationship with each other over all these years has been the easiest thing that's ever happened.

-Can I get some help with buttons?

-Yeah.

I have to go from behind you.

-I always feel like the two of us together, we can do anything.

We can go against something and win.

Sickness or political activism, whatever.

We always found a way.

We always found a way.

♪♪ -Would there be a Sidetrack without our love story?

The answer is no.

♪♪ ♪♪ I don't think there's any community better at coping than the gay community, what we've been through and what we've arisen from.

We struggle.

We fight back.

We work hard.

We care for each other.

We are a community.

-We need to celebrate the progress of the queer community.

We need to celebrate that there will be a second and third and fourth queer member of the state senate at some point in the very near future.

I have no interest in being the first and last.

-So the future that we all envision is here for a lot of people.

It's not perfect.

We still have a lot of work to do.

We still have to protect what we have, which can be taken away.

So you can't completely relax.

-We will always have to do this work.

Like, we have to wake up every single day and demand our equality.

-If there was one thing that I would love people to know, I know that you can make a difference.

You can make life better for the people you love, for the world.

Because we all deserve to have a better world than the one we came into.

It can be done.

It can be done.

If we can do it, I guarantee anybody can do it.

♪♪ -I agree.

[ Laughs ] ♪♪ -♪ It feels like something’s passed you by ♪ ♪ You’re too hurried or too worried to prioritize ♪ ♪ Hey, you ain’t gotta be lonely ♪ ♪ I know that you’re afraid ♪ ♪ Give it time, don’t you retreat into your mind ♪ ♪ Hey, ‘cause you shine like a star ♪ ♪ And we see who you are ♪