“The gay community started jumping on the parade because it was the night when you could be anything you wanted to be — you could be out, and that wasn’t so easy back then,” Fleming tells Them. “That’s what I’ve always loved about the parade — the freedom to be who you are or who you want to be in your imagination.”
the south side of chicago is so fascinating to me since it’s such a hotbed of cultural activity and social movements; but derided by the rest of the chicago as nothing more than a ghetto to be avoided.
it’s a bit like the reddit liberal and tankie divide on the lemmyverse. like south chicago, the lemmyverse was created to serve its tankie population and like a majority of the people in chicago; a majority of the lemmings are new and their views are so rigid that they avoid the lemmy ghettos despite those ghettos having a lionshare of the discourse.
i think that the clearest sign that chicago has this divide is most apparent its gay communities. reddit liberals and white gays alike relegate themselves to 2 or 3 neighborhoods/instances, but, like tankies, all of the other types of gays embrace the entirety of chicago/lemmyverse. as the result; the gay clubs on the south side of chicago are mostly unknown to mainstream gays and SIGNIFICANTLY more lit than the other gay clubs in the city. (i can’t emphasize this last part enough, it’s like night a day difference and that’s saying something because the gay clubs in boystown are world class).