by David Nelson
As they had at Bughouse, Chicago police soon turned to “Clark and Perversity,” as they called the intersection in the mid-1970s. Sting operations by undercover clients frequently brought in hawks and chickens alike.
Neither Gene nor Billy were ever arrested for prostitution. “He was too slick,” Gene said of Billy.
Other dangers orbited the New Town neighborhood, though. Like all sex work, the boys working Bughouse or Clark and Diversity faced exploitation and physical violence during interactions with clients. Clients would occasionally become rough or aggressive during their encounters. Abuse and violence are alarmingly common in sex work, especially for female sex workers. In these instances, word typically spread among the boys, of particular troublesome or dangerous men.
Boys started going out in pairs—one as the chicken, one as a lookout—when they met with johns. The preliminary meet-ups, or “interviews,” in places like the Yankee Doodle Dandy restaurant had become an increasingly important step for chickens to get a feel for their hawks.
There was a particular john, aptly named John, who began to earn a reputation among the boys. “There were some [boys] that took off in limousines, big cars … Cadillacs, and they never did show up,” Gene recalled. “They disappeared from the neighborhood; nobody ever saw them again.”
Unaware of this danger, or even this world, the gay neighborhood continued to hum. As Mark Johnson said of the 1970s, “That was when everyone came out.”
The Baby Boom, coupled with the civil rights era, had given the gay population both magnitude and an openness to expand. Havens began springing up all around the country: San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, Greenwich Village in New York City, Washington West Square in Philadelphia, and of course New Town in Chicago.
Gay-owned businesses flourished. Gay newspapers and magazines came into circulation. Even the Windy City Gay Chorus first performed in 1979. Various activist organizations like the Illinois Gays for Legislative Action, the Illinois Gay Rights Task Force, the Chicago Gay Alliance, and the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Metropolitan Chicago began advocating for LGBT rights through a variety of avenues. By the early 1980s gay rights had become part of the Democratic platform.
But aside from that, New Town enjoyed a vibrant nightlife. “The streets were full,” Mark said. “It was bar after bar.”
There was Crystal’s Blinkers on Clark, Little Jim’s on Halsted, Broadway Limited with its 1898 railroad cars for dining, and Cheeks with its clever motto “Wide Open for Business,” just south of Clark and Diversey. Even outside New Town, bars and clubs were popping up: the 21 Club on Irving Park, Man’s Country in Uptown, and the Glory Hole on Wells Street where nearby Carol’s Speakeasy* ran the week with DJs like Frankie Knuckles (known as the godfather of “house music”) and ended with a roller-skating party on Saturday and a show hosted by the Bearded Lady on Sunday.
For Mark Johnson though, there was the Bistro, perhaps the most notable and popular of Chicago’s gay haunts. “That was the Studio 54 of Chicago,” he said.
Mark performed as “Marsha,” and rose to become one of the Bistro’s A-list acts. It was not uncommon for him to perform—and party afterward—with celebrities. Bette Midler, Grace Jones, and Barry Manilow were just a few that Mark came across in his time.
After her show at the McCormick Inn one evening, Mark and a friend worked their way backstage and introduced themselves to gay icon Liza Minnelli, who had recently won an Academy Award for Cabaret.
“You girls look like you want to go to a party,” Liza said to Mark and his friend, inviting them up to her hotel room, where they spent an evening discovering she was just as down-to-earth as she seemed, all while her boyfriend Desi Arnaz Jr. sat in the corner with “powder all over his nose.”
On the outskirts of this scene was Mark’s friend, John Szyc. John hadn’t gotten out of Maine West High School in Des Plaines yet, but most of his friends lived or spent time in the city.
Although by most accounts he was not a big drinker—and also underage—he was free to be John in the city. Aside from bars or discos, there was also a never-ending stream of parties and get-togethers.
At times, the group was a melting pot, a tangled mire of broken hearts and past relationships trying to continue on as friendships, orbited steadily by various women known affectionately as “fag hags.” Mark had previously dated a man in the group named Cliff, the brother of his best friend from Des Plaines. “If you wanted to call it that,” Mark said dismissively of the word dating.
Cliff was older than Mark and tended to be promiscuous to the point monogamy became impossible.
At his home on Irving Park Road—just down the street from the 21 Club and the Blue Pub—where he lived above his grandparents, Cliff became known for hosting notorious parties. “A den of iniquity” is how Mark described Cliff’s set-up. Drag queens paraded through to the sounds of disco and rock music, or in Cliff’s case, female pop groups from the 1960s.
John Szyc drifted around the edges of these parties. Liquor flowed and drugs powdered noses liberally—a sign of the times—but mostly, he stayed out of it. Perhaps John was there for other reasons.
“He wanted a boyfriend real bad,” said Lynn Meadows, who herself did not know Cliff but did know Mark, who tried to teach her how to hustle drinks by convincing people she was Tiffany Chandelier, a famous drag queen.
Away from the expectations of his life in Des Plaines, John could now explore his sexuality in full. John was involved with Cliff’s younger brother for a time, but it was Cliff himself who became one of John’s early loves. “I’d go back [to Cliff’s] with somebody, and he’d be there with John,” Mark remembered.
Cliff could be kind and generous, but he was also “crazy” and loved to party. To the younger men he dated, he often encouraged them to try drag. As a sixteen-year-old, Mark first dressed in drag with Cliff’s help to get into bars.
For a while, John dabbled in drag as well, though by Mark’s evaluation, he struggled. He cobbled his look together from stray pieces of clothing he’d found. Mark took pity on him and offered to help, but John never took to it, preferring just to appear as himself.
Gay Pride 1975 saw between two and three thousand participants as it wound its way up from Bughouse Square into New Town. The revelers were cheered and of course jeered as they pushed through the neighborhoods, but mostly it was joyful—a moment to be seen, to be out.
John, Mark, Cliff, and their many friends lined up along the avenues to watch the sea of papier-mâché trail by, adorned with drag queens and go-go dancers. The sun filled the sky. The rainbow flag had not yet been adopted by the LGBT community, but there were enough colors among the men and women to cover the spectrum.
It’s impossible to say what John might have felt as the parade drifted past. He’d certainly found others of a like nature, even if he didn’t party as hard as they did. And while he and Cliff did not stay together—“They just didn’t work”—it was no doubt a time in John’s life that shaped who he was to become.
It’s impossible to tell what John might have felt, because he was just starting to open up. When Lynn Meadows remembers him, she thinks of “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. Young and sweet. Only seventeen.
He’d only had these friendships and these relationships, frail though they may be, for a short time. Soon, he’d have a new job and his own place too.
It’s impossible to tell what John might have felt, because soon he’d be gone.
Music had carried Craig Conner through life. From Pennsylvania, where he’d been born, to New York for part of his childhood, to New Mexico, where he’d come of age, then to Arizona for a brief stop before transferring to Illinois, where he met Robin Pratt and Tex Richardson at the Chicago Conservatory College of Music.
When the family lived on twenty-six acres in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, kids the same age were hard to find except at school. Craig, the middle child, invented dozens of adventures for himself and his siblings. His younger sister, Val, r
ecalled bicycle racetracks running through the barn, buried treasure awaiting them in soft dirt beside the creek, and mock forts holding watch from the boughs of apple trees.
At the age of twelve, Craig and his family moved outside Ithaca, New York, where the Conner kids continued fishing, ice-skating, and fort-building (though this time in heavy snow drifts.) “He loved learning anything new,” Valerie said. “What he created out of Erector sets was stunning.”
Craig dabbled in magic tricks briefly, though Valerie admitted that phase got annoying fast. Chemistry also fascinated him, at least until he caught the bedroom floor on fire with his “experiments.”
“Help,” he said quietly, going back and forth from the bathroom with a small cup of water. Their mother quickly put a throw rug onto the fire and stomped it out.
In New York, Craig’s interests turned toward music. No one else in the Conner family was musically inclined, so while Valerie and another brother played football or ran around outside, Craig tinkered away on the piano inside. Gradually, he filled their home with music.
Valerie remembered doing homework in the evenings under the piano as Craig practiced away above her. “He had a beautiful voice,” Valerie said.
Later, in New Mexico, cast members or band and choir friends would come to rehearse at the house, but Craig always let Val stick around.
After rehearsal at the Santa Fe Opera was interrupted by a storm one evening, Craig figured he’d save time getting home by not taking off the full body makeup his on-stage character required. “The white interior of Dad’s car never quite recovered from his green body makeup,” Val said.
During a visit to their grandparents, a local pastor allowed Craig to play his church’s pipe organ. Seated before a tower of pipes, he plunked out stern and worshipful hymns that echoed through the church. Unbeknownst to Craig (or so they believed) he’d accidentally turned on the outside chimes, so everything he played sounded out across the city. The pastor went running up to the organ to stop him.
At school, he wrote performance music for his fellow students and acted with them in the musicals. He taught piano out of the family home, taking out ads in the Santa Fe New Mexican for students from beginner to a year-three level.
After he finished at Los Alamos High School, Craig started at Arizona State University. But not long into his time at Arizona, he started hearing about the Chicago Conservatory College. The history and reputation were both enough for Craig to move farther away from home.
“It was a long, long fine history into the nineteenth century,” said Louis LaPorta, a professor of theory at the conservatory. “They taught about musical instruments, they taught voice, theory, and composition, they had performances.… It was a very, very good school.”
In the early 1970s the conservatory moved from the old Steinway Hall building to the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue overlooking Grant Park, where the conservatory’s students frequently put on concerts.
“Everything about it was appealing to me,” said Diane Bryks, a vocal student who started classes at the conservatory in summer of 1972. “The small-size classes, the real family feel of students and teachers.… I couldn’t believe that I would go to school from nine in the morning to six at night and just do music. It was fabulous.”
It was no surprise that Craig Conner excelled at the conservatory. In 1973 Craig won a piano competition playing a concerto by German composer Moritz Moszkowski. His own composition, a trio sonata for violin, clarinet, and bassoon, received an honorable mention in a contest at the conservatory the following year. A church in Chicago even commissioned him to write a cantata. At the Columbia School of Theater, he served as the musical director and pianist; at Tabor Church of Chicago, where he later worked as the musical director, he performed recitals routinely.
Craig made an impression, not just as a top student, but as a personable young man capable of good conversation peppered with wit. Even Craig’s mistakes were eloquent and astute. “I remember one recital he gave,” Robin Pratt said. “It was a student recital, and he was playing the Chopin F minor Fantasy, and he lost his way and couldn’t find where the ending was. He just kept playing and playing and just making up arpeggios and all kinds of stuff. And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘hmm, this is very interesting.’ And Tex is rolling his eyes, and of course the thing that Tex enjoyed the most about it was all these other teachers that were there were just, ‘Oh, that was so wonderful.’ Not a clue that he wasn’t even playing what was written.”
“He was a hard worker,” said friend and fellow student Jonathan Ben Gordon. “He was really serious about his music.”
Both Jonathan and Diane lent their voices to Craig’s musical program at the Tabor Church on Sundays. Other times, Craig accompanied them for performances. Often they were joined by Tex Richardson, the conservatory’s piano instructor. “He was the piano teacher at the conservatory,” Louis LaPorta said of his colleague. “He was the best.… He really built up a good following of students.”
Among that following was Craig Conner, one of Tex’s most talented, prized students. Only a few years older than the students themselves, Tex had a reputation within the conservatory as flamboyant, energetic, and unpredictable.
Although primarily a vocal student, Diane also took piano lessons at the conservatory. When her first teacher—an older woman who often fell asleep in the corner of the classroom—died, she’d gone to Tex to ask him to take her on.
“As long as I don’t die,” he’d said back to her.
One day, when a particular lesson was not going so well, Tex got up from the piano and went to the window. “Come on,” he told Diane as he led her out the fire escape. She followed him outside where they threaded their way into another room to continue the lesson. “It was fun,” she said. “People liked him.”
But unpredictability also led to volatility—the kind Robin Pratt had witnessed in the townhouse years prior. A conflict between Tex and another teacher even pulled in Robin, who continually felt himself picked on by the other teacher. It wasn’t until years later that Robin found out why the other teacher was so hard on him: he and Tex had been lovers during their days at Northwestern University together.
“There was some feud going on with [Tex] and the dean,” Diane said. “One was about how you should dress when you’re performing noon recitals.…”
Jonathan Ben Gordon remembered thick binders of music from dozens of composers on the shelves in Tex’s studio. And he remembered Tex thudding away at a song called “The Battle of Manassas,” during which the low-octave keys resembled the thunderous booms of the famous Civil War conflict.
Music for Tex took up both his work and his personal life. His friendships had been formed through music. It put food on the table, though money for a musician was always tentative.
Like Craig, Tex himself had also made a circuitous route to Chicago. He’d been born in Texas and raised in Bristol, Virginia. After graduating high school, he’d gone to Northwestern and settled in Chicago.
In 1969 while Tex was in Chicago, his father died of leukemia back in Virginia. Six months later, while their mother was out of town, Tex’s younger brother shot himself in the family house. After the event, he remarked to Robin, who’d also lost a brother to suicide, “Boy, you and I sure have more in common than I thought.”
Years earlier, Robin Pratt remembered opening the door to his apartment in Rogers Park and finding Tex standing there holding his cat and wearing nothing but a bathrobe. He needed a place to stay, after his building had burned down. Tex had left something on the stove. “Luckily no one was killed,” Robin said. “The whole floor was collapsed and everything. There was like six or eight apartments.”
Since Tex was not much older than them, the line between friend and teacher often blurred, specifically among the “gay” faction of students. “I always felt a little left out because it was the dominant culture,” said Jonathan, who is straight. “It was a little cliquish.”
Craig navig
ated the scene with the same precision he used to get through classes and extracurricular events. “He was very wise,” Jonathan said. “He would look around, he’d see everything that was going on.…”
Many of his fellow students saw him as the whole package: talented, intelligent, and attractive.
Heads often turned for the brown-haired, blue-eyed young man strolling the halls of the Fine Arts Building. Craig also maintained an athletic, muscular build. Men and women alike found him attractive. Although she knew it was a platonic friendship, Diane still considered him “ruggedly handsome.”
Robin Pratt’s crush on Craig persisted, even as he found himself in relationships with other men. He and Craig never explicitly talked about it, and the timing never worked out. It also seemed Craig was simply not interested in something serious with his good friend. “He never was receptive to that,” Robin said.
Nevertheless, over the course of their friendship, Craig and Robin slept together on a few occasions. Something stopped them from ever getting truly intimate beyond the physical nature of sex. Craig would always leave, never staying the entire night with Robin.
Though never discussed in detail, most who knew Craig assumed something was going on between him and Tex Richardson, his mentor. They spent most of their days together at the piano, but at one point, Craig lived with Tex at his apartment in New Town.
Robin had also found himself frequently in Tex’s sights. “He was always hitting on me,” said Robin, who was not attracted to Tex, though admitted he gave in on occasion. Tex’s friends recognized his insatiable libido, often heading up to various adult bookstores for sex with strangers in the booths.
Given Tex’s appetite and role as Craig’s mentor, it’s easy to see their relationship crossing into other territory. They spent extended periods together, not simply at the piano or in rehearsals but also outside school. “I just always assumed that they were more than [student and teacher],” Jonathan said. “It just looked that way and felt that way.”
