Now that I haven't any place to be during the day on account of my quitting my office job for some reason, I usually put in an afternoon appearance at Winston's Internet Cafe, the 24-hour coffee shop located in the spot where Clark's on Clark used to be. Clark's on Clark was a divey gay bar I once described, during the 2006 Great Gay-Bar Bar-Crawl, as "a dank, drafty room with sticky floors and air stale with years-old misery."
The property's present owner, a former bartender at the Chicago Eagle (also defunct, RIP), originally wanted to keep the place a gay bar, but then there were problems with the liquor license or something, and so now it's a coffee shop. [Time Out Chicago's Jason Heidemann told the story in greater detail in an article last fall.]
I like Winston's because it has free WiFi and stays open 24 hours, and the idea of all-night joints always comforts me. I have no intention of ever being anywhere but my bed at four in the morning, of course, but I like knowing I have options.
I didn't drop by today, though, because I had to run an errand in Boys Town and decided to go to Caribou Coffee on Broadway and Aldine instead. That's where I'm typing these very words, in fact. If Winston's is a coffee shop that once was a gay bar, Caribou is a gay bar that nominally functions as a coffee shop. At least, that's how it was in my day. I haven't been here in some time, but back when I was in college in the late Mesozoic era, the place was perpetually packed and cruisier than a Carnival Fun Ship.
I wrote a paper about it for a "Chicago in Short Fiction" course I took under Bill Savage (brother of sex columnist Dan Savage, but I didn't know that until later). The assignment was to go to some spot of our choosing in the city, observe for an hour or more, and then write an essay on the experience. Don't ask me what any of this has to do with short fiction; we also read a couple of novels and some non-fiction reporting, so clearly Savage interpreted the subject loosely. I chose Caribou on Broadway because, as I said, it was cruisy and I thought maybe I could do a mock-anthropological, mating-habits-of-the-homosexual-male-type thing. And if I got laid into the bargain, I figured I could justify it as research.
As it happened, I did not get picked up, and, perhaps in bitterness stemming from this fact, the paper I wrote featured vaguely Marxist blather about how chain-store capitalism appropriates and waters down a community's sense of itself and how the gays seemed to have exchanged revolution for a bland, yuppified materialism--embodied, presumably, by that nefarious stimulant of the bourgeoisie, the low-fat mocha latte with extra foam. I gave this ridiculous piece the ridiculous title "Stonewall It Ain't."
Of course it got an "A."
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