Last week, the annual winter flower shows opened at the city’s conservatories in Garfield Park and Lincoln Park. This year, the theme at Garfield Park Conservatory (300 N. Central Park) is “Snow Day,” which they’re channeling with a 12 feet tall “tree” created with white poinsettias, as well as oversized snowmen hidden throughout the conservatory’s […]
Tag: AIDS
A survivor retires
Illinois House majority leader Greg Harris wraps up a historic career.
Editor’s note: I remember
The who’s who of local journalism gathered recently at the Newberry Library for the 83rd annual Chicago Journalists Association awards. As the organization’s first in-person ceremony since the pandemic took its grip, a buoyant feeling was in the air (aided perhaps by an open bar), as Chicago journalists rocked their finest duds (props to Sun-Times […]
Pioneering electronic producer Man Parrish reworks the music of his departed friend Klaus Nomi
You might expect an album of Klaus Nomi material to sound like Klaus Nomi, but Man Parrish’s Dear Klaus Nomi isn’t that. Instead, the New York producer has added highly technical musical accompaniments to archival recordings of the cult figure’s songs to give them fresh sounds and feelings. The result is a love letter from […]
Freedom Uncut
Watching the 80s through the lenses of its superstars is its own glossy and compelling reward, but Freedom also depicts the carnage of the decade.
Hidden no more
One of my favorite passages in Chicago journalist Michael J. O’Loughlin’s new book, Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear, opens like an old-school joke. A nun named Sister Carol Baltosiewich is sitting in a New York City gay bar and eyeing the men around her, when […]
Pritzker has repealed the state’s HIV criminalization law
The 32-year-old statute was enacted during the height of homophobic panic about HIV and AIDS.
Queer to the Left came to raise hell
The group rejected the mainstream gay rights movement and kept alive the spirit of radical LGBTQ+ activism.
When crime goes viral
Activists say Illinois’s law that makes it illegal to expose others to HIV is racist and homophobic. Now they’re close to changing it.
Urban Theater Company re-creates the house music scene from Back in the Day
But the dance sequences undermine the attempts to address serious issues.
After AIDS, love endures—and so does Falsettos
The glorious Broadway revival makes a quick stop in Chicago.
The Last Session’s backstory makes it more than a relic of the AIDS crisis
Playwright Steve Schalchlin’s survival turns the musical into something hopeful and defiant.
Gone too soon: five films by directors who died young
These final films by five directors who died too young give a taste of what was left unrealized.
The inconsequential first half of Holding the Man is as hard to swallow as its devastating conclusion
Tommy Murphy’s adaptation of Australian author Timothy Conigrave’s coming-of-age memoir fails to question the sociopolitical forces that led to the AIDS crisis.