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
Posted inNews & Politics
A survivor retires
Illinois House majority leader Greg Harris wraps up a historic career.
Posted inStaff notes
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 […]
Posted inMusic
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 […]
Posted inFilm
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.
Posted inArts & Culture
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 […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Pritzker has repealed the state’s HIV criminalization law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.
Posted inNews & Politics
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.
Posted inMusic
Thirty years ago, a Black queer zine captured the scene that birthed house
Robert Ford and Trent Adkins shaped the bold, subversive, gossipy, funny, deeply engaged voice of Thing, which was felled by the AIDS pandemic in 1993.
Posted inNews & Politics
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.
Posted inArts & Culture
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.
Posted inArts & Culture
After AIDS, love endures—and so does Falsettos
The glorious Broadway revival makes a quick stop in Chicago.
Posted inArts & Culture
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.
Posted inBlogs
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.
Posted inArts & Culture
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.