A Place for Us: Gay Life at Chicago's Belmont Rocks

A Place for Us: Gay Life at Chicago's Belmont Rocks - Paperback

$26.95
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A Place for Us: Gay Life at Chicago's Belmont Rocks
  • A Place for Us: Gay Life at Chicago's Belmont Rocks
A Place for Us: Gay Life at Chicago's Belmont Rocks - Paperback

A Place for Us: Gay Life at Chicago's Belmont Rocks - Paperback

by Owen Keehnen
$26.95
$26.95

Book Overview

by Owen Keehnen (Author)

Belmont Rocks: Where Chicago Went Queer in Broad Daylight

A Place for Us: Gay Life at Chicago's Belmont Rocks by Owen Keehnen is a vivid work of LGBTQ+ history, queer Chicago history, and oral history that brings a legendary lakefront gathering place back to life. Before rainbow flags, before open-door bars, and before Pride was a season on the calendar, Chicago's queer community carved out freedom on a jagged stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline at the end of Belmont Avenue. It was not a beach. It was rock, concrete, sun, and possibility. Everyone knew it as the Belmont Rocks.

Often remembered as a big gay carnival, a gay paradise, and a place where everyone could just relax, the Rocks became an outdoor home base for gay men, lesbians, and the wider queer community. People came to meet friends, flirt, cruise, people-watch, welcome newcomers, and feel, for a few bright hours, unafraid. In an era when many gay bars still had blackened windows, the lakefront offered something radical: visibility, community, and belonging in broad daylight.

Drawn from interviews with more than 100 firsthand witnesses and illustrated with more than 115 photographs, this powerful oral history captures the humor, heat, music, codes, courage, and everyday humanity of a beloved gay beach that helped shape queer Chicago long before the wider world caught up.

Rich in memory and cultural detail, A Place for Us is essential reading for anyone interested in LGBTQ+ history, gay history, Chicago history, queer community, and the places where belonging was built in public. Owen Keehnen is also the author of Man's Country: More Than a Bathhouse and Gay Chicago Memories: 1300 N. Wells.

Number of Pages: 214
Dimensions: 0.49 x 9 x 6 IN
Publication Date: April 07, 2026
ISBN9781968983024
Author Owen Keehnen
PublisherRattling Good Yarns Press, LLC
GenreHistory and Education
FormatPaperback
PublishedApril 2026
LanguageENG- English
Pages214
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

History Nonfiction Social Science

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About Owen Keehnen

Tracy Baim is publisher and executive editor at Windy City Media Group, which produces Windy City Times, Nightspots, and other gay media in Chicago. She has won numerous gay community and journalism honors, including the Community Media Workshop's Studs Terkel Award in 2005 and several Peter Lisagor journalism awards. Baim received the 2013 Chicago Headline Club Lifetime Achievement Award. Baim is the editor and co-author of Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America (2012), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Top 10 selection from the American Library Association GLBT Round Table. She is the author of Obama and the Gays: A Political Marriage. She is also the co-author and editor of Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City's Gay Community (the companion website is ChicagoGayHistory.org); and author of Where the World Meets, a book about Gay Games VII in Chicago, Her books include a novel, The Half Life of Sgt. Jen Hunter, about lesbians in the military prior to Don't Ask, Don't Tell (it was the stage play Half Life in 2005), and the biographies Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow, and Jim Flint: The Boy From Peoria. She is also creator of That's So Gay!, a 2,400-question LGBT history trivia game. Owen Keehnen is the author of the novels Young Digby Swank, The Sand Bar, Doorway Unto Darkness, and the upcoming The Dog Trainer. Along with Tracy Baim he has co-authored Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow and Jim Flint: The Boy From Peoria. Keehnen also authored The LGBT Book of Days, a fun comprehensive guide to the most important dates in LGBT history. More than 100 of his interviews with various LGBT authors and activists from the 1990s have been collected in the book We're Here, We're Queer. He co-edited Nothing Personal: Chronicles of Chicago's LGBTQ Community 1977-1997, was a contributor to Gay Press, Gay Power, wrote the foreword for the Mark Abramson memoir For My Brothers, and contributed several biographical essays to the coffee-table history book Out and Proud in Chicago. Keehnen was on the founding committee and executive board of The Legacy Project and is currently a contributing biographer for the LGBT history education arts program focused on pride, acceptance, and bringing proper recognition to courageous lives and their contributions in LGBT history.

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