Chicago

Chicago has one of the largest LGBT populations in the United States, with some 150,000 identified residents. The scene is concentrated in Northalsted, inside Lakeview, with more than sixty bars, restaurants and clubs around the Halsted Street axis. Among the long-standing venues are Sidetrack, for videos and showtunes, Roscoe's Tavern, mixed and with a terrace, and Hydrate, for ending the night. And in Uptown, Chicago Eagle has occupied the old Baton Show Lounge since autumn 2025 and keeps its drag room inside, running since 1969.

To the north it is rounded out by Andersonville, more lesbian and family-oriented since the eighties, and to the west by Wicker Park and Logan Square, with the alternative queer end. The scene runs seven days a week, though with a strong seasonal swing: in summer it spills onto the street and in winter it moves indoors.

The Chicago Pride Parade is held on the last Sunday of June. The first edition was in 1970, as a political march and with barely 150 people, and the parade in its current form began in 1971. Today it tops a million attendees and runs along Halsted Street and Broadway through Northalsted and Lakeview. It is one of the biggest in the country.

The calendar is rounded out by Northalsted Market Days, the August street party that is the neighbourhood's second big event, by Pride Fest in June, which precedes the march, and by Andersonville's Midsommarfest, also in June and with an LGBT presence. The city hosted the Gay Games in 2006, from 15 to 22 July. Hotels rise 100% to 200% during Pride week.

Northalsted, the former Boystown, is the first gay neighbourhood officially recognised by a city government in the United States. In 1998 Mayor Richard M. Daley approved a $3.2 million refurbishment of the North Halsted Street corridor and planted the rainbow pylons that mark the neighbourhood's limits.

The core is the junction of Halsted and Roscoe and the Halsted axis between Belmont and Grace. Its boundaries with Lakeview East are Irving Park to the north, Broadway to the east, Wellington to the south and Sheffield to the west. In November 2020 it went from being called Boystown to Northalsted, on the initiative of local businesses and in search of a more inclusive name, though the old one is still used colloquially. The Legacy Walk, along Halsted Street, presents itself as the world's only outdoor LGBT museum, with plaques dedicated to historic figures. You get there on the Red Line, Belmont station, and on the Brown and Purple lines, at Wellington.

Chicago is key in the history of US LGBT activism. The Society for Human Rights, founded by Henry Gerber in 1924, was the country's first formal gay rights organisation, and the state of Illinois officially recognised it on 10 December of that year. Henry Gerber's house, on Bryn Mawr Avenue, is now a National Historic Landmark. And Illinois was the first state to repeal its sodomy laws, on 28 July 1961, eight years before Stonewall.

On community infrastructure there is the Center on Halsted, the largest LGBT centre in the Midwest, serving more than a thousand people a day since its 2007 expansion. Howard Brown Health, from 1974, was one of the first specifically LGBT health clinics in the country and has sites in Northalsted, Edgewater and the South Side, with PrEP, trans hormone care, testing and treatment without insurance. And Lori Lightfoot, mayor between 2019 and 2023, was the first openly lesbian and the first African-American woman to hold the office.