"I still remember walking in and thinking, 'This is fabulous this is where I belong,'" Mickey said. Mickey came out to his mother's hairdressers at age 18, and they took him to his first gay bar. If I wanted to go dancing with a fellow, we would have to take two girls with us, and pretend that we were dancing with them." "You could not touch anybody in the 1960s, nor buy a guy a drink. Mickey said the The Nutbush regularly had security guards in the parking lot to protect its customers, and poppers were a common sight inside the bar. Many people didn't want others to know that they were gay, but once they got inside, all hell broke loose and the fun would begin." "People were more hiding themselves back then, meaning, people often would walk into the bar with their collars up, wearing hats, with sunglasses. The bars were a lot of fun back then," said Mickey, who also worked at The Hideaway in Forest Park for less than a year, and at The Lucky Horseshoe in Lakeview from 1992-96. "Years ago, I think there was much more camaraderie in the bars, with all of the dancing. He is now retired, single, smiling and reflective on what he's watched in the LGBT world, specifically, gay bar life, dating back to the 1960s, when he first was a customer. He also worked at a bank and in the travel agency industry. Mickey tended bar in the Chicago area for 20 years, including 15 years at The Nutbush in suburban Forest Park. "Today, I don't hesitate to hug and kiss anyone on the street when I see them, yet we couldn't do that years ago." "I thought he was going to fall out of the car. "One day in the 1980s, I was driving with a friend of the family, and we drove past two men holding hands on Belmont Street," he said. He came out in 1965, first telling his mother's hairstylists. But years ago…" said Mickey, cutting off his sentence.
Mickey, originally from Chicago's South Side and a Lakeview resident for the past 20 years (though he's moving to Edgewater by the end of the summer), has had a front-row seat on the worldgood, bad and indifferent.
The world has certainly changed for the LGBT community. Today, we're talking about same-sex marriage. There was a time when two men needed two women to join them on the dance floor if they wanted to dance, even at a gay bar. There was a time, which Mickey witnessed first-hand, when gay men couldn't and wouldn't even touch each other in a gay bar. "We've really come a long way," Mickey said, reflecting on how gay life has progressed. And years ago, if they were kissing in public, they likely would have been arrested or attacked, or something more severe, Mickey said.īut on this night, as Mickey watched others in the area, no one even looked twice at the lovers. He thought that he personally would never be so open, in public, with his affection for another man. He spotted two twentysomething Latino men sitting side by side on a bench, and one had his legs draped over the other man, and they were kissing intimately.Īn array of emotions raced through Mickey's 66-year-old body. It was an early summer evening when Mickey Powers walked from his Lakeview apartment to the lakefront near the totem pole to read, as he often does.