“We paid off, just like every other bar did,” he explains. In an era when newspapers still printed the names of men arrested in police raids on gay bars, Renslow’s business prospered. Setting the standard for leather bar decor, the Gold Coast’s motif was dark and dungeonlike, with large depictions of jut-jawed muscle men lining the walls, some with penises bigger than their biceps, some committing acts that defy polite description even in clinical terms. Eventually the group developed a big enough following to justify buying the old Gold Coast Show Lounge at Clark and Elm, which under Renslow’s ownership survived more than five moves over 30 years. But they were soon kicked out of that place and every other bar where they met. “And we felt maybe if we’d meet in a bar, people would see us, and maybe we’d attract more people who were interested in leather.” He says the group first descended on a “drag queen bar” in a Loop basement that was a cafeteria by day and a bar at night. “Actually we wanted to start a leather group,” Renslow says. In the late 50s, at the suggestion of his friend, tattoo artist Cliff Raven, Renslow and his cohorts began to gather in bars, finding safety in numbers. If someone was coming from New York, they’d call me–that’s the way we got to know each other.” “In fact, it was a tight-knit group of people. “Prior to my opening up the Gold Coast, people met in little cells or groups in homes,” Renslow says. Seedy bars in larger cities may have been known to host an occasional leather night, but under the threat of police raids no one would risk catering to the leather crowd. While S and M circles had long taken a liking to leather, most experts trace the arrival of the leather scene to the first gay motorcycle club, the Satyrs, a group of Californians inspired in part by Marlon Brando’s star turn in the 1954 film The Wild One. Leather contest in the late 70s, and last month he set up a storefront museum dedicated to the underground movement noted for its natty sense of fashion. The putative daddy of what would become a worldwide phenomenon, Renslow, who’s now 66, helped start the International Mr. But Renslow, according to historian Marie Kuda, was also recognized for opening one of the country’s first leather bars, the Gold Coast, in 1961. White found Chuck Renslow to be “the best known gay personality in the area,” who got his start in the 1950s as “a beefcake photographer and publisher of Mars, a physique magazine.” Renslow went on to become almost legit–an ally of Jane Byrne and the owner of numerous bars, bathhouses, and the local newspaper GayLife. Upon his arrival in Chicago, however, he came face to face with the old school.
Sommelier Series (paid sponsored content)įor his book States of Desire, author Edmund White set out on a cross-country trip to document the changing profile of gay America in the late 1970s.