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Curious City

Chicago’s LGBTQ+ library is a space for people to ‘find themselves in the shelves’

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8642 Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Early LGBTQ+ history can be hard to find. Photos, letters, literature and other artifacts have been destroyed or hidden away, in acts of homophobia, out of a fear of repercussions, and even by witting and unwitting family members. “I think a lot of LGBTQ people, when they were passing away, their materials were being destroyed by family members that didn't understand them,” said Jen Dentel, the community outreach and strategic partnerships manager at Gerber/Hart, a large LGBTQ+ library and archive in Chicago. “And so having a space by us, for us, where we would collect and preserve the history became really important.” As we learned in our last episode, some queer women boldly operated sapphic establishments in Chicago during the 1920s and ‘30s. However, there was very little written about these places. Often, the only evidence of their existence came in the form of old newspaper articles reporting on the sudden closure of these businesses at the hands of Chicago police. In this episode, Dentel and Erin Bell, Gerber/Hart’s operations director, take us on a tour of this LGBTQ+ library and archive. They uncover archival treasures of the past, reveal unexpected moments in local gay history and explain the mission of the archive: to preserve queer history as a means of achieving justice and equality.

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:39.7

What's up, Chicago? I'm Erin Allen, and this is Curia City.

0:44.7

Right now, I'm in Rogers Park.

0:47.8

On my way up to a special area just above the Howard Brown Health Center.

0:52.7

Welcome to Gerber Heart.

1:01.0

Excited to have you here. It's called the Gerber Heart LGBTQ plus library and archive. We are one of the biggest LGBTQ plus library and archives in certainly in the Midwest, if not the world.

1:07.0

So I would say the world. Yeah. Okay. In our last episode,

1:11.9

we looked at some queer history, specifically where queer women in Chicago hung out in the 1920s and

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