This history of Chicago's gay community offers, dare we say it, plenty of pride.

--Time Out Chicago

Lavishly illustrated with historical color and black and white photographs, and drawing on the scholarly, historical, and journalistic contributions of a breadth of authorities on Chicago's LGBT culture and scene, this is a first-ever, one-of-a-kind overview of Chicago's LGBT community and its history.

Published as a companion to the WTTW public television documentary of the same name, and to the Web site www.ChicagoGayHistory.org, the book is organized into a few main chronological sections:

Prairie Settlement to 1949
1950s to 1960s: The Seeds of Change
1970s: The We Decade
1980s: Silence = Death
1990s: Taking Charge
2000s: Prospects for the Future

Out & Proud in Chicago begins the work of capturing a history that often has been hidden, or at least elusive. As editor Tracy Baim writes in her introduction, "A few brave people did try to document our community, either as major events were happening or through groundbreaking historical research. These writers, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, academics and historians have tried to find many needles
in the haystack, through interviews with pioneers, digging into old university and
museum archives, and reading the often-biased coverage of the mainstream media. In
some cases, finding out if there was a "there" there meant reading between the lines and piecing together what it was to be 'gay' 100 years ago."

As the gay movement evolved and strengthened in the mid- to late-20th century, of course, more history was made and documented, both in words and images. The book brings this story up to the present day, looking at Chicago's contemporary LGBT world and its prospects for a flourishing future.