What Was Queer Lakeview Like In The 1980s?
By Allison Yates
Like all of Chicago, the North Side Lakeview neighborhood has gone through several dramatic changes over the last century, from its humble beginnings as a quiet outpost, to a hotspot for punk youth, to eventually solidifying huge swaths of the boundaries as one of the best “Gayborhoods” in the U.S.
In the early 1980s, Lakeview was already the preferred neighborhood of the LGBTQ community—the majority white, cis men, though there were some other communities represented—and the epicenter of the organizing and fight around the city and country’s lack of response to the burgeoning HIV/AIDS epidemic. In Rebecca Makkai’s award-winning novel The Great Believers, we get a well-researched, detailed view of this neighborhood as its LGBTQ residents grappled with the loss of entire friend groups to the virus and how to support one another while also organizing for healthcare.
To understand more the real-life parallels between Makkai’s novel and 1980s Lakeview, Read & Run Chicago hosted three LGBTQ elders after our Book Club Run of The Great Believers in January 2025 in partnership with Gerber/Hart Library & Archives, the largest LGBTQ archives in the Midwest and a resource for Rebecca Makkai.
In the video below, hear the panel discussion moderated by podcaster and book club host Betsy Tomszak with Tracy Baim, Arnie Aprill, and Gary Chichester, all of whom were active in the LGBTQ community at the time the book is set, whether as journalists, community organizers, or in the arts. As you watch the panel discussion, you’ll start to identify many similarities between the novel’s characters and these elders. In fact, Tracy Baim was one of the people Rebecca Makkai interviewed while writing this book.