WBEZ | Boystown

'The Drop' all-ages dance party to raise funds for 'What's the T?' remount

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:41:00 -0500

Last summer’s “Where’s the T?” was an event. It’s rare in the Chicago queer community that everyone is talking about one thing (if so, it’s often in a bad way), but the play was that kind of phenomenon. It brought us together, for a brief yet beatific moment. It was like going to church.

For those who didn’t catch one of its many sold-out shows, “What’s the T?” was a play developed to highlight the intersections of racism, classism and sexism in Boystown -- through the lens of youth experiences. The play followed a youth who was kicked out of his house for being trans and came to Boystown for the resources and solace it promised, finding the neighborhood as prone to oppression and gentrification as it is to providing respite.

To develop “What’s the T?”, lead writer Sara K. worked with youth to “develop characters and storylines,” bringing lived experience into the theatre space. In devising workshops held throughout the year, K. said that the writers and youth would work together to “rip apart scenes or build on them in beautiful ways.” It wasn’t just that the stories included in “What’s the T?” were true. For an audience that experiences these issues every day, the stories needed to feel real.

For AboutFace Education Associate Nic Kay, that dialogue has a crucial impact on the youth AboutFace works with. In our email correspondence, Kay told me,

“I often talk with queer and trans-identified young people about the discrimination they face or current events and often I find that they have been made to feel that their thoughts don’t matter. Through the work AFYT does with young people I believe we encourage them to think critically about their chooses, current events and the TQBLG community. AFYT provides a safe space for young people to become strong leaders who can talk/perform about their lives and the things around them.”

According to Sara K., who also serves as the AboutFace Education Director, the weaving together of youth and adult perspectives fostered an “interesting dynamic” between the company and the community. AboutFace attempted to speak to business owners on North Halsted, hoping to bring their viewpoints into the dialogue. Youth performers went from shop to shop, asking to interview business leaders and shop managers. Sara K. said, “No one would talk to us. Everybody was scared.”

Because of that, there weren’t a lot of adult voices in the play, and there were few white characters. One, Bernard, particularly stood out -- as a representation of suburban privilege. For Sara K., it was important to “know what that character was coming from,” as the character could have been a stereotype of a mean white person. K. stated, “We all participate and inherit many systems of oppression. It’s not taught to us to think critically about them. We wanted to start the conversation at that level.”

According to Sara K., “What’s the T?” is “an effort to get people to think critically about their behavior and to think critically about their identity in the community.”

Nic Kay agreed:

“After ‘What’s The T?’, a lot of people in the queer and trans community were left asking...questions of each other like: ‘How do we move forward as a community to rectify these issues of ageism, racism and discrimination in the TQBLG community? How do we create spaces for TQBLG people of all ages to congregate and learn form each other? How can we be allies to each other?’”

In order to further ask those questions, AboutFace is raising funds to put on “What’s the T?” again this summer to “show this project is worth it.” After last summer, Sara K. said that AboutFace was getting requests from all over the community to do a “remount,” which will take place in the second floor loft of Victory Gardens.

According to K., last summer’s final show was cancelled due to a power outage. Their last show was a back-to-back staging, and a storm knocked out their power three-quarters of the way into the first performance. However, the cast played through the darkness, never skipping a beat. Sara K. called it a “beautiful moment of radical, celebratory energy.”

Kicking off the celebration with a party, AboutFace will be throwing an all-ages queer dance event at Bottom Lounge. Called “The Drop,” the party was co-organized by AboutFace’s Youth Task Force and the Chances Dances DJ collective.

When I spoke to Justin Mitchell (who performs under the name DJ Swaguerilla) of Chances, Mitchell told me that the youth were adamant the space not be ageist. As Chances is a 21+ space, I asked Mitchell if that was a challenge for their organizers. Mitchell paused for a moment to reflect and then affirmed my question, “Absolutely. Creating an inclusive space is always a challenge. Creating an all-ages inclusive space is even moreso.”

For Sara K., creating spaces for youth is important as gentrification and security in Boystown are slowly “[pushing] them out of the neighborhood,” while “the organizations that serve them [experience] a similar policing.” K. said that “youth have the same needs adults do.” They need “community, culture and an amazing dance party.” In the process of bringing this event to fruition, it was especially “important for not to think about it as us giving them this space.” It was about working together to build it.

“The Drop” will take place on April 20 at 6:30 P.M. and runs until 10:30, featuring dances and performances from Chicago queer artists like Shea Coulea. According to K., it might sound early to adult attendees, but it’s “not that unusual for youth to have a rocking dance party early in the evening.” For the adults who want to support youth, K. said, “If you’re an ally, you’ll step up and come kiki with them at 6:30. Just being there will show you care.”

Bottom Lounge is located at 1375 W. Lake. and suggested donations are $10. All proceeds will be put toward AboutFace Theatre and the “What’s the T?” remount. For more information, you can visit AboutFace’s website or find the event on Facebook.

Nico Lang writes about LGBTQ life in Chicago. You can follow them on Facebook, Tumblr or Twitter @Nico_Lang.

Chicago Pride may run two weekends

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:00:00 -0600

Chicago Pride is now going to run two weekends.

Well, sort of.

Chicago’s annual Gay Pride Parade consisted of the parade that recently underwent a route change to accommodate record-high crowds and Pride Fest, a two-day precursor to the parade.

The parade itself attracted large crowds, with estimates of 850,000 last year.

However, Pride Fest, a relatively new addition to the Gay Pride Parade organized by the Northalsted Business Alliance, acted more so as a holding area for the spillover crowds that patronized the area’s bars, which during Pride weekend have lines wrapping around a city block with near-hour wait times.

“It’s a pretty intense weekend when you have the festival and the parade. We looked at it, a lot of people have said in past years: ‘Why don’t we do it another weekend?’ When you have a festival on Friday it shuts down a major thoroughfare on a weekday,” said Jen Gordon, spokesperson for the alliance.

The alliance is seeking to have Pride Fest on the Saturday and Sunday before pride, June 22 and 23.

It’s not official. In order to have a parade or special event (outdoor festival) an organization or person must first obtain a permit from the city — and the organization is still awaiting approval from the city.

“We met with East Lakeview neighbors last night and this is what we’d like to go forward with it. Obviously the Pride Festival covers two different wards and in touch with Aldermen Cappleman’s and Tunney’s office,” Gordon said.

The Chicago Annual Pride Parde has a route that starts in Uptown, Alderman James Cappleman's 46th ward and Lakeview, Ald. Tom Tunney's 44th ward.

"We're still getting input from residents," said Sean Kotwa, co-chair for the alliance.

When asked if this would cure the problem of crowds or exacerbate it, giving bar-goers the opportunity to drink and party more on two weekends instead of one, Gordon said they believe it would split up the crowds somewhat, especially for tourists coming in from others states.

“A lot of the people are coming to Pride Fest for the entertainment line up, a lot more activity than the bars on the strip,” she said.

“We want to focus on the idea of celebrating pride and celebrating equality that whole week.”

The North Halsted Business Alliance, which organizes Pride Fest —but not the parade — is still awaiting permit approval from the city.

Comment from Tunney's office was not immediately available.

Young, gay and black in Auburn Gresham

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:00:00 -0600

The trip on public transportation from Auburn Gresham on the South Side to North Side Boystown can be long and tedious. But as Terrence Chappell rides from 79th Street to Belmont and back home again, he uses the time to think.

Chappell is a nightlife and society columnist for ChicagoPride.com. He travels this route frequently – between his apartment in Auburn Gresham and the gay nightlife in Boystown. But in both places, he feels misunderstood.

In Auburn Gresham, he says, there are no bars that he would hang out at more than once. And in Boystown, he can sometimes feel like an outsider because of the stereotypes he hears from people about the South Side.

A few months back, a woman, upon learning where he was from, asked him, “Are you from one of those ghetto families?” Chappell laughs as he recounts the story now. But it’s not the first time someone has had a notion about Auburn Gresham, where he grew up and still lives.

“People are very scared of what they don’t know about,” he says.

All this week we're spending time in Auburn Gresham, getting to know a few of the people who live, work, and play there. Our series Auburn Gresham, Chicago continues today with Terrence Chappell and his mother Marilyn talking about what it's like to be young, gay, and black there.

Auburn Gresham, Chicago received support from the Chicago Community Trust's Local Reporting Initiative.

The Paper Machete Radio Magazine 7/16/11: The Solid Gold Duets show

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:06:00 -0500

In this week's episode, The Paper Machete celebrates the power of two. Tim Sniffen and Brendan Dowling discuss the realm of the Bachmann's (that would be Marcus and Michele). The History Girls become Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller who talk about teacher pensions. And Coya Paz and Ricky Gamboa take down the campaign to take back Boystown. On your way out, you'll hear Will Phalen with music. As usual, if you can hear us, this magazine is LIVE. Download it here, or listen below.

This Saturday's line-up thus far includes Spencer Ham (iO, Jellyvision), Corey Rittmaster and Monique Madrid, Fred Sasaki (writer), Tim Paul aka "The Homosexualist" and Julienne Bilker who writes about theater for TimeOut Chicago.

Crime puts Boystown service agency under spotlight

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:47:00 -0500

It’s been just over one week since a video depicting a brutal street attack in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood went viral. That violent incident was just one of several so far this summer in the popular gay entertainment district known as Boystown. But it’s taken the lid off an emotional debate that community’s having about who’s responsible for crime. Some are pointing fingers at Boystown’s Center on Halsted — a social service agency — and particularly its young clientele.

The attack happened just before midnight two Sundays ago. It was a regular weekend night, with people teeming outside Boystown’s clubs and bars on Halsted Street. The video captures a crowd punching, beating, and jeering at a young African American man. He was also stabbed multiple times.

Late last week, Chicago Police announced an arrest. A man from Hammond, Indiana. Others are likely to follow. But before anything was known about the attackers, rumblings began, mostly online, that gay youth from other neighborhoods were committing these crimes. Those rumors got a full airing last week during an explosive community policing, or CAPS, meeting.

SPEAKER: I was one of those kids. I grew up in the neighborhood. So don’t attack the kids. You are to blame.

Almost six hundred people packed that meeting hall in Lakeview.

SPEAKER: When I grew up here, gays were getting beat up on, my friends were beating up gay people. Now you own the community, and what do you do? You turn it on kids that are troubled because their parents can’t afford to feed them so they throw them out on the street. Not on your doorstep? Not on your doorstep?

AUDIENCE: (Booing)

SPEAKER: You guys better wake up. Wake up now. Wake up.

Several gay youths also spoke.

Many said their sexual orientations got them kicked out of their own families and communities.

So they went to Boystown for acceptance… but even there, they felt despised.

SPEAKER: I have been looked at as an individual who is stared down upon because I am dirty, because have no place to sleep, because there are no shelters. Because there are no shelters in Lakeview ...

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Not on my doorstep, buddy…

Catch that? One audience member said, “Not on my doorstep, buddy.” And that’s been the complaint from some… that when the Center on Halsted closes at 10pm, its youth go out onto the streets to loiter, squat, roam, and commit crimes.

When it opened four years ago, the Center was meant to be a safe haven for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people of all ages. That’s worked. The Center says it’s at capacity — 1000 people go there every day for everything from meals, job skills training, gym activities, or to use the Internet.

But some Boystown residents wonder if the youth program is doing more harm than good.

ambi: street noise

CUNNINGHAM: Want to go this way or this way?

GREG: Let’s go that way.

A team of six or so Boystown residents were out on Halsted after midnight this last Saturday. It’s an ad-hoc group of men… they do this every week… sweep the side streets and alleys to call in crimes and suspicious activities they see to police.

SCOTT WHITE: Yeah, they’re literally just west of Halsted…

They report anything from assaults to relatively minor things… like this group smoking weed on the sidewalk.

SCOTT WHITE: Yeah, anywhere from ten to fifteen.

Greg Rohner is one of these self-appointed vigilantes. He’s lived around Halsted since 1998 – before the Center was built. He says he started doing the walks a couple of years ago after he stopped a sexual assault in progress outside his apartment.

YOUSEF: Do you have any reason to believe that some of the crime is attributed to people affiliated with the Center?

ROHNER: I hate to say it but… yeah. I’ve been very involved in CAPS, and I’ve been involved in CAPS all year long. And I was in a CAPS meeting a couple of months ago, and we had somebody that was familiar with people that get services from the Center, and they had a list of the recent arrests, and one person on there was somebody that had been receiving services at the Center.

YOUSEF: Do you think it would be better for them to simply not offer services so that they don’t basically eject all these people onto the streets at 10pm?

ROHNER: I would hate to see that happen. But on the other hand, the problem isn’t getting any better. And when you’ve got people that have no place to go when the Center closes, they’re on the street. And we can’t all take them in. We get them from everywhere, and we do our best here to give them services because their neighborhoods don’t give them services. There’s only so much that we can do, you know?

I asked another one of these crime watchers, John Cunningham, about his take on the Center.

Cunningham says he also doesn’t think closing it, or its youth program, would accomplish anything.

CUNNINGHAM: While that might have been the initial cause of what started things escalating things many years back, I don’t think that that is the current reason. Word got out that it’s a fun, safe neighborhood, and then things escalated, and then unfortunately, so did the criminal element, too.

In other words, the genie’s out of the bottle.

Young gay people across the city know about Boystown now, and they’ll keep coming, regardless of whether the Center on Halsted is there. Still, some people affiliated with Center say, every time crime flares up, they’ll still have to be on the defensive. Modesto Tico Valle is CEO of the Center.

VALLE: We are part of the solution. We are not the problem.

Chicago police have affirmed that the Center was not the problem in the videotaped assault. They say don’t believe the man they arrested or other suspects were affiliated with the Center. Valle agrees with people who say there should be a homeless shelter, or something that takes in youth after hours, but he says it would be a travesty to suspend the Center’s youth programming until it there are 24-hour services, as some Boystown residents have demanded.

VALLE: These young people come here for mental health, for job readiness, for case management. We in some cases are t heir lifeline. Take that away from them, and we have ourselves a larger problem.

Valle says the Center’s critics are just a small, but vocal group and that, as a whole, the Boystown community supports the center and its youth. Yes, the recent meeting aired some ugly comments and accusations. But many more members come forward to offer kind words, donations, and time.

A divided Boystown

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 19:00:00 -0500

A stabbing captured on video has been the unlikely spark for a fiery debate on race and class in Chicago’s premier gay neighborhood.

The video captured a large group of black youth getting into an altercation with a 25-year-old victim. The scuffle in the late hours of Sunday, July 3rd, resulted in a stabbing of the victim – the second that day - and the third within a three-week period in the North Side neighborhood.

The stabbing incidents, which resulted in no fatalities and two arrests, have become tipping points for a community increasingly on edge about crime in recent months.

In early June, a series of robberies involving the pepper-spraying of victims caused the Chicago Police Department to issue an alert, with bars posting warnings at entrances.

An analysis of crime data by WBEZ shows that Boystown has been the location of dozens of assaults, robberies and batteries since April.

Boystown marred by violence on Dipity.

One of the first major incidents to call public attention to violence in the community took place very early on the morning of June 18^th in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven.

A couple, who lives in Lakeview, was attacked around 3 a.m. Citing safety issues they wished to remain anonymous, but the boyfriend of the victim agreed to be interviewed.

“Some stranger wanted to start a fight. He bumped into the two of us as were leaving Burrito Palace,” said the boyfriend. The restaurant is located on Cornelia and Halsted.

The stranger then followed them to a nearby 7-Eleven where police say he stabbed the victim. The suspect in question, Anthony Bledsoe, was later charged with aggravated battery.

The victim’s boyfriend recently moved to Lakeview, but is a Chicago native from the South Side. He said prior to the incident, three of his friends were mugged. “It’s almost like gang violence,” he said.

A few weeks later, a stabbling incident on July 3rd was captured on video by resident Rob Sall, who, with his partner John Cunningham, has sought to address the violent crimes that were brought directly to his doorstep.

The Chicago Police Department announced on Friday morning that a suspect was arrested in connection with the incident. The suspect, Darren Hayes, 24, of Hammond, IN., turned himself in to police after the investigation began to close in on him.

The police charged him with four counts of aggravated battery. Two knives were recovered by police, and are said to be the weapons used in the case.

The father of the victim told ABC 7 in an interview that the victim had suffered a punctured lung as well as wounds to the chest, back and arms.

“It’s one thing when people are getting mugged, it’s another when they are getting stabbed,” said Sall.

The couple lives on the 3300 north block of Halsted Street in Boystown, the location of the stabbing. North Halsted is also the site of many of Boystown’s popular gay bars, and the couple’s block has become a hangout at times for groups of lesbian, gay and transgendered teens.

Those groups have become a lightning rod – and some say scapegoat – for the spat of violent crimes.

The extent and duration of those violent crimes and the unsettling nature of the video have anger spilling from Facebook forums into heated townhall meetings.

The young homeless of Boystown

At the center of the attention are homeless youth in the neighborhood, many of whom are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered minorities from Chicago’s West and South Sides.

LGBT black and Hispanic youth, like many others, flock to Boystown because of its gay-friendly reputation, its nightlife and its support network.

But many of these youth have been the target of blame by residents who accuse them of loitering along Halsted Street, drinking in public, smoking marijuana, blaring loud music, urinating in public, and vandalizing - as well as engaging in occasional verbal or push-and-shove altercations.

Some websites such as gis.chicagopolice.org or everyblock.com, which utilizes the same data from gis.chicagopolice.org, list a slew of offenses at all hours of the night.

But a common element in a number of the reported stabbing incidents in this predominantly white upper-middle class neighborhood is that many of them were carried out by black men - either individually or in large groups.

Residents have been quick to say their concerns are limited only to crime and don't involve race, but some feel that the loitering and behavior of youth may be leading to the more violent crimes.

Rhaisa Williams is a Ph.D student at Northwestern University who has researched the dynamic in Boystown and argues that race and class divides do play a role in the tension between some residents and youth.

"[B]lack queer youth who do not live nor are employed in Boystown, but come there to "hang out" —which is synonymous to loitering in the discourse— become figures of an inappropriate embodiment that that is antithetical to middle class stability and consumption," she writes.

And with so many strong-armed robberies and assaults - and few arrests - many residents have focused their anger on the Center on Halsted, a local social services organization that serves the LGBT community.

A Center of controversy

The Center, located at Waveland Avenue and Halsted, opened its doors in 2007 with a mission “to provide a safe and nurturing environment," according to the organization's website.

A former worker at the Whole Foods grocery story that sits adjacent to the Center, however, created a Facebook page originally named “Citizens Demanding Center on Halsted ‘Youth Program’ Shutdown,” that later changed to “Center on Halsted FAIL.” (Click on right image for original page).

"I had to call in police for shoplifting on many of the kids I'd see loitering all day in front of and inside the [Center on Halsted]," said the former Whole Foods employee. "I'd say at least half of them were white. Maybe more. Again, not a racial issue.”

The page as of Friday afternoon had 42 “likes.”

Another Facebook page, “Take Back Boystown,” is a different story. With over 3,400 fans, it has served as an organizing forum for concerned residents and, at times, has featured posts by those using pseudonyms with racial overtones, though they have later been purged by moderators.

Tyler Roberts, 34, frequents the "Take Back Boystown" Facebook page and says it occasionally contains racist remarks. He also insists that the Center on Halsted shouldn't be singled out for the actions of others.

"I don't believe for a second that [closing down the Center on Halsted] would solve any problems," Roberts says. "I do however believe they should be holding the youth that frequent the Center accountable for their actions."

Many youth also believe the Center is being unfairly singled out, and note that it's one of the few organizations providing services to transient LGBT youth.

"All we have is the center," said a 28-year old Center member and health educator who goes by the name Peanut Butter. "If they take away the center, they’re going to have a bigger problem."

Kloe Jones, 23, who is transgendered, came to Chicago from St. Louis. “Where I’m from, we don’t have this. We don’t have Boystown. We don’t have a Center on Halsted.”

“There’s a lot of people coming from the South and West Side," said Jones. "It is a predominantly white neighborhood, but this is all we have. There have been muggings and robbings up here, and [white residents] look at the African Americans who come to the Center, as if somehow it’s their fault. There are kids, who are messy, who do things on purpose, but some of us actually do need these resources,” she said.

When asked if there was any connection between the transient youth who occasionally get cited for loitering or other infractions on Halsted Street and the string of muggings in recent months, police have repeatedly said they have yet to find any correlation.

"There is no connection," said Chicago Police Sgt. Debra DeYoung.

'If they want to talk about the youth? Let's put everything on the table.'
--Peanut Butter, 28

Peanut Butter and other minority LGBT youths, however, report being frequently approached by white men in the area for sexual favors or drugs, creating dangers and a double standard.

“They take advantage of the young ones, saying ‘You sleep with me, I’ll pay you some money.’ If they want to talk about the youth, let’s put everything on the table,” said Peanut Butter.

Koko, 17, is another North Sider who frequents the Center and is concerned about sexual exploitation.

“Some of them have to prostitute,” she said. "They’re trying to get their money and find a place to stay, and see if they could stay with the person they could sleep with at the moment."

Tension brews, nerves frayed

On July 2nd, Rob Sall and nearly 60 others participated in a “positive loitering” session. This was the third summer for the event, with the Commander Kathleen Boehmer from the Chicago Police Department's 23^rd District and a number of police officers also participating.

“We would divide in groups of 6-12 people, canvas the neighborhood. Police would issue citations for violations, prostitution -- citing people for small infractions, confiscated knives, violation of parole,” said Sall.

At 11:30p.m. that evening, a group called GenderJUST began protesting the event, claiming purpose of the event was to drive out LGBT youth from Boystown. The protest was covered in detail by the Windy City Times. Sam Finkelstein, the organizer of the “counter-protest,” was arrested later for disorderly conduct.

A few hours later, around 2 a.m., a 27-year-old Lakeview resident was stabbed on Wilton Ave. and Addison —one block west of the Chicago Police Department’s 23^rd precinct headquarters.

That stabbing was eclipsed by the infamous video-taped stabbing, some 21 hours later.

Fight heard round Chicago

On July 3, Sunday at 11:45 p.m., the much-publicized fight broke out after what some say was a verbal altercation among two groups of young people near the intersection of Halsted and Aldine.

In response to the fight, the police shut down much of Halsted, but left the sidewalks open. The bars were letting out, leaving patrons guessing what had happened.

Media reports at the time were scarce.

The Fourth of July holiday weekend in Chicago saw six murders and 28 violent assaults, two of which were in Boystown. Most news outlets such as the Sun-Times, Tribune, CBS 2 and ABC 7 covered the holiday violence in a single, citywide roundup.

But when the video was posted online, the incident garnered widespread attention on major television newscasts and social networking sites despite having no fatalities.

And the video wasn't the only one to surface from the weekend.

The video, on the left, was uploaded to YouTube the same day of the incident at Halsted and Aldine. This attack occurred on Addison and Wilton earlier that day --one block from the area's police station.

In response, Ald. Tom Tunney (44) on Wednesday called for an “entertainment detail” to be formed to assist in beat officers. He said it’s unrealistic to expect beat officers to cover areas where there are high concentrations of entertainment and hospitality venues.

Heated exchanges in a hot auditorium

Outside the Inter-American Elementary Magnet School Wednesday evening, the mood seemed peaceful. An hour before a scheduled Chicago Alternative Police Strategy (CAPS) community meeting, several residents sat on steps and mingled with their Lakeview neighbors.

Teenagers in yellow shirts gathered, prepping for their planned demonstration as members of GenderJUST. The same group that had protested a peace loitering event a few weeks prior.

Just four days after the video-taped beating of a black youth shocked the neighborhood, the community was gathering for a discussion about how to address violence.

GenderJUST gave a few brief speeches lasting only 20 minutes, before they broke into song and made their way into the auditorium.

Nearly 600 attendees filed into the auditorim in an orderly fashion. Some spilled out onto the floor and into the hall. A handful attempted to reach the balcony of the auditorium, which led to a brief and light-hearted exchange with Tunney and a constituent.

Cmdr. Boehmer and Sgt. Beth Giltmier were both in attendance, as was Ald. James Cappleman (46).

Behind a series of mics at the center of the auditorium floor, stood a long and ever growing line of people waiting to comment. The line and the temperature in the room seemed to grow in tandem, with many using their placards to fan themselves.

As the mic was turned over to the crowd, the first boos came out within moments.

One woman asked: "What is CPD doing to examine the role of race in this violence? How are Boystown and its residents welcoming diversity?"

One man angrily accused the gay community of being elitist:

"These kids have slept in cars, have eaten out of garbage cans, have been molested. I was one of those kids. I grew up in this neighborhood. Don’t attack the kids. You are to blame! This community was not always a gay community. When I grew up here, gays were getting beat up. My friends were beating up gay people. Now you own the community. And what do you do? You turn it on kids who are troubled because their parents can’t afford to feed them. So they throw them out on the street. Not on your doorstep! Not on your doorstep! You guys better wake up now!…All of you guys need to make a difference and stop blaming these damn kids."

Many residents called for an increased police presence in the neighborhood, with some directly attacking Cmdr. Boehmer and Ald. Tunney as they stood mere feet away.

Another speaker suggested that the city install collegiate-like alert boxes along the street.

Such requests aren't new. Northwestern University scholar Raisa Williams notes that calls for increased police presence have been a common theme in discussions about neighborhood tensions over the years.

"Boystown property owners reason that they need heightened levels of policing and surveillance to control black youth's actions, which are seen as one of the main disturbances in the maintenance of Boystown," Williams writes.

One after the other, residents came forth to admonish police, aldermen, teens, gangs -- and themselves. Pleas to limit the soliloquies fell on deaf ears.

But at the end of the night, the boyfriend of the June 18th victim took to the mic.

“Us working together as a community –this is how we’re going to get past this. We don’t need to hate each other. We don’t need to point fingers. We need to come together, sit together like civilized adults, respectable youth and people of the future.”

--Landon Cassman and Meghan Power contributed to this report.

Email Elliott Ramos at: eramos@wbez.org

Chicago police have suspect in custody for Boystown beating, stabbing

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:26:00 -0500

Chicago police say they have a suspect in custody for helping a mob of people beat and stab a man on Chicago's North Side this week. Police say 24-year-old Darren Hayes from Hammond, Indiana turned himself in to authorities and is cooperating with the ongoing investigation. A resident video taped the mob beating and posted it on the Internet.

Sergeant Debra DeYoung said the video shows other witnesses also videotaped the incident and she hopes they come forward with their accounts.

"It is part of the investigation," she said. "It's a different angle or whatever and it might give us - it might shed some further light on the investigation. We'd really appreciate being able to see that."

The victim of the stabbing was released from the hospital earlier this week. The stabbing incident led to a raucous community meeting this week attended by hundreds of people about crime on the North Side.

Videotaped street attack divides Chicago's Boystown

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 06:22:00 -0500

A videotaped stabbing and beating of a man in Chicago's Boystown neighborhood has torn wide some rifts in that community.

At a community policing, or CAPS, meeting Wednesday night, it was standing-room only for hundreds in the auditorium of the Inter-American Elementary School in Lakeview. All came because of a common concern about the latest high-profile and violent attack in their community.

The recorded images of the attack show a crowd beating, stabbing and jeering at a 25-year-old African American man Sunday night on Boystown’s busy Halsted Street. Despite many pleas for civility, the packed hall was a highly emotional scene punctuated throughout by booing, cheering, and even one woman’s claim that she had her camera slapped out of her hands.

“The stabbing was just kind of like the icing on the cake,” said John Cunningham, one of the people who witnessed and recorded the Sunday incident from his condominium overlooking the street. Cunningham said Lakeview residents have been concerned about street disorder, from muggings to rowdy night revelers, for some time. At Wednesday’s meeting, though, there was intense disagreement about the causes and solutions for the crime.

“We do have a lot of people in the neighborhood, a lot of people are walking the streets,” said Ryan Acuff, a resident of Halsted Street.

“For people to just be simply there, they’re loitering on the streets, what do we find for them to do?” Acuff said the Center on Halsted, a community and social service agency for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals, is overrun by an influx of people in the neighborhood.

But others, like Joshua McCool, said shifting the blame to loiterers was a veiled attempt to scapegoat young, vulnerable minorities. “The idea that race is not part of this is ridiculous,” said McCool, a member of a grassroots organization for LGBTQ youth.

“Because obviously it's not just about being queer, because Boystown consists of queers, white queers, white men, middle class men. So this is a race issue.”

The Chicago Police Department does not believe race or sexual orientation were factors in Sunday’s attack, nor that gangs were involved. The meeting, which normally runs for just one hour, ran for almost two. Chicago Police Department Sgt. Beth Giltmier announced that the meeting would be continued at a later date.

Photos: Chicago Pride Parade could be one for the books

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 23:19:00 -0500

On Sunday June 26, the Chicago Pride Parade took place along Halsted Street on the North Side of the city. Thousands of Chicagoans attended the event, which officials say may be the biggest crowd in parade history. The parade was almost derailed by vandalism, as 51 floats were damaged overnight in a warehouse on the South Side.

WBEZ participated in the parade. Events like Pride are a great way for WBEZ to get out into the city make WBEZ's content known, says Vanessa Harris, WBEZ's Director of Marketing.

Here are some photos taken from the WBEZ float.