If they want it, it's available, yeah they'll grab it, but they're really here to be with people of their own kind. Lovers come here, just because they enjoy the atmosphere, they enjoy the strippers, they don't necessarily want sex. A lot of people come here just to be with their own kinds of people.
A common misconception is that people come here just for sex, and that's not true. In terms of just hanging out, as well as just for sex? At a time, we were the only place for gay people to come. Two or three blocks from here there's a cabaret bar and they've got some top notch acts in there, and it's mixed, they get lesbians, gay men, straight people… they don't have to come here any more. Once the attitudes towards gay life, and especially leather men and everything started to change, then all our people started to go to regular bars. Today gay people are welcome all over - why come here when you can just go get a drink at some bar? Times have changed. No, because don't forget in those days when we did that we were the gay cabaret and people came here because they weren't welcome in other places. Why is that? Do you think if you had cabaret acts and singers today, they wouldn't go down so well? In terms of entertainment now, you just have male strippers. It was good, he had some off-color jokes, but so what.
However, some contemporary reviews I found are less than complimentary, with folk describing "a horrible state of disrepair," "the stench of very stale poppers," and "air so hot and humid it was hard to breathe." I called up Mr. In the early 70s Bette Midler launched herself here, accompanied by Barry Manilow on piano as Bette flung poppers into the crowd. With fantasy rooms including "a full-size model of an Everlast truck where visitors could have sex in the cab or in the rear," Man's Country is legendary. What a friendly gym it seemed to be.Ĭhuck Renslow, a leading light of the Chicago gay scene during the entirety of the late 20th century (as publisher, bar owner and political activist) opened the very popular Man's Country Chicago in 1972. This old ad for a place called Man's Country caught my eye. It's about gay sex in the 70s, and at one point the film delves into the world of gay bathhouses.
The other night I watched a documentary called Gay Sex In The 70s.