City in a Garden

by Jack Schneider

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Two young men in repose—one supports the other’s head with his leg as he rests his cheek against his companion’s stomach. Their bodies mirror each other in a coiled embrace as others linger nearby, talking in groups, relaxing solo, or gazing at the blue horizon of Lake Michigan. Other details—the clothing, Carrera-style sunglasses, Walkman headphones, and a can of Cherry Coke—date the image to the mid-1980s. Indeed, artist Doug Ischar took the photograph in 1985 at a de facto gay beach along Chicago’s northside lakefront called the Belmont Rocks (fig. 1). Part of the artist’s Marginal Waters series, the image depicts a sunlit scene of unselfconscious homosexual leisure and affection. However, beneath the surface-level serenity and beyond the frame, a malicious force is threatening this community. For several years—slowly at first, then faster and faster—neighbors, friends, and lovers all over the city but especially in nearby Lakeview, colloquially known as Boystown, were being diagnosed with and succumbing to a mysterious illness first referred to as “gay cancer,” then GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency), and finally HIV/AIDS. By the end of 1985, over 12,000 people in the United States, mostly gay men in urban centers like Chicago, had died from AIDS-related complications.^[1]

Amid this looming crisis, activists were organizing to combat the epidemic. In the early years, they favored relatively polite approaches like the provision of services, lobbying, and candlelight vigils, but over the course of the decade, as the number of infections and deaths rose, it became clear that authorities were more interested in demonizing people with HIV/AIDS than helping them. As a result, more radical forms of activism began to take shape.^[2] By the end of 1990, the epidemic had claimed over 120,000 lives in the United States. In April of that year, the Chicago chapter of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) organized the National AIDS Action for Healthcare, a long weekend of teach-ins, rallies, and protests that culminated in one of the largest demonstrations in the history of AIDS activism. On Monday morning, April 23, 1990, thousands of activists flooded downtown Chicago, targeting government buildings, insurance company offices, and the American Medical Association to “highlight the relationship between the AIDS crisis and the inadequacies and inequities in the delivery of healthcare in the United States,” according to ACT UP/Chicago member Deborah Gould.^[3] During the action, members of the ACT UP/Chicago Women’s Caucus donned hospital gowns and sat atop 15 mattresses—representing the number of empty beds in Cook County Hospital’s AIDS ward, which barred women—that they dragged into the street in front of city hall, blocking midday traffic as they chanted, “AIDS is a disaster, women die faster!” Police arrested over one hundred activists that morning and “in an unusually swift demonstration of the effectiveness of civil disobedience and direct action,” ACT UP/Chicago member Mary Patten explains, “Cook County’s AIDS ward opened to women the very next day.”^[4]

Despite the efficacy and enormity of this event, not to mention the group’s countless other actions, ACT UP/Chicago is often underacknowledged in the history of AIDS activism. Existing accounts, Gould explains, “tend to conflate ACT UP with ACT UP/New York.”^[5] Similarly, most accounts of queer art from this period and after largely overlook Chicago, focusing primarily on New York City and to a lesser extent San Francisco and Los Angeles.^[6] While Ischar captured moments of cautious reprieve in his Marginal Waters images, many others in Chicago were likewise dedicating themselves to photographing, painting, filming, or otherwise documenting the lives of queer people in America’s heartland metropolis. With an interest in broadening the scope of scholarship on queer art and activism beyond, or rather between, the coastal queer meccas, I organized City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, an exhibition featuring artwork and ephemera from over 30 artists and collectives with significant ties to the city working from the 1980s to the present.^[7] This essay highlights select artists and activist groups featured in the exhibition, themselves but a fractional representation of the many people who have made Chicago an important site for queer cultural production over the last half-century. As with the exhibition, this text is not a comprehensive account. Rather, the artworks and projects discussed offer windows into particular, illustrative moments in this history as it played out across the city.

The 1980s were a decade marked by profound loss but also by the emergence of new political possibilities. During this time, Gould explains that HIV/AIDS “seemed to be striking gay men in particular, reinforcing implausible antigay rhetoric that linked disease to gay identity itself.”^[8] This powered a vicious wave of state and societal homophobia, with politicians and pundits calling for everything from involuntary testing and quarantine camps to tattooing the arms and buttocks of people with HIV/AIDS.^[9] Perhaps the cruelest and most consequential response was indifference. President Ronald Reagan took years to even acknowledge the crisis, and his administration’s neoliberal approach to governance severely limited funding for research and healthcare—the first Bush administration followed suit, as satirized in a political cartoon by prominent ACT UP/Chicago member Danny Sotomayor. In this political climate of fervent hatred on one hand and gross negligence on the other, ACT UP members and other AIDS activists were fighting not just an epidemic but also the widespread homophobia that allowed it to flourish into a full-blown existential crisis. Within the movement, a new sensibility began to take shape, one that encouraged “pride about gay difference and about confrontational activism, fury about homo-hatred, antipathy towards heteronormative society, and aspirations to live in a transformed world.”^[10] As a descriptor for this sensibility, activists reclaimed the historically pejorative epithet “queer,” reimagining it as a sort of anti-identity, a way for people to resist strict categorization based on sex, gender, and sexuality while forging solidarity across these traditional identity markers. “Queer not only challenged the vehement homo-hatred that structured state and societal responses to AIDS,” says Gould, “it also offered emotional, political, and sexual ways of being that both addressed that anxiety and helped to carve out an exciting alternative world.”^[11] The periodization of the exhibition—the 1980s to the present—aligns with the emergence of queerness amid the AIDS crisis and recognizes that this political paradigm shift is one we are living in the long tail of today.

As this new understanding of queerness appeared in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for the earliest works in the exhibition, such as Ischar’s photographs discussed earlier, the application of the term “queer” is somewhat anachronistic. For instance, the exhibition includes a set of photographs picturing patrons of the Rialto Tap that artist Patric McCoy took in 1985 while patronizing the bar and house music venue himself. The Rialto primarily catered to Black men interested in meeting other men, and McCoy is careful to point out that few if any of them openly identified as gay—let alone queer—preferring not to be defined by their sexual preferences. Another set of photographs taken by Luis Medina circa 1980 at International Mister Leather, a major fetish convention that Chicago has hosted annually since 1979, show the raucous sexual atmosphere of the event, with some attendees adopting exaggerated hyper-masculine personas and others subverting the gender binary. Roger Brown’s 1983 painting Peach Light (fig. 2) addresses a related scene; its title and palette reference the dim, peach-toned lighting of Gold Coast—a leather bar the artist frequented whose owners founded International Mister Leather—and other gay bars that used such lighting to obscure visible signs of illness during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.^[12] Meanwhile, Diana Solis’s photographs depict pride rallies and intimate moments among people in her community in the early years of the 1980s. None of these artists nor their subjects would have volunteered the term “queer” to describe themselves at the time, as it was then still a linguistic weapon of bigotry. In the exhibition, these early pre-queer works illustrate LGBT life in Chicago prior to and during the AIDS crisis—the context from which groups like ACT UP/Chicago and the concept of queerness itself emerged.

Notably, many works in the exhibition picture or otherwise represent locations in the city that no longer exist—Gold Coast closed in 1988, the Rialto Tap was razed in 1990 to make way for the Harold Washington Library, and the Belmont Rocks were demolished in 2003. For some artists, documenting these vulnerable places and the people who gathered there was the point. Ischar explains: “I was working against the clock, because I felt with the way AIDS was going, and the way the reaction to AIDS was going on the right, that we might not be around much longer. . . I was crucially aware of the fact that this was a conserving project, I was trying to save something that I thought might be lost forever.”^[13] It’s unclear how many of Ischar’s subjects, or those of the other artists, survived the AIDS crisis. Medina himself died from AIDS-related complications in 1985.^[14] Brown’s leather-capped skeleton alludes to this spectre of death hanging over his community in the 1980s—one that would eventually catch up with the artist, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1997. Consciously or not, Ischar, McCoy, Medina, Brown, and Solis created durable documents of people and places that either ceased to exist in the form presented, or ceased to exist entirely.

While these artists created first hand documents, others in the exhibition take a retrospective approach to historic queer establishments. With their 2021 video Man’s Country (fig. 3), Amina Ross addresses Chicago’s longest-running gay bathhouse, also called Man’s Country, which opened in 1973. While Ross lived on the same block as the bathhouse, they never entered due to its “men only” admission policy. Having never been inside, Ross based their digital reconstruction of the space on photos and footage available online, creating an approximation of the building’s interior that the artist, and by extension the viewer, are permitted to enter, albeit virtually. As the video progresses, the animated structure slowly breaks down into parts floating in a digital ether, reflecting the dissolution of its real-life referent, which permanently closed after an all-night party in the early hours of New Year’s Day in 2018.^[15] In the video’s final moments, the fragmented bathhouse cuts to an ominous blank screen as a voiceover repeatedly sings, “When the feeling arrives / when the feeling arrives again,” hinting at some possible future beyond closure.

Edie Fake’s Memory Palace series similarly represents historic queer organizations that the artist never visited himself, some shuttered well before he was born. Killer Dyke (fig. 4) refers to a newspaper of the same name created by the Feminist Lesbian Intergalactic Party, or “Flippies,” a group of students at Northeastern Illinois University who described themselves as “a female nationalist, gay nationalist political party that works for the overthrow of everything in society that oppresses women and gay people (namely everything).”^[16] While the Flippies and their newspaper were short-lived, only producing three issues between 1971 and 1972, Fake’s gouache painting conjures them back into existence with a vision of a fantastical brick-and-mortar headquarters, emblazoned with the word “DYKE” above the door and clad with ornate tile and stonework inspired by vernacular architecture in Chicago. By painting this building (that never actually existed), Fake reaches to the past “as a source of power in the future,” positioning this bygone organization as an aspirational model for the queer institutions of tomorrow.^[17] In doing so, the artist reflects cultural theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz’s notion that “queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”^[18]

In his seminal text Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Muñoz contends that queerness only exists in the present as a potentiality: “unlike a possibility,” he explains, “a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense.”^[19] According to Muñoz, while queerness may not yet be realized, it can be glimpsed through cultural practices that hint at utopian potentials beyond the stultifying limitations of the heteronormative present. Many of the artists and activists featured in City in a Garden offer such glimpses. Nick Cave, for instance, creates garments, sculptures, and performances that envision potential futures through a strategy of misidentification, most notably with his Soundsuits. Cave made his first Soundsuit after witnessing, via video, the brutal beating of Rodney King by police officers in Los Angeles. Recognizing the incident as symptomatic of the broader epidemic of anti-minoritarian violence in the United States, Cave created a wearable sculpture from thousands of individual twigs he collected in Chicago’s Grant Park, which functioned as a device to conceal markers of his identity—Blackness and queerness in particular—that made him vulnerable to such violence. Somewhat paradoxically, while Cave’s Soundsuits do conceal conventional markers of otherness, to wear one is to become more radically “other.” The 2008 Soundsuit in the exhibition, for example, features crocheted doilies and floral appliques sewn into a bodysuit from which a tangled canopy of tole flowers bloom (fig. 5). It’s a look that would make any club kid jealous—to wear it is to become something unrecognizable, uncategorizable, almost monstrous. Cave offers freedom through sartorial transcendence; his response to the oppression of the present is a vision of a future where markers of difference are celebrated rather than policed. His artwork is “a rebuttal to a totalizing gaze,” says curator Naomi Beckwith, “a refusal to participate in a scopic regime that devalues bodies like his own; and a way to resist accepted ‘social realities’ by offering utopian possibilities instead.”^[20]

This notion of queerness as utopian proposition aligns with Gould’s understanding of activism, which she describes as “sites of collective world-making. . . . More than challenging what is, they offer something else.” Beyond ACT UP/Chicago, other art/activist projects featured in the exhibition also model this something else. In 1992, the artist collective Haha (Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof) convened Flood, a network of 20 to 30 volunteers who collectively maintained a hydroponic garden in a Rogers Park storefront on the northside of the city for three years (fig. 6).

Flood used the hydroponic system to grow vegetables and medicinal herbs without the use of soil, virtually eliminating the risk of soil-borne bacteria contaminating the food, thus making it suitable for people with HIV/AIDS, whose weakened immune systems are especially susceptible to infection. Beyond its practical value, which was somewhat limited (the garden could produce food for approximately seventy-five people every six weeks), Flood produced a surplus of social value. After all, Flood was not just the garden, it was also the network of volunteers, who represented a new model for “active participation in healthcare,” as the subtitle on their front window announced. In addition to growing and distributing food to people with HIV/AIDS, this network hosted communal meals, class visits, impromptu conversations, informational literature, and workshops in the curious storefront on Greenleaf Street, providing a wholly unique context for education about the AIDS crisis. According to Haha member Laurie Palmer, Flood operated “somewhere between usefulness and metaphor.”^[21] As the project provided material support for people with HIV/AIDS, it also metaphorically represented a body in need of such support. “The garden is a covenant,” Haha explained, “a tangible tie, emblematic of the complex and manifold links of care between a community and an individual, and if it is given sufficient care, it will grow and survive.”^[22]

A decade later, on the other end of the city, another group of artists and activists convened for a similarly anomalous but very different project. For four days in October 2004, the Pilot TV collective hosted a conference titled “Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass” in a three-story building in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood that they transformed into a temporary autonomous television studio.^[23] Ahead of the conference, the group put out a call for participation that was as expansive as it was specific:

Calling all trans activists, women, queers, male feminists, media activists, intersexed hackers, radical educators, gender changers, direct-actors, performance artists, anti-racists, mothers, documentarians, prop collectors, youth video collectives, squatters, fence-climbers, cyber-feminists, urban farmers, prison abolitionists, women’s healthcare providers, all-girl graffiti crews, resistant bodies and trespassers of all kinds . . . we invite you to take part in 4 days and nights of participatory, creative problem-solving to rethink how we “stage” protest.^[24]

Over 200 participants answered the call, converging on the DIY television studio dubbed “Pilotwood” (figs. 7–8) to produce upwards of 35 videos, which the organizers called “pilots.” Among the pilots were a satirical variety show called Feeling Good About Feeling Bad hosted by Chicago Feel Tank (Lauren Berlant, Deborah Gould, Mary Patten, and Rebacca Zorach); an experimental wrestling program by the artist MPA; an erotic reimagining of the film Battleship Potemkin by Cary Cronenwett featuring a cast of over 100 trans actors; and performance lectures by Barabara DeGenivieve and Gregg Bordowitz. While the pilots were as varied as the call for participation would suggest, the organizers noted that one of the central themes of the conference was “transfeminism,” by which they meant, “working across different forms of feminism, and . . . recogniz[ing] that trans/genderqueer people are daily trespassing in the gendered spaces of capitalism.”^[25] Operating in the lineage of other alternative video collectives like DIVA TV, Videofreex, and Raindance Corporation, the Pilot TV organizers understood that corporate media reproduces narrowly defined models of gender, sexuality, and humanity in general. They envisioned the pilots as counterprogramming to this limited and limiting content. Following the conference, Pilot TV participants disseminated the videos through public access television, film festivals, exhibitions, and other channels. That said, as with Flood, the material products of this strange gathering were almost secondary. The primary achievement of Pilot TV was the event itself and the group’s recognition that by pooling resources, sharing strategies, and collectivizing labor, they could manifest an alternative world, at least for a weekend, and model “forms of organization which can contribute to the radical infrastructure of the future.”^[26]

The organizers of Pilot TV rightfully noted that “as the last vestiges of public space, natural resources, and community-control are bought-off, our bodies will continue to be the final line in the struggle for autonomy.”^[27] Indeed, the political forces that Pilot TV responded to remain active today. This exhibition comes at a time of historical parallels between the 1980s, 2000s, and the present, with conservative governments laying waste to public life while attempting to restrict bodily autonomy, whether that means reproductive health, gender-affirming care, or simply the right to live as oneself. Then, as now, healthcare is the bellwether of bigotry. In the 1980s, state and societal responses, or lack thereof, to HIV/AIDS plainly revealed the homophobia deeply entrenched throughout the United States. Today, healthcare is again the primary battlefield upon which the rights of queer, particularly trans and nonbinary people, are being negotiated. In 2024, legislators across the country introduced 674 bills to limit trans peoples’ access to healthcare, legal recognition, and ability to exist publicly. This year, 2025, is set to far exceed this tally, with over 900 such bills introduced in just the first half of the year alone.^[28] The broader attack on queer, trans, and nonbinary people is perhaps most succinctly and damningly epitomized by President Donald Trump’s executive order, signed on his first day of his second term, that states, “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”^[29] Edie Fake confronts the present anti-trans political climate with a new mural produced on the occasion of the exhibition, titled The Free Clinic for Gender Affirming Care (fig. 9). Fake’s mural pictures the kaleidoscopic facade of a clinic for free transgender healthcare—its layered architectural motifs suggesting a majestic structure whose undulating colors reflect the spectrum of gender expression beyond the binary. This issue is personal for Fake, who notes: “In my own life, access to gender affirming care has been hard-won and life-changing . . . this mural is meant to meet the threat (and often reality) that has positioned gender affirming care as scarce, under-resourced, and underground with an aspirational and celebratory vision.”^[30] Following his earlier Memory Palace series, with this mural the artist shifts his focus from the past to the future, from what was to what could still be.

What I hope this essay has begun to do, and that the exhibition does more extensively, is highlight some of Chicago’s cultural practitioners who have played a larger role in the national and global histories of queer art and activism than previously recognized. The gaps in this essay and the exhibition are manifold and there remains much work to do to comprehensively account for this history locally. Writing about the longer history of LGBTQ+ activism in the city, Timothy Stewart-Winter notes that “compared to the better-known stories of San Francisco and New York, the story of gay empowerment in Chicago was in many ways more representative of the dozens of other regional magnets for gay migration—from Atlanta to Seattle, Boston to Dallas.”^[31] As with these other cities, part of what has made Chicago special is people from throughout the region and beyond migrating here, including many of the artists in the exhibition, who recognize the city as a metropolitan sanctuary for those who may not fit the normative molds of the places they came from. That said, Chicago, as with the rest of this country, is no utopia—far from it. But in the spirit of Muñoz, I read the city’s utopian (and vaguely fruity) motto, “Urbs in Horto,” as aspirational for what it could become. I see glimpses of this “city in a garden” in Doug Ischar’s images of the Belmont Rocks, in the hopeful activism of ACT UP/Chicago, in Edie Fake’s speculative renderings, Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, and in the imaginative social practices of Haha and Pilot TV. The artworks and archival materials in the exhibition are—fittingly for a project concerning queerness—wildly varied, constituting an almost untenable constellation of differences. But what they share in common is an orientation. Not a sexual orientation per se (although, that’s often part of it) but an orientation toward time. The artists and activists discussed here, like all of those represented in the exhibition and many others who are not, recognize the insufficiency of the past and present and use their work to help us realize better futures.

Notes

1. “Snapshots of an Epidemic: An HIV/AIDS Timeline,” American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), accessed March 12, 2025, amfar.org/about-hiv-aids/snapshots-of-an-epidemic-hiv-aids/.

2. Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and Act Up’s Fight against Aids (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 49–176. In the first part of her book Moving Politics, Deborah Gould discusses how shifts in what she terms the “emotional habitus” of LGBT communities during the 1980s determined what forms AIDS activism took—from the politically respectable activism of the early 1980s to the more radical activism exemplified by ACT UP by the close of the decade.

3. Gould, Moving Politics, 405.

4. Mary Patten, “The Thrill Is Gone: An ACT-UP Postmortem (Confessions of a Former AIDS Activist),” in The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. Deborah Bright (Routledge, 1998), 392.

5. Gould, Moving Politics, 52.

6. For example, the catalogue for the major traveling exhibition Art After Stonewall features just a handful of artists who lived or worked in Chicago for a significant amount of time. The vast majority of the more than 170 artists and activists discussed are/were New York City–based. Similarly, the original checklist for Art AIDS America featured just two or three artists with significant ties to Chicago out of the over 100 artists exhibition—again, the vast majority lived and worked in New York City. However, when the latter exhibition traveled to Chicago, the curators did supplement the checklist with several local artists, some of whom are featured in City in a Garden; Jonathan Weinberg, Tyler Cann, Anastasia Kinigopoulos, and Drew Sawyer, eds., Art after Stonewall: 1969–1989 (Rizzoli Electra, 2019); Jonathan David Katz and Rock Hushka, eds., Art AIDS America (Tacoma Art Museum in association with University of Washington Press, 2015); Staci Boris, Art AIDS America Chicago (Alphawood Foundation, 2018).

7. This exhibition joins and is indebted to a lineage of local projects that have long championed Chicago as an important site of queer cultural production, most notably Iceberg Projects, a project space in Rogers Park programmed by Dr. Daniel S. Berger and John Neff. It was through their program that I first became acquainted with Chicago’s rich queer history.

8. Deborah Gould, “Education in the Streets: ACT UP, Emotion, and New Modes of Being,” Counterpoints 367 (2012): 353.

9. In an infamous New York Times op-ed, the influential conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. suggested that “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.” William F. Buckley, Jr., “Crucial Steps in Combating the Aids Epidemic; Identify All the Carriers,” New York Times, March 18, 1986.

10. Gould, “Education in the Streets,” 353.

11. Gould, “Education in the Streets,” 356.

12. Kate Pollasch, “Roger Brown: On Leather and Longing,” in Boris, Art AIDS America Chicago, 89–90.

13. Doug Ischar, “/Dialogues: City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago,” panel discussion with Patric McCoy and Edie Fake, moderated by Jack Schneider, EXPO Chicago, April 27, 2025.

14. David Travis, “The Life and Career of Luis Medina,” in Facts and Fables by Luis Medina, Photographer, ed. David Travis (Art Institute of Chicago, 1993), 18. In the essay, Medina’s cause of death is noted as “a cytomegalovirus infection,” or CMV. Conspicuously, the author neglects to note that CMV is closely linked to HIV/AIDS. Even years after his death, it seems that there was some effort to conceal or at least downplay Medina’s sexuality, as evidenced by the fact that his photographs of explicitly queer subjects have not, to the best of my knowledge, ever been exhibited publicly.

15. Aaron Gettinger and Brittany Sowacke, “Last night at Man’s Country,” Chicago Reader, January 3, 2018.

16. “Chicago Gay Liberation Publications,” Gerber/Hart Library & Archives, 2021, accessed February 18, 2025, exhibits.gerberhart.org/exhibits/show/chicago-lgbtq-history-1924-197/gay-lib-pubs.

17. Joey Garfield, “Edie Fake: Off the Grid,” JUXTAPOZ, accessed February 18, 2025, juxtapoz.com/news/magazine/features/edie-fake-off-the-grid/.

18. Jose Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2009), 1.

19. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 9.

20. Naomi Beckwith, “Nick Cave: American Artist,” in Nick Cave: Forothermore, ed. Naomi Beckwith (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2021), 28.

21. Laurie Palmer, “Dirt / Flood / Leaks,” in With Love from Haha: Essays and Notes on a Collective Art Practice, eds. Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof (WhiteWalls, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2018), 65.

22. Mary Jane Jacob, “Haha and Flood: A Volunteer Network for Active Participation in Healthcare,” in Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago (Bay Press, 1995), 89.

23. The core organizing members of the Pilot TV collective were Aay Preston-Myint, Abby Glogower, Bruce Wiest, Ashland Mines, Dara Greenwald, Lee Relvas, Edie Fake, Midnight Forman, Wu Tsang, Kim Kelly, Leidy Churchman, Math Bass, MPA, Michael O’Neill, Rebecca Mir, Silky Shoemaker, Victor Van Bramer, Latham Zearfoss, Na Mira, Maris Curran, and Mary Lewis.

24. Emily Foreman and Wu Tsang, eds., Pilot TV Guide: Experimental Media for Feminist Trespass (Chicago: 2004), 3.

25. Pilot TV Guide, 4.

26. Pilot TV Guide, 4.

27. Pilot TV Guide, 3.

28. Trans Legislation Tracker is an independent research organization tracking bills that impact trans and gender-diverse people across the United States. So far this year, legislators have introduced 910 anti-trans bills in the US (as of May 28, 2025). For the latest figures, see: translegislation.com/.

29. Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” Fed. Reg. 2025-02090 (January 20, 2025), whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/.

30. Edie Fake, email message to the author, December 7, 2024.

31. Timothy Stewart-Winter,  Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 3–4.