Chicago's Boystown Club Scene, Circa 2002

[methodwriter85]

    So Mark wants to update the J-Bar, as seen in A Summer Love through 9.11, into the new decade.

 

    What was Boystown's club scene like circa '02? What did a hip club look like? Can Mark basically just crib off the Babylon from Queer as Folk, or was Chicago's gay club scene really different from Toronto-standing-in-for-Pittsburgh?

 

    I also read that Boystown became whiter, more affluent, less strictly gay, and started gaining families i.e. the gentrification process. Is this true, and would this have been in place by 2002? Like would there be straight and gay families pushing their babies in strollers by this point, or is that later in the decade?

 

  

[Lisa]

There's a great story on here called BOYSTOWN. .

[apjordan]

Boystown was definitely already transforming a bit (especially in terms of having more families, both gay and straight, with children) when my husband and I left Chicago in 2000. We were never much into the club scene, so I can't offer specific advice there. It was my impression that the club scene still thrived—the neighborhood transformation being much more obvious during the day than at night—and might not have been very different in 2002 than it was in the 1990s. Chicago being much larger than Pittsburgh, the collection of bars in Boystown was always larger and more diverse than anything portrayed in Queer as Folk.