Weekly walking tours highlight LGBTQ+ history in Chicago

CHICAGO — Just outside the Art Institute, you can find history on tour. With each step there is a new fact on Chicago’s history through a rainbow lens.

“We’ve always been here,” Daniel Williams said.

Williams is a political scientist who dives into Chicago’s queer history and has gained a lot of traction online.

“There is a popular narrative that LGBT people are new, something we just invented. If we look at the historical data, even just here in Chicago, that’s clearly not the case,” he said.

This summer, every Saturday at 1 p.m., Williams becomes a professor and tour guide, leading groups around the city to look into what came before us.

“Our focus is women and femmes. I’ve got shoplifting drag queens in the 1890s. I’ve got cross dressers, it’s a really fun tour,” he said.

Williams does his research, pulling his facts from the archives of newspapers, court records and police blotters.

“People are always amazed that the records exist, particularly when I can come up with direct questions from people in the 20s and 30s,” Williams said. “One of my favorite things to hear from people is, ‘Oh, I walk by there every day,’ or ‘I live in that neighborhood, I had no idea this history was here.’”

Each week’s tour is different from the last.

“We’re picking a different point in the city, a different theme and walking around and talking about how LGBTQ people used the city in the past and how politics affects that,” he said.

For those who join the free tours, it’s a way to connect to a city they love and the history all around.

“Getting to know these stories that happened a long time ago, it just reminds me that we’re not alone and we’re a community,” Camden Morris from Edgewater said.

For Williams, it’s a way to help others understand while walking as a community.

“If you don’t know your history, if you don’t know your heritage, you can be manipulated by other people into thinking whatever they want so getting the truth out there, getting historically accurate pieces of information out into the public, counters falsehood,” he said.

The walking tours are sponsored by the Gender and Sexuality Center at UIC. For more information, click here.