QI’m a twentysomething married trans guy in an openish marriage. In the online hunt for a guy to have some aboveboard under-the-sheets fun with, I run into snags because I’m trans (I disclose on my profile) and because I’m married. I’m baby-stepping my way toward an offline search for guys, going to events hosted by the local gay pride center. I’ve been thinking of not wearing my wedding ring at these meetups, as I worry it says I’m taken and off-limits....
The sun is setting earlier each day and festival season is drawing to a close. But that doesn’t mean this week isn’t packed with a slew of great events. Here’s some of what we recommend: Mon 9/18: Randi Wallace has had quite the journey: marriage led her to realize that she was queer and needed a divorce. Her solo show The Secret Life of a Lesbian Ex-Wife at the Annoyance Theatre (851 W....
We had a lovely summer, didn’t we? The world was spiraling down a planet-size shit funnel of humanity’s own making, but at least it was warm, breezy, and sunny in Chicago. During the last sweet breaths of the season I ate at the Kennison, the new restaurant in the Hotel Lincoln, and I took every opportunity to order the fantastic corn we were blessed with this year. It was the culinary analogue to Nero’s fiddle....
Gabriel Galloway pview.findlaw.com/view/4732246_1 @gabegalloway Runner-Up Jim Fennerty
There’s plenty to do in the New Year. Here’s some of what we recommend to start off 2017 on the right foot: Wed 1/4: For the new revue Hug It Out at Annoyance Theatre (851 W. Belmont), sketch group Huggable Riot stages their best material from the past two years. 8 PM For more stuff to do this week—and every day—check out our Agenda page.
Q: My partner and I have been playing with male chastity devices. We’ve been considering going to a strip club while his cock is caged up and getting him lap dances. Is there some etiquette for this with the dancers? Do we let the dancer know before she is on his lap? Or do we not mention it? Is it rude to get a dancer involved at all? I’ve not yet found an etiquette guide for this situation....
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, May 19, 2017. Have a great weekend! Emanuel to reveal his plan for raising $129 million for CPS Friday Mayor Rahm Emanuel will reveal his plans to fill Chicago Public Schools’ $129 million budget gap to the City Council on Friday. “After a lot of hard work by the CPS and city financial teams, and many discussions with their lending partners, tomorrow we will brief aldermen on the district’s finances and the financial plan for the remainder of the CPS fiscal year,” said mayoral spokesman Adam Collins....
Donald Trump vilified immigrants during his presidential campaign and has continued to do so since being sworn into office, signing executive orders that target undocumented immigrants, among other measures. As federal immigration officials emboldened by Trump’s executive orders seek out and detain undocumented immigrants, their communities are experiencing an increase in fear that can impact their health. An estimated 307,000 undocumented immigrants lived in Cook County as of 2014, according to a report commissioned by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights....
Talk about a lousy way to spend your birthday. On Labor Day, Stephanie Reid was biking along the lakefront to 12th Street Beach, where she planned to meet up with friends to celebrate turning 30. Near Adler Planetarium she wiped out on a patch of slippery, algae-covered concrete, winding up with a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, and some nasty road rash. Now she’s calling on the Chicago Park District to take steps to prevent similar mishaps—or worse—from happening to other folks....
Current exhibits at Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago History Museum, Art Center Highland Park, College of DuPage, vivianmaier.com, vivianmaier.photography.com Marketing campaigns for dead artists are nothing new—think of all the hoopla for those long-gone French impressionists. But the meteoric posthumous rise of local photographer Vivian Maier, fueled by an intriguing discovery story and the power of the Internet, is unprecedented. Maier died impoverished and unknown in April 2009. Six months later, local real estate agent John Maloof—who’d previously bought a box containing 30,000 Maier negatives for $400 at an auction—posted a few of the pictures on the Flickr forum Hardcore Street Photography....
435 N. Clark 312-610-4220 threedotschicago.com Runner-Up Danny Shapiro of Scofflaw
Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, May 31, 2017. Rahm counters Census Bureau data with U-Haul report Chicago was the only major U.S. city to lose population in 2016, according to a Census Bureau report. But after its release last week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel quickly tried to refute the data, citing a U-Haul report that “determined Chicago ranked No. 2 in the nation for one-way drop-offs of the company’s trucks and trailers....
All Dogs from Columbus, Ohio are playing at Township tonight, and it’s probably a show you should go and see. I caught the band over the winter and have been in love with their 90s-flavored, female-fronted emo-pop-punk ever since. Today’s 12 O’Clock Track is “Buddy,” the first song off of their self-titled seven-inch that came out at the end of last year, and it sums up the bands sound perfectly: it’s an incredibly balanced blend of pretty and sad, poppy and punky....
Netherfriends main man Shawn Rosenblatt is ambitious—he wrote and recorded a song in every state for a project called 50 Songs 50 States, which he released in full last year via an interactive online map. The psych-pop multi-instrumentalist has since dropped one of my favorite albums of the year, the life-affirming P3ACE, and he continues to build on that album with a five-part film project, “Untitled.” Rosenblatt has already released the first three parts of “Untitled,” and today’s 12 O’Clock Track is the exclusive premiere of the fourth part, which is a music video for the beautifully melancholic “Birthday....
Nico Soto/Guazu Media Daniela Speranza on the set of Rambleras In the first part of my conversation with Daniela Speranza, the Uruguayan writer-director explained that it took ten years to complete her recent feature Rambleras (which had its local premiere last weekend at the Chicago Latino Film Festival). Speranza’s perseverance is admirable in itself, yet it also accounts for the innumerable little pleasures of the finished film. Speranza refined the script as the years went on, making the characterizations more lifelike and evenhanded....
Chloe Riley Nick Marzullo, co-owner of the artists’ collective Pawn Works, wonders when it’s going to get paid for work on murals in Pilsen. No one seems to know exactly where $140,000 in public funds has gone in the 25th Ward. Solis apparently believed in the initiative enough to sink his own money into it—$20,000 in campaign funds, to be exact. But those funds were just supposed to get the ball rolling, according to the alderman’s spokeswoman Lauren Pacheco, who said back then that the alderman planned to use menu money and potentially tax increment financing (TIF) dollars to keep the new murals coming....
Coming-of-age movies never go out of style. There are two reasons for this: First, teenagers make up a huge portion of the movie market, and they like watching stories close to their own experience. Second, when aspiring writers dredge their own lives for drama, laughs, or wisdom, their coming-of-age is often the first thing that bobs to the surface. (Sometimes it’s the only thing.) Because there are so many coming-of-age movies, one needs to discriminate, and for me the determining factor has always been idiosyncrasy....
OOIOO The 90s are back! Veruca Salt plays on Monday, and that’s something to get excited for. Unfortunately, the show is sold out. While they’re not the blast of angsty nostalgia Veruca Salt would have been, there are some other great shows to see at the beginning of this week. Afrobeat star Seun Kuti comes to the Concord this week. Peter Margasak says of his new album A Long Way to the Beginning, “The new album’s ferocious opener, ‘IMF,’ brings a classic Afrobeat groove to a full boil with chattering brass and choppy, cross-cutting funk—and the lyrics don’t hold back either, renaming the IMF ‘International Motherfuckers....
An American in Paris By all rights An American in Paris should be an exercise in nostalgia. Based on the 1951 movie musical starring Gene Kelly and featuring such chestnutty Gershwin classics as “I Got Rhythm”, it tells the tale of Jerry Mulligan, an ex-GI who falls in love while trying to make it as an artist in the City of Light. Thanks to playwright Craig Lucas and director-choreographer Christopher Wheeldon, however, the show doesn’t depend on schmaltz for its richness....
Blank Project In the annals of improbable pop-music career revivals, few have been as welcome or as gratifying as Neneh Cherry’s. The stepdaughter of jazz great Don Cherry released a couple commercially successful albums in the late 80s and early 90s (Raw Like Sushi and Homebrew) before working sporadically over the next 20 years. Last year her career got an unexpected jolt with the release of The Cherry Thing (Smalltown Supersound), a collaboration with Scandinavian free-jazz group the Thing, a favorite among many music critics (the Reader‘s own Peter Margasak placed it on his year-end list)....
