Where Could Reporters Hear Stories About Barack Obama’s Gay Life in Chicago?
NOTE: For complete archives on the “Is Barack Obama Gay?” series, click HERE.
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Last night, I was interviewed by Dr. Jerome Corsi on The Andrea Shea King Radio Show on the topic of Barack Obama’s gay life in Chicago. You can listen to the full show HERE.
I’ve always been surprised that no reporter has ever bothered to take the time to come to Chicago and camp out in the gay bars here to get the scoop on the current President of the United States — and by “camp out” I don’t mean dress up in drag and be boisterous, but rather to spend a couple of weeks becoming “a regular” in these kinds of places, chatting up the locals, and generously tipping the bartenders until everyone knows your name (the one you choose to give them, at least) and they let down their guard and start telling you tales of Barack’s bathhouse adventures before he became a US Senator (and later the President).
I really believe the “reporters” out there just don’t want to know the truth about this man. Writers on the conservative side of things probably just don’t want to spend that much time in gay bars.
But, you’d be amazed by the scoops you can get just sitting quietly in a corner in these places and listening to whatever the locals are talking about. You can easily nurse a drink for a while and eventually steer the conversation toward “the good old days” and hear about what various bars were like many years ago…say, from the mid-90s through 2004 when Barack Obama was sexually active with men in Chicago.
The way I’ve always heard it has been that Obama enjoyed being with older white men (the more grandfatherly the better) and liked only for them to do things to him (no recip, in the slang). This was most common at Man’s Country Bathhouse where that establishment’s current clientele now jokingly refer to rooms there as “presidential suites” or “Oral Offices” because the current President used to haunt the place back when he was a random Illinois state senator that no one had ever heard of or cared about. All of this changed when Obama ran for the US Senate and someone in his PR team made him stop going to Man’s Country. From then on he’d only have sex with older white men in the steam room or sauna at the East Bank Club, which is a very exclusive and expensive fitness center/social club where Chicago’s well-to-do essentially have the same bathhouse experience found at Man’s Country while paying thousands of dollars more for it.
Some in Chicago’s gay community are of the mindset that talking about all of this hurts Obama and therefore is forbidden. A reporter asking questions about Obama’s gay haunts would encounter resistance from guys in their 30s and younger who have been taught by the “gay community leaders” to attack anyone who is seen as “an enemy” of Obama. Guys in their 40s are iffy, too, but anyone 50 and above is just so thrilled someone wants to talk to him in a bar that he’ll chat your ear off if you let him. Especially if you’re nice looking and want to listen to stories about what Chicago’s gay scene was like “back in the day” when a guy like this got more play.
Have you ever seen an old episode of a show like Murder, She Wrote where faded movie stars from years and years before played bit parts in the mystery? That’s sort of what the corners of a lot of Chicago’s seedier gay bars are like. Some of these guys were truly gorgeous back in their prime and reigned over the scene. The gay community is 100% looks-based, so once you lose those looks you become invisible. It actually doesn’t matter how much money you have, since if your hair turns gray or falls out and your six pack becomes more of a keg you disappear into the woodwork no matter how fabulous you were once upon a time.
THESE are the guys that reporters should be talking to about Barack Obama. If they want the real story, at least. Though, getting guys to admit they used to (or still) frequent a place as sleazy as Man’s Country is tough. You need to understand that even in the gay community admitting you enjoy going to Man’s Country is something a lot of people shy away from because it’s just that nasty in there. Chicago has two main bathhouses and then a few places that are essentially bathhouse but pull off the “we’re a spa…really!” ruse better. Steamworks on Halsted is more chrome and glass and clean than Man’s Country, but guys still duck into the door when entering and try to slip out unnoticed when leaving. King’s Spa out in Niles, where Jesse Jackson often goes, is totally a gay cruising spot but it’s a Korean full-spa that has a side reserved for women and it’s posh enough for people to claim they’re “just going to the spa”. Another dump that claims to be a Korean spa is Paradise Sauna on Montrose at California where a lot of married guys go to cheat on their wives with men.
I bet reporters would be embarrassed to camp out in any of these places for extended periods gathering tidbits for an Obama tell-all because they’d have to be naked most of the time to do it. Nudity seems to be the protector of a lot of Obama’s secrets, oddly enough. But reporters could also hang out in the following bars here in Chicago where the older guys haunt who would have been around in the days when a skinny, weird-looking, black state Senator with a hard-to-remember Muslim sounding name was looking for oral sex from white men at Man’s Country:
1. The Lucky Horseshoe Lounge on Halsted – Bar none, this place is the best to get scoops. All sorts of people come in here all the time from the Chicago political world. On any given night, you’ll find guys who work for Anita Alvarez (the state’s attorney), Tom Tunney (the Alderman of the Boystown neighborhood), the Mayor, and other local officials ogling the jockstrap-clad strippers at the Shoe. The Fire Chief is a regular here. A lot of black celebrities come here as well, including the guys who played the dads on Fresh Prince and Family Matters in the 90s. To my knowledge, they’ve never been there on the same night, but it would be hilarious if they were both in town and at the Shoe together. I think they like it because a lot of porn stars come to the Shoe when they’re in town as well…and the place is seedy and crumbling like it’s a Speakeasy or something…this little hole in the wall where people are so embarrassed to be there that they’d never think of telling anyone they saw someone else there. You have to understand the power of being in a place where you can’t admit you were there, or people would make fun of you for being there. Whatever happens at the Shoe stays at the Shoe unless a reporter would be game enough to become a regular there and chat up the most frequent barflies. There are a lot of grandfatherly-type guys who look very despondent as they stare at the young bucks on display on the stages because it’s pretty obvious when these guys were the strippers’ ages it was not acceptable socially to be who they really were inside…and now at the end of their lives I think a lot of them regret that. These are precisely the types of guys who would have been going to Man’s Country in the late-90s and early 2000s who would have encountered Barack Obama there at some point.
2. Buck’s on Halsted -- This is another bar that mostly older guys hang out in. It’s depressing inside and they clean the place once every other year or so. Very few young guys, tourists, or anyone without serious drinking problems ever goes in here. The staff is pretty nasty to any non-regulars so you’ll have to go through a hazing period before anyone will ever talk to you. But just tip $2 per beer and $3 for any mixed drink and after a few weeks you’ll be accepted and won’t draw much attention if you haunt a stool and start picking up bits of Chicago history from the drunks who surround you. Literally, depressed older guys drink their lives away in these kinds of holes in the wall. Sometimes they order pizza and eat together and kind of acknowledge “this is where my life ended up because of bad decisions”. Cheers!
3. Little Jim’s on Halsted — I actually love this place. It’s open until the crack of dawn, long after other bars are forced to close. I haven’t been there in a while, but when I’m there I flood the jukebox with Whitney songs. They have a Batman pinball machine in the back and I think they’ve got darts as well. I’ve never played either of those because there are too many good sources to talk to in this place about what’s going on in the neighborhood. It has always been beneficial to pop into Little Jim’s after all the other bars are closing and get the scoop on whatever happened everywhere that night; it’s also an industry bar so people who work in the other clubs end up here after they close-out and you can hear things from the people who actually work on the strip. There are twin black cowboys who hang out here who will tell you all sorts of things that will shock you, but you always have to figure out which of them is the gregarious and chatty one and which is the one who is suspicious of why you’re asking so many questions about Obama.
4. The Granville Anvil — Another depressing hole in the wall, but further north of Boystown. I’ve only been there a few times, with a friend of mine who insisted I could find people who knew Obama back in the day. He was right. This is the kind of place that seriously committed drunks haunt and they are allowed to bring McDonald’s into the bar and eat it with their booze. For some reason, the whole place smells like urine and there’s a strange patio out by the restrooms that looks like murders would happen there. They could easily film a Stephen King movie adaptation in this place, because it kind of looks like it would be found in the middle of nowhere in Maine, across the street from a pet cemetery…and a McDonalds.
5. Jackhammer — This place is a trip. As in, I don’t know why it’s allowed to stay open because it breaks just about every rule I thought a liquor license carried with it. Jackhammer has a main floor, an upstairs, and then the basement. The main floor and upstairs are nice-looking…but the basement is called “The Hole”. Women are never allowed in “The Hole”. Down there, the fetish crowd hangs out, with a bathtub in the middle of the room for some guy to lay in while other people urinate on him. The bartenders wear only stained yellow jockstraps and there’s a “secret” hidden hallway off to the side that looks like it would lead to the sewers…and that’s where guys go to have unprotected public sex. This place is like something you’d see in the Al Pacino movie “Cruisin”. It’s shocking that it exists in the year 2012. The guys who go here regularly are rough and tumble and suspicious, but they’re the crowd who would have been frequenting Man’s Country during the Obama days too. Good luck making friends with them, though, because they are most interested in trying to pee all over you.
If Obama was a Republican, I have no doubt that all five of these places would be chock full of reporters digging up the dirt on him. Hell, Anderson Cooper would have moved to Chicago and volunteered to live in “The Hole” 24/7 until he scooped all the scoop that was fit to scoop. But, Barack Obama is a Democrat so “nothing to see here, folks”.
Someday, all of this is going to be as public knowledge as JFK’s affair with Marilyn Monroe and the other women he cavorted with while married to Jackie.
Someday, in the next 10-20 years, everyone will know all about Man’s Country and the place will no doubt get a plaque of some kind commemorating the times that a President of the United States “slept there”.
You’re just getting the scoop early because a gay guy in Chicago has broken ranks and told you all about it.
© 2012, Kevin DuJan. All rights reserved.
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