Yes. A fairy ring is a ring of mushrooms that grow from the bark of a dead tree stump. So I burned out the stump. It was rather large and burned for three weeks. A few weeks later the phone got goofy. It turned out the cable was underground, right through the roots of that dead tree!
I used to frequent a lot of men's gay bars when I was young. I don't remember if they made circles together.
This one I practically lived in.
This week the Nutbush celebrates its 30th anniversary--and a history that coincides with sweeping changes in the way gays are perceived, both in the nation at large and in the suburbs where homosexuals long lived closeted lives and had few public places to socialize.
"Don't forget, back in the early years, gay people didn't have no place to go," said Zych, a no-nonsense saloonkeeper in a white shirt and black vest. "Nowadays, pretty much everything is open and people can go where they want to go. But in those days, it was rough. I got three concussions out of the deal. Bottles over my head outside in the parking lot."
Despite the assaults, the Nutbush became a rare haven in the western suburbs where an openly gay couple could sip a beer without worrying some bully across the bar might pick a fight or lob a verbal stink bomb into their evening.
The bar has its bawdy side: It sometimes hosts "leather nights" and strippers, and its newsletter contains a photo of the backside of a man dropping his pants. But it is the tavern's more ordinary qualities that its customers emphasize. There's a softball team, and the Nutbush competes in a Forest Park dart league against other bars, something patrons say they never would have done a few years back.
Wayne Matulionis, a regular, compares the Nutbush to a bar in a sitcom of the 1980s and '90s.
"I call it `Cheers' for queers," said Matulionis, who raises money for AIDS and HIV victims through the bar. "It's the kind of place where, if you don't show up for a week, someone will call and see how you're doing."
Added customer Eddie Messina, "I'm a 16-year regular, and I've always felt comfortable here. It's not a pickup spot. It's a neighborhood bar."
Wayne Brekhus, a University of Missouri-Columbia sociologist who has studied suburban gays, said the situation has changed radically in recent years. Once it was rare to find gay bars outside urban centers. Now such establishments are more commonplace, though they tend to be more generic--like the Nutbush--and less focused on a particular theme or ethnicity.
Also, suburban gays live more openly than they once did as stigmas wane, said Brekhus, the author of "Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity."
"There are obviously still people in the suburbs who are very closeted and leading double lives," Brekhus said, "but much less than before. It's not so unusual for a male couple to live openly in a small city or a suburb, whereas 10 years ago that was unusual and 20 years ago, if it happened, it was very hidden."
Twenty-five years ago, gay bars tended to last little more than four years, facing pressure from police and other authorities, said Art Johnston, an owner of Sidetrack, which opened on North Halsted Street in 1982. Where such bars have succeeded, they have tended to be surrounded by a large gay and lesbian clientele, as on North Halsted, which has become "the Main Street of gay Chicago," Johnston said.
"The Nutbush has been going it alone for a long time," Johnston said. "So what they've done really is quite amazing."
Located on Harlem Avenue a block south of the Green Line `L' station, the Nutbush presents a poker face to the middle-class community around it. It is a nondescript wood-and-brick structure, its windows bricked in to provide the privacy and safety its customers once demanded.
There is a door out in back for those who, in the past, wanted to slip in without being noticed. Inside, the lights are dim and regulars start gathering in the afternoons.
Zych's former partner, who opened the bar, borrowed the name from Tina Turner's song about her hometown in Tennessee. Zych joined the Nutbush about a year after it opened.
The Nutbush itself is marking 30 years, but the building has a storied if boozy history that stretches back to the 1920s. For a time, it operated as a speakeasy with a hidden system of tubes that brought liquor from the second floor down to hidden taps, Zych said. Legend has it that Al Capone once ran a still downstairs.
Perhaps because of its free-living speakeasy roots, the tavern developed a reputation as a gay-friendly place decades before the Nutbush opened in 1976. In 1984, the Tribune stated that it had been known as a gay bar since 1961.
The Nutbush once drew gays from downtown Chicago in search of anonymity, Matulionis said. They could take the Green Line out and slip in the back door, confident that they wouldn't be recognized. 1 | 2 | Next Ad
I tried to find a simple gif with men in a circle ("ring"), by looking for "men in a circle" - - all of them were hard-core gay male porn -- and women were in some of them, too? I only tried to help with a visual for you :) - - but now we know - - any time men get in a circle, it's gay male sex going on, with a woman thrown in every once in a while.
( I was sort of surprised there were no gifs with just guys in a circle, just standing or something. Then I was going to say that here was a ring of fairies. The gifs I saw, though, one could assume pretty much the guys were gay, too, ha!)
This post was edited by WelbyQuentin at July 17, 2018 11:53 AM MDT
This post was edited by WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH at April 14, 2020 5:06 PM MDT
Not Sure 