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RELATED: Here's Why Gay Bars Are So Important, Explained By A Chicago Gay Icon In the early 1960s, Renslow opened Gold Coast bar, one of the first leather bars in the world and among the earliest gay-owned businesses in the city and went on to be the oldest leather establishment before it closed in 1987. He was involved with Cliff Raven, Chuck Arnett, Sam 'Phil Andros' Steward and David Grooms and had a relationship with Ron Ehemann that spanned 30 years. Renslow continued to love and nurture artists after Orejudos' death. The couple remained together for 43 years until Orejudos' death in 1991 that resulted from a combination of pneumonia and complications from AIDS. Even so, dancing together and kissing someone of the same sex was off limits.Ī few years later on Oak Street Beach, he met Dom Orejudos, an artist who worked under the pseudonym "Etienne" in physique portraiture and dance.
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With just a handful of gay bars in Chicago entirely controlled by the the Mafia in the 1950s, Renslow recalled the "very free atmosphere" they provided, safe from police raids thanks to payoffs from the syndicate. At times, that was extremely frustrating, but everybody did. "The problems I had, of course, was hiding it.
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"By some grace of God, I accepted my identity and what I was very early," Renslow said in Baim's 2007 series of recorded interviews.
The founder of International Mr Leather /REekpoCapKīorn and raised in Logan Square, Renslow came out as a gay man when he was a student at Lane Technical High School, he told Baim, who is also the publisher of the Windy City Times. His life was extensively chronicled in "Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow," a 2007 biography by Tracy Baim and Owen Keehnen.Ĭhuck Renslow, a pillar of our lgbtq community here and around the world, has died at age 87. Leather contest and the Leather Archives and Museum in Rogers Park, but Renslow has a storied history of opening dozens of gay friendly businesses around Chicago. He is perhaps best known as the founder of the International Mr. Renslow, 87, died Thursday after multiple long-term health issues and nearly seven decades of pioneering the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer business scene in Chicago. CHICAGO - Chuck Renslow, one of Chicago's earliest openly gay entrepreneurs, died Thursday, but the longtime activist's leather-clad legacy continues on.