I’d been to other drag bars before: in Miami Beach and Indianapolis, where the queens reveled in classic torch songs, and at La Mere Vipere in downtown Chicago-not exactly a traditional drag place, but eventual home base for Jim Skafish, a gender-defying punk performer who’d squeeze into a woman’s bathing suit without the slightest regard for passing and serve up terrible stories of humiliation and karmic revenge on a bed of hard, angry music. Just behind it is La Cueva, the country’s oldest Latino drag bar-a mightily successful enterprise in Little Village that is, to date, conspicuously missing from the neighborhood web page published by the City of Chicago.īack then I was at La Cueva, with fake ID in hand and shivering with fear, because, though open since 1972, its legend had already reached me in Indiana, where I grew up, certain that no place existed that could accommodate my sexuality and ethnicity. That door is important, not just because its unremarkable state has remained a constant (it now has lettering that says proof of age is required to enter) but because it’s a kind of portal. A flash of glitter turned into a troop of sprinters that disappeared behind an unmarked steel door. Suddenly, a mustard-colored sedan raced east and came to a squealing stop in front of a squat white-brick building.
The street at night was a quiet fog, the piquant smell of carnitas wafting from a couple of late night eateries. The first time I went, back in the early 1980s, I missed most of the hustle and din. There’s still gang activity out here, the occasional sniper fire that fells a bystander, but this strip of Twenty-sixth Street is said to generate more business revenue than any other in Chicago except Michigan Avenue. There are taco stands here, and stores with layaway programs and showrooms of plastic-encased sofas and living room chairs, banks, legal offices specializing in immigration matters, giant supermarkets, and bridal shops whose real forte are the quince dresses necessary for Latin-style coming out parties. (When you’re with me, that’s when I can say / that everything, everything I’ve suffered was worthwhile.) “ Cuando tú estás conmigo es cuando yo digo / que valió la pena todo todo lo que yo he sufrido,” croons Juan Gabriel, probably Mexico’s most popular singer of all time, through the speakers set outside the shops, usually winning the battle of volume. Traversing the heart of the neighborhood is the two-laned Twenty-sixth Street, with parking on both sides and a jumbled soundtrack of boleros, rancheras, and Latin pop at its busiest hours, especially after mass on Sundays, when gaggles of toddlers in miniature suits and frilly pastel dresses lead their families around by the hand from ice-cream shop to music store to elaborate window displays of a timeless sort of Western wear: cowboy hats, wide belts, snakeskin boots with buckles, and leather and silver bolos.
It’s south of the BNSF railroad tracks, north of the Chicago River, and just east of the westernmost city limits. Little Village-La Villita, as it’s also known-is on Chicago’s southwest side, a cluster of bungalows with trimmed lawns and the occasional yearlong crèche or Virgin of Guadalupe standing just off the stoop.