Footnotes Chicago Quotes

The Cubs are a major league baseball team based in Chicago. Apparently, the team was once cursed by a goat and is doomed now to never win the World Series. The 71 seats [auctioned by the Chicago Board of Exchange] are adjacent to the Cubs' dugout on the third-base line. This is an unnecessary detail needed to give color to what would otherwise be a dull and uninspiring narrative.

I was certainly angry that, of all those messages Mrs. Campbell relayed, not a single one mentioned Ruby. DOWN SOUTH DRUG RING LINKED TO CHICAGO MOB, the Papers would scream. The death of the Tattooed Woman? A footnote somewhere below the fold. Who cared about her? I did. My boss did. We cared about Ruby and everyone like her.

The men who trusted Kinsey—a hard-won trust that he achieved only because one man vouched for him to another, who did the same to someone else, who followed suit—unwittingly became part of a movement that was only just beginning, one that was little more than a hope for some, such as Henry Gerber two decades earlier, but a seeming impossibility to most. However small and obscure it was in the beginning, it would help to stoke the fires of the sexual revolution that would explode in New York in 1969 in what has been called the Stonewall riots and in the gay liberation movement that the riots spawned. It would be too late for Raymond Carlson and hundreds of other men like him who, caught up in the insidiousness of the time, took control of their destiny in the only way available to them. It also would be too late for those who, like Ralph Wright, charged into marriage to hide their sexuality. Others, like the men of the Rush Street boardinghouse, would make due, devise strategies that would allow them to survive the very real threats that surrounded them—threats not only to their bodies but also to their sense of self—while keeping what we think of as their sexual identity intact. Chicago was full of such men, all heroes and virtually all forgotten now or, if remembered at all, relegated to a footnote to the narrative of the period in which they lived and loved and over which, in time, they triumphed.