And then we’d go back to Medusa’s and just be nuts. We’d go out and eat purple microdots like fiends and do blow all day and all night. We had the most fun when we weren’t open. I lived in a room that was the backstage area. “There’d be people shooting up heroin in the bathroom and having sex behind the couch.”ĭave let a few of us live there, and we didn’t have to pay rent or utilities. It was an unusual place to have something like that. There was no sign, and it was in an out-of-the-way neighborhood. If you were walking down the street, you wouldn’t know there was anything going on in there. But I always knew I was going to get it open. I was so broke I sold my car for money to live on. I lived there for over a year, scraping the paint off the ceilings and staying up all night fixing shit. I borrowed 16 grand from my mom to get the club going.
#CHAPS CHICAGO GAY BAR LICENSE#
Shelton had managed to obtain from the city a license to operate a “public place of assembly.” Dave Shelton Founder and owner Medusa’s opened in the fall of 1983, a year or so after Shelton, then 26, signed a lease for a four-story brick building in Lake View that had once housed a Swedish social club. Here is the story of Medusa’s from those who knew it best. So dim the lights and crank the Ministry. Its rise and ultimate fall straddled one of the most musically, culturally, and sexually dynamic periods in the city’s history.įor the club’s most passionate devotees-and for the DJs, promoters, artists, and provocateurs who worked there-25 years can feel like a day. Those already on the other side saw it as a refuge, a community, and, above all, a playground. Live bands were part of the mix, too-little-known artists who’d go on to fame: Al Jourgensen, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Billy Corgan, the Violent Femmes, Front 242.įor countless Chicagoans, Medusa’s was a portal to the city’s counterculture. Its teen dance parties, which increasingly became the club’s focus in its later years, were a rite of passage for a generation of high schoolers, and the music was as eclectic as the clientele: funk, electronic, R&B, industrial, punk, ska, house, even pop. 30 Very ’80s Portraits of the Cool Kids at Medusa’sīilling itself as a “juice bar,” the cavernous Lake View club sold no alcohol-there were convenience stores for that-and it stayed open until the dancing stopped, which was often midmorning the next day.Goths, skinheads, punks, black house-music fans, white Boystown denizens, closeted suburban honor-roll kids-they all converged on Medusa’s vast dance floor or in the rooms upstairs, where performance artists staged outlandish live exhibitions involving everything from fake blood to mutilated mannequin parts. Named after its gloriously coiffed owner, airline-employee-turned-impresario Dave “Medusa” Shelton, the late-night dance venue and art space on Sheffield Avenue achieved something unprecedented during its nine-year run: It brought together all of Chicago’s long-segregated nightlife tribes in a single throbbing melting pot. Leather optional.This year marks a quarter century since the closing of Medusa’s, Chicago’s most famous all-ages nightclub. Plus, Studz is a sign of a maturing city, one that can support a bar that is to gay people what Will's Pub or Copper Rocket Pub is to straights - a no-frills hangout.
#CHAPS CHICAGO GAY BAR FULL#
But Studz doesn't take itself too seriously - that's apparent from the appropriately friendly atmosphere, the Bud on draft (no full liquor, unfortunately), the no-pressure chitchat happening all over. In the end, Studz really is a neighborhood bar where folks who are left of the mainstream can be themselves and not make such a big deal about it. Thursday, there are pool and darts tournaments - the kind of friendly competition you might find in any neighborhood bar. Tuesday, there's a gay bowling league from Winter Park that heads to Studz for the after-party.
Occasionally the Studz crew ads a gong to the karaoke game for spice. Monday is a karaoke night, and Schwab says lots of theme park cast members show up and put to shame the average crooners at straight bars. There are more mainstream gatherings, too.