Howdy, homo! (Or, for the politically correct: Greetings, fellow homosexuals and those who explore nontraditional gender/sex mores and roles including but not limited to same-sex attraction!) Oh, "Howdy, homo!" will do for a start.

Thank you for picking up our field guide to gay and lesbian Chicago. Assembling this book has been a labor of love, and we hope that you will find our affections well spent. For years, both of us have worked within Chicago’s GLBT community, and in the midst of our work and play, we have appreciated the diversity of its offerings. As book clerks in gay- and lesbian-identified shops, we both have also served many years on the information front lines for visitors to Chicago, answering, with witty frankness, their questions about where to stay, play, or pray, where to two-step, or where to 12-step. "What is a good bar to take a date?" "Is there a place where both my girlfriend and my mother can feel comfortable?" "Hey, I’m straight, but my out-of-the-closet-like-a-bullet queer-boy cousin is coming to town—what can I tell him?" "Where can I meet a girl just as charming as you, Kathie?" "Robert, where do gay gents who share your sterling qualities keep themselves in this wonderful! town?"

Frankly, we got sick of it—sick and tired.

If only there were a single resource that had this information—and more—compiled in one slim, portable volume. Something we could put in the hands of the information seekers, to guide them as a best friend or chatty book clerk would guide them through the myriad of Chicago’s gay community offerings. Something filled with the type of off-the-cuff insights and tongue-in-cheek observations that we had so long provided while leaning over a Chicago map spread across a bookshop counter.

And the startling fact is that up until now, this resource did not exist. Sure, a handful of advertising-driven "phone books" have been published over the years, and naturally, Chicago is mentioned in all the major national gay travel guides, but we have often found these resources inaccurate, misleading, or so slanted to advertisers as to be fairly useless for anything other than leveling a crooked table. "Who compiled that information, and do they live on Uranus?" we would ask ourselves when reading that the Closet, a tiny lesbian (but very boy-friendly) bar, has a pool table or, even more laughable, a dance floor. These listings were clearly not doing anyone any service.

And yet, Chicago’s gay and lesbian cultural scene has so much to offer the visitor (or resident, for that matter). Chicago has two active neighborhoods that are so strongly gay and lesbian identified that even the straight denizens of these hoods admit that they live in a gay neighborhood. These areas are filled with gay-oriented shops, services, restaurants, gyms, bars . . . gay everything. But these two communities, vibrant though they are, are not the be-all and end-all of Chicago’s culture and nightlife. Gay life in Chicago spreads from the city’s farthest reaches on the North and Northwest Sides to the South Shore and Far Southwest Side. Our community includes numerous churches encompassing virtually every denomination, a comprehensive health center, several gay weekly papers, two competitive sports leagues, a chamber of commerce, and a marching band. Every year thousands of gays and lesbians visit Chicago for several annual events, including tIML, the Lesbian Community! Cancer Project’s Coming Out Against Cancer Ball, the Northalsted Market Days, and, of course, Chicago Pride, which attracted more than 440,000 participants and spectators in 2005. And hundreds more come to the city for non-gay-specific reasons: to visit family and friends, to sightsee, to attend conventions at McCormick Place, the world’s biggest (and perpetually expanding) convention center, or to take in a trade show at the Merchandise Mart.

All this culture, yet no way to disseminate it. All these visitors, but no one to tell them where to go. It became clear that we had a mission, and a calling. And, not to put too fine a point on it, a contract.

This is our field guide to the lesbian and gay Chicago that we know and love. It contains the field notes we have accrued in our many, many collective years in the homosexual midst and queer fringes of this city. Some of the knowledge we gained in the school of hard knocks and bitter experience (not to mention extension courses in naughty delights and delighted excess). Some of it we begged and borrowed from friends, exes, acquaintances, and the occasional beautiful stranger. We offer it to you, dear reader, the way we would if you were standing across the counter from us at a bookstore or sitting catty-corner from us at the Closet, where we both have been known to grab an after-work drink or five, and where we know from experience that there is no pool table—and certainly no dance floor. It’s our guide, filled with our own predilections, biases, opinions, experience, and advice. We love Chicago, and frankly, while we don’t know everything, we do know a lot.