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The film also highlights the work of several LGBTQ activists and community leaders who are continuing the advocacy many credit Johnston and Peña for having started. “There was joy in fighting back, and it infected all of us and we have learned how to be politically effective and change the world.” “During that time, our community was discovering that we could have political power,” Johnston says in a teaser for the documentary. Sidetrack has always served as a meeting space for people organizing to advance those causes. That fight had Johnston and Peña on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic and battles for anti-discrimination laws and marriage equality. “Art and Pep fell in love, then built Sidetrack, which is where they express their love for the community, and then they had this fight to love freely and are still together after 45 years.” “They are this pillar of love in the community,” Kane said. Mercedes Kane, director of the documentary, said the couple’s love for the LGBTQ community is what motivated them to open Sidetrack and act as civil rights leaders throughout the HIV/AIDS crisis and gay liberation movement. When they opened Sidetrack together, “it was this tiny little bar where you sat on the cases of beer, but it was a place where you’d step inside and be free.” Peña made his way to Chicago from Cuba, and often says the city is the “first place where he felt like he could be free,” Hauswirth said. “That bartender happened to be Pepe, and they’ve been together ever since.” “It was this little bar with no sign on it, and Art struck up a conversation with the bartender,” Hauswirth said. Some buddies from the school’s theater department recommended Johnston visit a bar “for people like us to be able to go.”
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Johnston was visiting Chicago in 1973 to complete a short teaching program at Northwestern University when he met Peña. “You can point to any big moment in the past 40 years - whether it’s the City Council wars, Harold Washington or the first passages of LGBTQ-inclusive legislation - and Art and Pep were there for all of it.” “The story of Chicago politics is the story of an LGBTQ uprising,” executive producer Kevin Hauswirth said. The film features rare archival footage of Sidetrack and Chicago’s LGBTQ community, as well as interviews with more than 30 people who were part of Johnston and Peña’s lives. That relationship between Johnston and Peña, who have been partners for more than 40 years, is the subject of “ Art and Pep,” a documentary that chronicles their journey as a couple against the backdrop of Sidetrack’s rise to prominence and the local movement for LGBTQ equality. Most recently, same-sex marriage, by raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for many of Chicago’s community organizations leading these efforts.LAKEVIEW - When Art Johnston and Pepe Peña opened Sidetrack in 1982, it was a tiny, hole-in-the-wall bar that would be unrecognizable compared to the sprawling gay nightclub it is today.īut behind the bar’s trajectory to becoming one of Chicago’s most well-known gay bars is a love story between two civil rights leaders who helped define the political power of LGBTQ people in Chicago and across the Midwest. Since its inception, Lawyers for Diversity has supported the passage of nondiscrimination laws, civil unions and,
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Seventeen years ago, several lawyers got together to raise money for Chicago’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community at a mid-summer barbecue dubbed ‘Lawyers for Diversity.’ The idea was simple: connect the legal community, including law students, lawyers and judges, with organizations at the forefront of LGBT equality.