A True Urban Legend –
Talking with the Amazing Chuck Renslow (Kris of Chicago)
Chuck Renslow is absolutely amazing, with a list of credits, accomplishments, and accolades that straddle many eras as well as areas of expertise and interest. Here is a man who in the late 1950s was the famed adult male photographer Kris of Chicago and who ran his studio (Kris Studio) during the entire Physique Pictorial era from 1950 to 1979. He was the longtime lover of Dom Orejudos (also known as the famed gay artist Etienne). In 1958 the couple opened the legendary Gold Coast Leather Bar, one of the first openly gay establishments in the country, which soon attained international fame and reigned until 1993 as the oldest leather establishment in the world. In 1979 Mr. Renslow co-founded the International Mr. Leather contest, which has since grown to massive proportions and become a huge source of revenue for the city of Chicago. For seven years he was the publisher of early Chicago gay newspaper Gay Life. He has owned and operated a number of other businesses such as Man’s Country bathhouse, The Eagle, Bistro Too, Zolar, and Pyramid. In 1991 he gave back to the community in an entirely new way and (along with Tony DeBlase) opened The Leather Archives and Museum. Mr. Renslow has also been a force in both Chicago and national politics, serving the Democratic Party in a number of capacities. He has also been an essential and instrumental force in securing rights for gays in Chicago and statewide. His deserved honors and awards are extensive and include induction into the City of Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, Gay Chicago magazine’s Hall of Fame and Humanitarian of the Year Awards, The Leather Journal lifetime achievement award, A Centurion Award as Leatherman of the Century, and others. All that and he had the privilege of calling Marlene Dietrich a close personal friend.
Owen Keehnen: In the early 1950s you started Kris Studio and gained a great deal of Physique Pictorial notoriety as Kris of Chicago. How did that all come about?
Chuck Renslow: Well, I was a photographer and the first photography work I did was female nudes and I did that for about a year. I had a studio called Century Studio and it did rather well. Then a friend of mine, Harry Mickelson, came along and said why don’t you go into shooting males because you’re very good at it. I said okay and I formed a partnership with him doing Kris Studio. Of course I was very much interested in doing males – I’m gay, but I didn’t think there was a market for it. It turned out there was a market for it.
Were the obscenity guidelines tough for a mail order business like that at the time?
Obscenity guidelines were very tough. We had to be very careful with what we did. The post office had postal inspectors coming over hollering about my "excessive strap delineation," which meant you could see the outline of the cock through the posing strap. At the time we had a postmaster named Summerfield who was very down on it. He used to take the pictures, not just gay stuff but outright porn, and show it to women’s groups all over the country trying to get them to stamp this horrible thing out. In fact, the postage cancellation stamp at the time said ‘Report Obscene Mail to Your Postmaster’. It was rough. When the Fanny Hill case came about that really changed everything because that’s when the Supreme Court ruled that porn had to be judged by contemporary community standards. It was said that the book Fanny Hill had a modicum of literary value and historical importance and therefore it could not be classified as obscene. When that happened, obscenity charges in the United States dropped in half.
And where did you find your models?
Myself and my lover Dom, also known as the artist Etienne, were both bodybuilders. In fact I was the chairman of the AAU – The Amateur Athletic Union. I headed the part that handled physique contests. So I got models from the contests, from the gymnasium where I worked out, I was very connected that way. Later I bought a gym downtown and ran Triumph Health Studio for a number of years, which is also where I got my models.
Speaking of you and Dom Orejudos (Etienne) I find it interesting that you were both focusing on the erotic in different media – you with photography and Dom with his drawings and artwork. Was that artistic connection part of the attraction or is the fact that you two shared that merely a coincidence?
Well no, that was not part of the attraction. The attraction was I saw this beautiful boy on Oak Street beach and fell in love instantly and that’s all there was to it. I didn’t know he was an artist and I think it was the fact that he was with me in the studio that he started going into physique art. Dom was an extremely talented artist – he played violin with a symphony orchestra, he could sketch something in an instant, he was an acclaimed ballet dancer and choreographer. To give an example, the first color TV cast in Chicago was him dancing in a ballet that he wrote and choreographed. He was extremely well known in the dance world and so he became Etienne in the physique world.
So did he sketch while you took photos? Did you share that studio in that capacity?
No, he had a studio too where he did his sketching. When I was posing a model he would often come down and help pose them. I did all the lighting and photography, but Dom was a genius at posing.
A couple of his murals still adorn the walls of Man’s Country, your bathhouse, as well as the bar next door, The Eagle.
There were more but I took them down and put them in the Leather Archives and Museum to preserve them. Everything I own of Dom’s work, except for the pieces here and at home, are at the Museum. There were more but we sold some of the oils to raise money when he got sick. Still there are so many.
In 1958 you and Dom opened the Gold Coast Leather Bar here in Chicago. How did you know there would be a clientele?
Prior to that Cliff Ingram (who was also known as the tattoo artist Cliff Raven) one day suggested we get a small group of leather people together – four or five of us – and hang out at bars and see if we could attract more people. So we did. The first bar we hung out at was Omar’s downtown in about 1956/57. After we were there about a month or two the owners came up to us and said, "All you guys in motorcycle caps and jackets are scaring the shit out of the patrons" and so they asked us to leave. We left and went to another bar that wasn’t doing much business at all in The Lane Hotel across from Washington/Bughouse Square, and that was fine for about two months until they tore the building down. Then we went to a bar on Broadway called The HiHo, which is where Friar Tuck’s is today, and we were there almost a year. We did very well and the group started to grow. It was a regular bar during the week but on weekends we had it. Anyway, then they sold the bar and the new owners kicked us out, so then we went to The Gold Coast Show Lounge, which was one block south of Division on Clark. We did well there. We were there for a year or so and then the owner died and his son came to us and asked us if we wanted to buy the bar. We said "Yes" and that’s how The Gold Coast started. We kept the name The Gold Coast, because that’s what was already on the license, but dropped the Show Lounge part.
You have mentioned previously that when you first opened you used to have to regularly pay off the cops. How exactly did all that work?
Right after we opened the bag man came around and said we would have to pay X amount of dollars (I’m not sure what it was at the beginning – but it got up to $200 a month) and said we had to pay each month. We couldn’t argue. I knew some bars that argued and when that happened the police would just park out in front with the blue light going and nobody would dare to go inside. Pay-offs were terrible, but there were some good things about it. For example, we had a 2:00 license and one year on New Year’s Eve at 2:00 a.m. the bar was packed so I called the watch commander and said "Look, do we have to close at 2:00, we’ve got a great business going?" He said $50 an hour, but you have to be closed by 6:00 when people start going to church. And every hour on the hour his man came over to get his $50. The outfit also came and got their money, well not money, but we had to have their jukeboxes and all that sort of thing.
So did business just start happening? Weren’t people frightened or sheepish?
Oh, a lot of people were frightened, a lot of people were sheepish. To give you an idea – if you walked up to The Gold Coast on North Clark there were no signs, no beer signs, nothing. It was a black front with a black door. When you walked inside you were standing in a dimly lit cubby hole with a black curtain in front of you and a guy on a stool who sat there cross-examining you. If he thought you were okay, you went in. But you had to know where The Gold Coast was and that was all done by word of mouth.
Okay, and if we take the next step in your amazing life chronologically – what prompted your decision to get into the newspaper business with Gay Life?
I didn’t want to. Grant Ford was a very good friend of mine and the publisher of Gay Life – he started it and it was his baby. He got into trouble with the IRS over taxes so he came to me and asked if I would buy into the paper for no cost but to merely take care of the taxes. I’d had a similar problem with the IRS – if you were a gay business in those days they could really pounce down on you. So anyway, I took over the paper and paid off those taxes. Grant stepped out and became more involved with the MCC (the Metropolitan Community Church) and I ended up running the paper for seven years – but I never really wanted to be in the paper business.
Something you did want part of was your role as co-founder of the International Mr. Leather contest in 1979. Today it’s one of the biggest gay gatherings and events in the country. How did that all start?
Well, we had The Gold Coast at 501 North Clark and remember I had been the AAU chairman for Mr. Illinois and Mr. Chicago and all those bodybuilder titles. So I got an idea one day to have a Mr. Gold Coast contest, which we did and it was extremely popular. In fact it got so popular that it filled up the bar – the pit of the basement of the bar, the upstairs of the bar, and people were out in the streets. I was worried about the neighbors and all that and so I said to Dom, "We’ve got to move it and go to a different venue". And Dom said, "You can’t have a Mr. Gold Coast somewhere else, that wouldn’t be right". So I suggested calling it Mr. America, but that title was taken so we couldn’t do that – so I said, "Let’s call it Mr. Leather." Dom didn’t think that rang very well so we finally decided on International Mr. Leather. One of the things that was smart was that I didn’t want any criticism for having an international contest that was just a Chicago thing so what I did was had posters made, Dom did the artwork, and I sent them all over the world and to other U.S. cities. I even had some of them translated into German. The first year a guy from San Francisco won, but we did have people come from Germany. The second year the guy who won was from Sydney, Australia, which gave us the authenticity of being international. Since then there have been winners from Germany, England, all over.
Has the level of success it has achieved blown your mind?
It didn’t blow my mind because it didn’t start this way – the progress was almost logarithmic. It’s just like guiding a ship, you set course by seeing what’s good and it just keeps getting better. In the beginning we didn’t have a leather market, then one or two guys came in and said, "Hey, can we set up a booth?" I said sure, and that developed into the leather market which today is even bigger than the contest. It’s also not as surprising when you do research. I had people fill out questionnaires asking how they heard about International Mr. Leather and most heard about it from someone else. So that told me, "Okay, let’s make this even more spectacular so people go home and talk about it" . . . which is what I have tried to do year after year. This year it’s going to be at Navy Pier and we are going to revamp the whole show because once again, we want people to talk about it. That also brings up the reasoning for the popularity of the contest as well as The Gold Coast for 22 years, and that was that I very seldom advertised in Chicago, but I advertise all over the world.
You’ve really fostered the leather community in so many ways. What about the world of leatherfolk, do you think bonds in that community are much stronger than with many gay groups?
Well, let’s look at it this way. Here’s a group that’s looked upon by the mainstream community with animosity, and also by the gay community. That is changing. But in the early years ‘leather queen’ was very derogatory and considered worse than a drag queen. I think that persecution, or rather lack of credibility, really bound the people together.
Yet another way in which you are giving back to that community is with the previously mentioned Leather Archives and Museum. How did that come into being?
That was easy. I never thought of preserving history until Dom died and I inherited all of his artwork and there was plenty of it – boxes and boxes of art and such. So I had to decide what to do with them. At first I thought I would do a foundation, but after some research I started to see that foundations don’t last – at least if they don’t have money. For example, the Hemmingway Foundation had thousands of people visiting after he died and they still get good crowds – but the number is going down. It’s happening now too with the Tom of Finland Foundation. So a friend suggested on donating it to an established library and I thought about Gerber Hart here in Chicago, but I didn’t terribly care for the way it was organized. So then I looked at New York but they wouldn’t take it unless I gave them the rights to sell it. I wasn’t going to do that; if I wanted to sell it I’d do it myself. Well, then I decided to start a museum, have Dom’s work as a part of the collection rather than as all of it. Then I started thinking of the history I also had with International Mr. Leather and Kris Studio and The Gold Coast – and all that stuff was in my basement. So I talked to Tony DeBlase and a few other people and we all agreed it was a good idea and so we started the Leather Archives and Museum.
So what are some of your favorite items in the collection?
My favorite acquisition is probably some of the magazines. We have a complete set of Der Kries, which means The Circle. It was published in Germany before Hitler and right through the Nazi times. It was published in German, English, and French. It had stories by some great, great writers like Phil Sparrow writing as Phil Andros.
Who was really Samuel Steward. I interviewed him quite a few years ago before he passed away.
We were friends but he became angry with me. He taught me how to tattoo with the needles and the knives and I taught it to Cliff Ingram (Cliff Raven the tattoo artist) and Samuel got all bent out of shape about that. He was angry, but we were able to make up before he died.
I’m sorry – I got you completely sidetracked. What are a couple other of your favorite acquisitions?
We have a complete set of The Leather Journal and we also have some great Steve Masters artwork too.
And if someone has a donation to the museum . . .
We’ll take it, but it has to be leather or fetish related. And this is a 501-C3 corporation so the donation is deductible. However, we can’t determine the value – that has to come from an outside appraiser.
You’ve contributed so much – the photography, your political activism, the bar, the museum, IML, the paper, etc. Which of your many accomplishments gives you the greatest sense of pride?
Getting the gay rights ordinance signed last week. I worked on that and for gay rights for people for some 40-odd years. I was instrumental 30 years ago with Ellis Levine and a few other people with getting it into the state legislature. When I had the Gay Life newspaper I wanted an interview for the paper with Mayor Byrne. I called and called, no way – couldn’t get through. Nothing. A complete dead end. So I got to brainstorming and I called up her husband and asked if he wanted to go to lunch. He said "Who are you?" and I told him. Then he said, "And why do you want to take me to lunch?" and so I said, "Because I want to get to your wife." Well, he laughed and said, "Okay, let’s have lunch." We went to Mayor’s Row, which was at that time a restaurant across from City Hall. We had lunch and then he said, "Come on, let’s go across the street." So we did and walked right into Mayor Byrne’s office. I said "I’d like to do an interview with you." And she said "Oh very good, when?" So we set up a date and time. In the middle of the interview I asked, "Would you sign an executive order forbidding discrimination in city employment and hiring and so forth?" And she looked at me and said, "Yes." I expected some sort of political answer like we’ll look into it or something. So I said "When?" and she responded with "When is gay pride? It’s this month isn’t it? I’ll sign it for that." And she did. And I have the original of it framed right behind you. It’s things like that which I am the most proud of. And last week I went down to see the governor sign the bill making Illinois the 15th state to have a gay rights ordinance. Those things are the crowning achievements of my life because this is my community too.
It’s so impressive that your career, your life, has continually been about giving to and building a gay community. I mean, the studio, the bar, the paper, IML, all of it is bringing people together and making us less fractionalized, less alone, and most importantly less invisible.
It’s still fractionalized, but we can get together. You’ve got to understand, the only thing that unites us is sex – that’s it. And I think the unity we’ve done is fantastic considering that’s the only common thing. We’ve got bankers, we’ve got bums – you name it.
Not only do you foster this within the gay community but also you are involved in the rights for other groups as well, as evidenced by your involvement with the ACLU and NAACP for example.
I was also the first openly gay person ever appointed to a position pf authority in the Masonic Order. I was District Deputy Grand Master. A Grand Master is elected every two years and he is the absolute authority in that fraternal organization, but there are 700 some lodges and he can’t visit them all so he divides the state up into sections or districts and appoints a District Deputy Grand Master, who has the same authority that he has, to oversee those area lodges.
So has being openly gay ever been a roadblock to something you wanted to do?
Oh fuck yes. At one time I ran as a delegate for Ted Kennedy, Carter ended up getting it that year. Anyway, after that the guy who was the chairman for the Democratic Party wanted me to run as an alderman, but I said no. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to run, I did. But I was afraid that position could do too much harm. They could take so many things and twist the facts. They could take the fact that I own a bathhouse and equate it with prostitution – which was done at that time. Not to mention the fact that I own a leather bar, so they would say "And he owns a bar where men beat each other." I know how those things can be twisted. Anyway, I thought that would hurt the party and I thought the health of the party was much more important so I said no. That’s one of the times that makes me feel bad, because I think I could have done a great job.
You’ve accomplished so much . . .
I’ve just lived longer than most people that’s why.
Well, then you’ve made very good use of those years. Now, who is the personal hero of someone who has done so much?
That depends on when you’re asking; it’s different people for different times. One of the people who I really admire is Reverend Troy Perry who started the Metropolitan Community Church. I think that’s something I would be incapable of doing, but something that was so necessary since there were so many gay people carrying around guilt from the Catholic Church or whatever with no religious place to go. So when he did that it was great. He not only started the church but by doing that he influenced so many churches in the acceptance of gays.
Thanks Chuck, it’s been a great hour and on behalf of so many I really want to say thank you for doing so much to help usher the gay community through this massive transitional period. It’s amazing.
Well, thank you Owen. The pleasure has been all mine.
Copyright © 2005 Owen Keehnen. All rights reserved.
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