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RESOLUTION
WHEREAS, Chuck Renslow, 87, a longtime pillar of the LGBTQ community in Chicago and around the world, died on Thursday, June 29, 2017 after multiple long-term health issues; and,
WHEREAS, The Chicago City Council has been informed of his passing by the City Council LGBT Caucus; and,
WHEREAS, Renslow was born in Chicago in 1929, raised in the Logan Square neighborhood by his grandmother, and graduated from Lane Technical High School; and,
WHEREAS, In the early 1950s, Renslow founded Kris Studios, one of the earliest and most durable of the physique photography houses. He was an accomplished photographer, including of the ballet. His dance photography is in the Newberry Library in the Chuck Renslow Dance Photographs collection; and,
WHEREAS, In 1958, he was brought to a local court for the distribution and possession of material with "excessive genital delineation." Unlike some gays, Renslow did not passively wait for a conviction. He and his attorneys fought back, including as evidence nude statues in Chicago. In 1964, the Post Office also brought Kris Studios up on charges of pornography. The studios did not use the more common strategy of saying the materials were art; they just denied they were pornography, and the judge agreed that the human body itself, in posing straps, was not porn; and,
WHEREAS, He opened Gold Coast, believed to be the first leather bar in the U.S., in Chicago in 1958. It closed in 1987, when it was known internationally as the oldest leather establishment in the world; and,
WHEREAS, He was the founder of many bars and sex clubs since the 1960s including Man's Country, which is still open in Andersonville. In the 1970s, the bathhouse attracted top names on the "K-Y circuit."; and,
WHEREAS, He was the publisher of Triumph, Mars and Rawhide Male magazines, publications mailed and shared across the country as the earliest ways gay men found each other. In 1965, he was a founder of Second City Motorcycle Club, the first such c...
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