Open bar

By David Tamarkin

MEN BEHAVING BADLY Better keep an eye on Raphael, Evie—anything goes at pansexual Berlin.

Model: Akio/Stewart Talent; Raphael: All items from Beatnix; Evie: All items from Lulu's at the Belle Kay; Akio: All items from Beatnix (except pants, from Scott Tallarida)

Once upon a time in Chicago, the Boy George types went to gay bars, the Brat Packers went to straight bars, and unless you were bisexual, you didn’t move between the two. Then came Berlin (954 W Belmont Ave, 773-348-4975).

“It was fundamental to the Chicago scene, because it started at a time when there was no such thing as a mixed bar,” co-owner Joe Webster says. The year was 1983, and Webster—just a Berlin regular at the time—remembers it was a refuge for people who “wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t sweater sets and wasn’t leather chaps.”

This was no accident. Opened by Tim Sullivan—a gay man—and Shirley Mooney—a straight woman—Berlin was born out of a desire for inclusiveness. Of course, there were also other goals for the bar: It became a space that was open not only to all sexualities but to all aesthetics. The interior was constantly changing, with artists decorating it with installations—turning the entire bar into a life-sized board game, for example—that could compete with the extreme costumes in which people were fond of arriving. Music was just starting to come with videos (MTV had launched a mere two years before), and visuals were extremely important to the club: As one of the city’s first video bars, Berlin ran a constant stream of Madonna, B-52’s and Peter Gabriel on the screens.

Twenty-five years after opening, the bar still has the same layout (though the dearth of installations has rendered the space rather blank), and the crowd is still mixed. Unfortunately, Chicago’s homogenous nightlife scene hasn’t evolved much, either; Berlin is still one of the few truly diverse bars in the city. So much so, Webster says, that “to a lot of gay people, Berlin is not gay enough, and for a lot of straight people, Berlin is too gay.” Still, on the bar’s wildly popular Madonna-rama nights (the first Sunday of every month) or Prince nights (the last Sunday of every month), the progressive melange of gay punks, straight club kids and outlandish drag queens can be so striking that it feels like a bar of the future. Or perhaps more accurately, a bar of the past.

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