By that time, Hunter says, there were a couple of gay bars in the suburbs: the Hideaway and the Nutbush in Forest Park, and the now defunct Charlie’s Angels, on Golf Road in the Des Plaines area. Marion Dudley was a Downers Grove widow 20 years his senior who came in for dance lessons and wound up with a business partner.
“I was just like Travolta.” He got a job as a professional ballroom dance instructor, first at the Fred Astaire dance studio in Niles and later at the Astaire studio in Downers Grove. I knew all the disco moves.” He chuckles. First time in years that you touched your partner. “This was the time when Saturday Night Fever had just come out.
He lived in Arlington Heights, went to Wheeling High School and Harper College, and trekked into Chicago “to do anything.” What he did best was dance: jazz, tap, ballet, “but my forte was ballroom dancing,” he says. The northwest suburbs were a lonely place when Hunter was a gay teenager there. “When people ask me who comes here,” says owner Mark Hunter, “I say we’ve got one of everything.” No one pays much attention when a caricature of a 1950s bombshell in platinum wig, white fur stole, and XXL white gown pays the $4 cover and flounces to the bar. On the other side, a lone muscled man-boy in tank top, baseball cap, and jeans gyrates to “Dancing Queen.” A few singles and couples perch at the small tables lining the darkened dance floor, their eyes raised to the images flashing on a dozen video monitors–tarted-up no-talent kids lip-synching to bad music. There’s a mannerly array of mostly male customers around the big, cozily lit bar on one side of the L-shaped space.