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.
![gay bar chicago side tracks gay bar chicago side tracks](https://irs0.4sqi.net/img/general/width960/p8LEA05M1doJa9HZ9yTpC2yg2Zd1yKt4JrxdHl1Zg6M.jpg)
“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.” 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.
![gay bar chicago side tracks gay bar chicago side tracks](https://irs1.4sqi.net/img/general/width960/1621865_STwDcGoupWeErGhqomLZpQ73-1dVOre4el3NloSi5og.jpg)
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. 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.