Pride & Prejudice
“If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point.”
Edward Corey
Edward Corey was from Chicago. He graduated from Francis Parker, was drafted and served in WWII, went to Harvard, and found his creative and commercial success as an illustrator and writer in NYC. He was many things; one thing he wasn’t was boring.
Prej·u·dice /ˈprejədəs/ noun
preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience
harm or injury that results or may result from some action or judgment
Photos: Lakeview Pride, June, 2025, from Block Club Chicago
An arrogant sonofabitch once wrote to end an argument, - “Chicago is not even a city by European standards”. His was a nativist argument that a person can never find themselves in a place where they weren’t born. As in, if you speak with an accent, you will always be miserable. You can guess which crumbling empire he was glazing.
We do not share in this belief. If anything, being from many places gives you layers of context and experience. Speaking many languages sharpens your observational skills. Overcoming nonsense in multiple cultures gives you an appreciation for irony and chronic back pain. Watching women adorn themselves in silk and gold makes you crave texture and style in your life. Waking up to the smell of grandma’s cooking and grandpa’s cigarettes makes you hungry and nauseous at the same time. Opposing things, sights, smells, textures can exist at the same time, as do opposing ideas.
Layered, nuanced contextual understanding and feeling for what’s important in life is completely missing from our civic spaces in Chicago. We’ve been segregated into geographic, racial and economic spaces, where we are supposed to stay and be content. If we venture outside of our designated area, we risk being pulled over, questioned, provoked and punished. That seems to be the fear that hangs over any conversation about policing, criminal justice and existing in public spaces, not just in Chicago of course, but everywhere. As we watch our cousins in NYC celebrate the Knicks victory and progressive advances in Mamdanistan, we ask ourselves, what is standing in our way? We have one of the most progressive mayors in the country, an enviable economy, a diverse population, a storied history of labor and civic rights movements, and all we have to show for it is a city council full of conservative alders ranging from diet to full calorie MAGA. These alders spend the monthly city council meetings auditioning for their FOX News highlights reel, while taking campaign contributions from a local billionaire, a Friend of Rahm and the Governor™, and blocking the mayor’s progressive agenda that would God forbid, see the daylight and make our city safer and more affordable.
Join the movement!
Sign our Petition for Safe and Inclusive Pride and share this with your friends.
One plausible explanation for this is that we are in the midst of a 180-degree turn on the suburbanization of the Midwest. Children of middle-class America who grew up in the ‘burbs are rediscovering the joy of urban life. Urban, a word that became synonymous with Black and poor in the second half of the last century, as resources were drained from the cities and public transportation to subsidize suburban sprawl with its car-focused highways and bleak strip malls, is experiencing a renewal and a rebrand into Urbanism™ and Abundance™. It’s sporadic and aimless, driven by a sense of possibility without a vision, ideologically hollow and intellectually lazy, and above all - prejudiced. The same prejudice that drove housing and infrastructure development into the ‘burbs in the 20th century is now driving urban renewal, with the added bonus of epic income inequality, billionaire greed, and a growing authoritarianism on steroids.
All of these forces come into focus here in Lakeview, the home of Boystown and Wrigley Field, sharing one bed under one corporate blanket. There is no one reason why Lakeview’s 44th Ward is only on our third alderman in 43 years, but it’s one of the reasons why we have what we have. Is Bennett Lawson the worst alderman in Chicago? If you’ve ever sat through a city council meeting, you’d know that he is, as he himself says, in “the middle”. Between far-right eccentrics like RayLo and progressive firebrands like BSL, he is a quiet freshman who votes with the progressive block at least a third of the time. He doesn’t run his mouth, or pop gum, or raise his hand to speak on every topic. But he doesn’t represent our ward either.
If you haven’t taken our community survey yet, please take a few minutes to do so, and share with your neighbors, particularly younger ones. We are woefully underrepresented in our survey with zero under 24 responders so far. We want to hear from our younger neighbors.
Our ward has voted for progressive tax measures and progressive candidates like Brandon Johnson. As much as our alderman pretends not to know, he knows. Early returns on our community survey indicate that he is 2 to 1 unknown or unpopular with younger renters, and older homeowners are ambivalent towards him, at a 50/50 split. At the end of his three-year tenure, all he has to show for it are the ADUs and two bicycle parades. He can’t really brag about helping to freeze the phase out of the sub-minimum wage, because even he knows, it’s nothing to be proud of. He is mum on the subject of CARE expansion, because he voted with the corporate caucus against funding it last December, and he is happy to take campaign contributions from one Michael J. Sacks, aka a local billionaire, a Friend of Rahm and the Governor™. He seems to focus on the two big employers in the ward: the Cubs and the Advocate Illinois Masonic hospital. And he relies on the local network of neighborhood associations to isolate himself from having to host any ward nights or true public events where he might have to answer a real question from a constituent. With the looming municipal elections season on the horizon, will he change course, or stay snuggled under his corporate blanket?
Only time will tell. In the meantime, we keep advocating for a public forum to talk about the corporatization and over-policing at Lakeview Pride. We appreciate the smorgasbord of LGBTQIA resources that our alderman’s office has conveniently dumped into his latest newsletter, but all of these non-profits and organizations are not a replacement for an actual community conversation about the cost of Pride, in every sense of the word. If we are to ground the next chapter of our political life in the true Urbanist vision and responsible stewardship of public resources, we need to have leadership that is both competent and able to work with all manner of constituent stakeholders.
Happy Pride!