Hate, lust, bigotry, love—
it all happens in that place in town
called the Levee.
When the Orpheum Theater in Springfield, Illinois, was demolished in 1965, it
marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. On the street where it
stood, lesbians and gays found a haven in a strong, caring community, built from
the need to separate from a society unwilling to accept them. Tales from the
Levee tells these peoples’ stories, spanning the years 1965 through 1976,
when the Fifth Street Levee emerged as a thriving Midwestern center for the
lesbian and gay culture of that time. It’s all here: entertaining and outrageous
real stories of love, lust, bigotry, and death.
Tales from the Levee centers on Casey, a masculine, part Apache lesbian born
and raised in a small Midwestern town. Always knowing inside herself that she
was not like others she knew, she
escapes, moves to Springfield, Illinois—to the center of town, where she
discovers an area known as the Levee. The street, infamously sprinkled with
several gay bars, a massage parlor, a hamburger stand, and apartments, becomes
her new home. There she befriends and lives and loves with lesbians, drag
queens, prostitutes, and gays also seeking a place they too can call home.
From Tales from the Levee
P R O L O G U E
The Fifth Street Levee ended
because of urban renewal, tearing down the old and building the new. There’s a
high-rise there now, red brick with black iron gates and a courtyard. There’s a
park with a fountain across the street: a grassy lawn, benches, and a play area
that’s usually empty. Nobody goes there but the homeless, or tourists come for
the new presidential library and the rebuilt Union Station.
A
Springfield poet wrote about a
famous ghost that walked at midnight. Some people think that Levee ghosts still
haunt
Fifth Street, no matter what
the city tried to turn the place into. They call from what were decaying hotel
windows on summer nights. Drunk. Laughing. They parade in sequined gowns on
cracked cement sidewalks, past the open doors of bars, beneath the flashing beer
signs. Young. Innocent.
The district perished, its
denizens scattered to the winds. And I am an emissary, telling tales told to me
by the shadows
