A book, “Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall,” followed in 2012. For six years, the British-born de la Croix published weekly 1,000-word columns documenting the Windy City’s gay nightlife scene for local paper. “I went to my publisher and said, ‘Can I do a column?’” That was 1997. “I was listening to these two old guys in a bar, and they were wearing this old leather and they were arguing about the exact address of some old bar that wasn’t there anymore,” he remembers. Sukie de la Croix didn’t set out to be one of the prolific custodians of gay bar history in Chicago.
