Sex in America: Chicago

It is Friday in midsummer Chicago.

In the Brassary Restaurant at Ontario and Michigan, the jukebox plays Donna Summer; lunch is being served but nobody really cares. There's a waiting line at the door. The tables are filled with men who have corporate titles and women who do not. The former group is buying drinks and charcoal-grilled hamburgers (hold the onion) for the latter. The tabs may go on expense accounts, but the arrangements being made have nothing to do with office business.

In the Loop, at the corner of Lake and Dearborn, the Cinestage theater is showing Chorus Call and The Seduction of Amy to a packed audience: men on their lunch hours, who will sit through maybe 90 minutes of whatever happens to be on the screen and go back to work, their minds filled with images of thrusting cocks and turgid nipples. Not having eaten lunch, they will subsist on the images until dinner. It's called the pornography diet.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: In the studio on the 11th floor of the Playboy Building, a beautiful blonde, who happens to be naked, reclines on a fur-covered bed for a PLAYBOY photographer. Like most Playmates, this particular girl next door is an import--she actually lives 2000 miles away in Los Angeles. The photographer frames the girl in his viewfinder and wonders for the millionth time if the rumor is true that Hef is planning to move the magazine to the West Coast.

Later in the evening, a horny conventioneer from San Diego leaves his room in the Continental Plaza on North Michigan Avenue and, five minutes later, sits down at a table in a B-lounge on Chestnut Street to watch a succession of "talented" girls dance nude on a dimly lit stage. No stickler for atmosphere, he will enjoy the talents of one of the young ladies in the back room, and will pay for her services with a major credit card.

Meanwhile, just a few blocks north on Rush, a busty brunette, who works a counter at a fashionable Michigan Avenue clothing store by day and entertains generous gentlemen at night, is standing on the imported Moroccan tile at the entrance of the exclusive Faces disco, waiting for tonight's companion to return from parking his rented car. Tomorrow morning, he'll fly back to Omaha and she'll sleep late in his room at the Ritz-Carlton, then take a leisurely stroll back to her apartment in McClurg Court, less than a mile away.

Just about the time Faces begins to get hot--around two A.M., Saturday--40 nude swingers are wandering around their rented suite at the Holiday Inn near O'Hare International Airport, looking for their clothes. They started early, were out of their Charles Jourdan heels and Florsheim loafers by 9:30 and into each other by ten. Some couples leave for homes scattered throughout the northern and western suburbs, while others, in for a swinging weekend from cities as distant as Honolulu, return to their own rooms in the hotel.

Dawn breaks on Saturday. As the sun rises red, then golden, then white-hot against Chicago's massive skyline, an armada of nearly 4000 privately owned pleasure boats begins to glide and hum out across the water. On a trim Hatteras yacht heading out of Burnham Harbor, three lithe young women on deck remove their shorts and halters. Two wear underpants and one doesn't. The one who doesn't turns her bottom west to moon three fat beer-drinking fishermen sitting along the shore.

At 29th Street, behind and just south of the McCormick Place trade and exposition center, a slender, dark-haired woman, wearing a white sweater and a pleated blue skirt, lies on the rocks while her clean-cut boyfriend, standing on a lower ledge, slips his fingers into her under her skirt. They talk as he does so, looking from a distance like two lovers merely having a warm conversation. Then they trade places, he sitting, she standing on the ledge below. They look around casually, only half-caring who sees them, and she goes down on him while he stares reflectively at the John Hancock Building jutting into the white northern sky. Good morning, Chicago.

•

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. The late Mayor Richard J. Daley was a neighborhood man, meaning that he never outgrew the attitudes of Bridgeport, his community, nor wanted to. Bridgeport is a nearly all-white middle-class neighborhood in the solidly Democratic 11th Ward on the South Side. It is clean, mowed, neat. One can hardly imagine spontaneous acts of sex occurring in Bridgeport: Sex is so untidy. Indeed, one would expect Bridgeport to adopt a righteous posture in the face of all evil, but the ethics of Bridgeport are colored by the fact that an extraordinarily large percentage of its population has for nearly 50 years been employed by the City of Chicago through Democratic Party patronage. Thus, on most issues of political morality, Bridgeport's attitude is, "We didn't see nuttin'." However, when it comes to sex, Bridgeport, with its large Irish Catholic population, is sincerely against there being too much. And too much as far as Bridgeport is concerned isn't much at all. So Daley grew up and rose to power in a neighborhood where the sins of politics were looked upon as small, while the sins of sex were considered mortal.

Now, more than two years after Daley's death, the antisexual influence of his 21-year administration on matters prurient remains, largely because most of the "wunnerful" people who elected him and his successor, Bridgeport boy Michael Bilandic, like it that way.

Bridgeport is not unique in its sexual attitudes. Wherever you find white lower-middle-class ethnic neighborhoods, you find the sexual morality, more or less, of Bridgeport--and the attitudes in black neighborhoods (37 percent of Chicago is black) are in some ways even more conservative. For this reason, sex for sale--prostitution, strip joints, porno movies--is confined to small pockets of movable and immovable space, and the neighborhoods and precincts where liberal sexual attitudes abound are obvious and few.

The number-one area, the Alice's Restaurant of sex in Chicago, is the Near North Side. It's bounded on the south and north by Chicago Avenue and North Avenue, respectively, and on the east by Lake Michigan. On the west...well, it goes as far as property values hold up. The Near North Side has everything, including the Playboy Building and the Chicago Playboy Mansion. An abundance of condominiums, town houses, fine old brownstone buildings and modern middle-income housing developments such as Carl Sandburg Village have, for the past 20 years, attracted a high percentage of Chicago's young single working adults. The result is that almost any public place on the Near North Side holds possibilities for striking up a meaningful relationship.

In the middle of the Near North Side is the roughly eight-square-block Rush Street area bounded by Chestnut on the south, Division on the north and State Street on the west. Here one can pick up a prostitute (male or female), go to a bottomless joint (and get laid in the back room), see porn movies, buy sex aids, cruise the most popular singles bars and discos, and even see a first-run movie. Unlike New York or Los Angeles, where theaters, movies, discos, posh restaurants and sexual diversions are to be found in a variety of neighborhoods, the only area in Chicago where all those options are available is the Near North Side.

There are other free-fire-zone neighborhoods, but they offer different kinds of sexuality than the pay-as-you-go of Rush. Among them are Hyde Park, the home of interracial sex (and intellectual sex); Uptown and New Town, where gay is not only beautiful but also powerful; the Gold Coast, where live the bankers, stockbrokers and lawyers who make Chicago swing; Rogers Park, second only to the Near North Side as the heartland of the single liberated heterosexual; and the suburbs around O'Hare Airport, where B-clubs and callgirls are conveniently available to conventioneers and nearby hotels host private orgies nearly every weekend.

But for the most part, the vast physical space of Chicago is occupied by working families lumped together by race and class in residential neighborhoods. One third of Chicago's 3,400,000 population is married; one third is under the age of 18 and a surprising percentage of the rest live at home. Sex is somewhat of a problem in the neighborhoods. Everybody knows everybody else and, consequently, everybody else's business, which makes it hard on he who would schtup the neighbor's daughter.

To understand the sexual psychology of Chicago, it's necessary to understand the moral pressures of the neighborhood. In Los Angeles, for instance, half the city's population is from somewhere else. There are no parents or old school chums to hear about you being taken to a hospital, covered with Love Butter and complaining of an unremovable cock ring; no old schoolteachers to bump into on the street when you're smashed on 'Ludes and rubbing your lover's ass inside his or her pants. In Los Angeles, Big Brother is on vacation like everybody else. In Chicago, however, he's just around the corner, just a few el stops away. Because of this, most native Chicagoans cannot allow themselves to be totally wild. What they lack in liberation, though, they make up for in feeling, because they feel wilder than hell, just as one would feel more daring doing it in a closet at City Hall than at any orgy. Some prefer it like that.

•

Bill and Cathy are married, but not to each other. They are Polish, in their early 20s and are lifelong residents of an eight-square-block section of southwest Chicago. Both say they felt pressured by their families to settle down as soon as they graduated from high school. Cathy, a redhead with green eyes, walks with a tottering, swaying motion. Her husband works days and Cathy works nights, so they don't see much of each other. Bill, a muscular greaser (greasers still exist on Chicago's Southwest Side, untouched by the ravages of time, Andy Warhol or Timothy Leary), is married to a Polish Catholic girl who is practicing early to be an old, prudish, fat grandmother. She is already fat and prudish and is merely waiting for the years to transform her completely. Bill and Cathy work together at the same printing company, he as a pressman, she as a typist. He is horny, so is she. They meet on lunch breaks and drive to Bill's apartment (his wife also works nights) and frantically get it on. Punch in, punch out. A typical timecard affair. Cathy only lets him go down on her and fuck her in the ass because she still feels faithful to her husband. In Chicago, there is morality, even in sin.

Cathy and Bill both get off on the fear of being caught. They enjoy the urgency of having only 50 minutes to complete the act. Sometimes, when one or the other of them is held over by a supervisor and they have less time, they just go out into the dark parking lot and fuck in Cathy's car. Cathy says, "I'm just a dirty little girl [honest!] and the thought that my husband or Bill's wife might catch us makes me, well, you know." She blushes. Her favorite scare was the time Bill forgot to wash his hands and her husband saw the outlines of two blue hands on her buttocks. "I told him the girls at work played a joke and painted ink hands on the toilet seats in the women's john. He believed me."

•

But before the conundrums of marriage come romance and courtship. Wherever one finds morality in abundance, there one will also find romance in abundance, and Chicago is a romantic city at heart.

Chicago is a two-season city: summer and winter. In winter, it's mainly a matter of weekend parties, hanging out at neighborhood bars and, for winter-jock enthusiasts, an occasional star-crossed encounter at Morrie Mages Sports Store. Probably the most romantic thing about Chicago in the winter is the harsh cold itself. If you find a lover in the winter in Chicago, you'll most likely keep her or him until spring, because they ain't goin' nowhere while the gentle lake breeze (and the subsequent 40-below wind-chill factor) is roaming the streets. If you don't find a lover by winter, you probably won't make it to spring.

In the summer, Chicago transforms itself. There are colorful art fairs that attract thousands of people and provide wonderful opportunities to mingle with strangers in a more intimate way than usual. There are poetry readings, traveling amusement parks and street-corner banjo pickers. There are free concerts wherever there's a bank or a shopping mall. There's a lot of free entertainment in the summer, many opportunities to pause a moment, make eye contact, take a chance.

And of all Chicago's free entertainment, probably the most popular is its oldest "landmark," Lake Michigan. There's nothing more romantic than a picnic beneath a shady tree near a lake, nothing more sexy than a stroll along a rock-lined shore. Everything one can possibly imagine happening near a body of water at one time or another happens on the lake front. Connections are made there, gang-bangs happen there, late-night disco couples high on poppers and (continued on page 176)Sex in Chicago(continued from page 126) music have been known to go there, rip off their sweaty clothes and fuck under the moonlight.

Singles

Once you leave the lake front, sex in Chicago can be downright expensive. A local magazine art director, with ample experience bedding women in Chicago as well as on both coasts, describes his town's unique romantic ambience this way:

"In Chicago, most of the women are looking for marriage, love or security, or all three. Therefore, what's considered attractive about a man here is entirely different from what L.A. women consider attractive. In L.A., influence is important. A guy who knows a casting director or a producer personally can get a lot of women, even if he's flat broke. But in Chicago, knowing Steven Spielberg and being broke is much less sexy than making six figures as a used-car dealer, though making six figures as a lawyer or doctor is even sexier."

To be a mover in Chicago, a man has to wear well-cut clothes, have his hair just right, drive the best damn car he can afford, be prepared to buy endless drinks at too dollars per and, if he's smart, be able to offer as a last-ditch enticement a dab of cocaine. When these expenses are added up, it is obvious that only the well-heeled can survive the sexual wars.

Money is the coin not only of white Chicago's romantic realm but of black Chicago's as well. Tyrone, a handsome 29-year-old West Side black whose income as a telephone operator will never exceed $11,000, has had a rough time competing with the growing number of young men earning $30,000 and up on the relatively affluent South Side. He paints an extremely unromantic picture of money's aphrodisiacal power over young black women.

"Every woman I've met is money-conscious. And if the sister's got her own job, her standards are even higher. She expects expensive dinners, she wants to ride around in a BMW, and all that crap. What's happened here is you got a number of brothers who've gotten over, gotten into some big money, and naturally they flashin' it on the creamies. The creamies done got spoilt. Don't want to have nothin' to do with a dude that ain't got no money."

This is not just heartless gold digging but the values of the neighborhood at work again, those prehistoric laws that dictate that a woman should grant her favors to only the best possible provider. Certainly, not all of Chicago's young single women are looking for a husband; but many select their partners, if only for a night, as though they were. It's the Darwinian dance of natural selection.

The dance reaches its peak in Near North Side singles bars and discos, and is seen in its archetypal purity at Faces, the city's one truly famous disco at 940 North Rush Street. Faces' 37-year-old creator and part owner, gaunt and mustachioed Jay Emerich, understands the ground rules for the Chicago dance and has a profitable sensitivity to the requirements for its setting.

Faces is the private club in Chicago. It costs $300 for a year's membership and $50 to renew. A dress code (no jeans, work shirts, gym shoes or sandals) is strictly enforced. The kinds of people who make Faces the high-energy arena it is are not so much famous as they are wealthy and/or powerful. Executives from the network stations and young local real-estate tycoons go there. You don't find many steelworkers there, nor shoe salesmen. Emerich sees to it.

"Sure I discriminate," he admits. "I look at the membership application cards, check the professions. I want only the cream of Chicago's singles. This is a private club and new members can only come in if they're sponsored by an old one."

Right now, with a membership of 5500, Faces has a moratorium on new members. The age of the average male Faces member is 35, the average female is six or seven years younger. The women-- models, secretaries, designers, store buyers, divorcees and not a few high-priced callgirls--look as if they just stepped out of the pages of Mademoiselle or Vogue. They are perhaps the most beautiful and fashionable young women in Chicago; the men are unquestionably among the most desirable bachelors. Here, sex is a high-stakes game, played with certain ground rules.

"The women who go to Faces," says a 34-year-old lawyer who's been a member for four years, "like to watch a guy for a while before they'll sleep with him. Sometimes you eyeball each other for a year on the dance floor before you get it on. Of course, it usually doesn't take that long if she's interested. Sometimes they'll pick you up, which is actually just flirting until you ask her out. Then, if you're smart, you do nothing but talk the first date. Just talk. Don't even touch her except for a goodnight kiss. Act like you've got other things on your mind. Almost always, if there's a second date, she sleeps with you."

Probably the only disco where the smell of sex hangs more heavily in the air than it does at Faces is the B.B.C., a few blocks north of Faces at State and Division. In a way, B.B.C. is merely Faces' younger sister. B.B.C.'s crowd is in its mid-20s to early 30s, so it's naturally a bit poorer than the crowd at Faces, which is ten years older. But the 25-year-olds at B.B.C. are the cream of their age bracket. Most of the men already make decent middle-class incomes, enough to have four- to five-room apartments complete with excellent stereo systems and a nice stash. The women, mostly in their late teens and early 20s, are almost all clerks, secretaries, students or nurses. Whereas the leisure crowd at Faces doesn't begin really cooking until after midnight and goes on to four A.M., most habitués of B.B.C., particularly the women, work nine to fives. So moves are necessarily quicker, less subtle than at Faces. B.B.C.'s sexual reality is reflected in the enforced loose dress code and the two-dollar door charge. There's no time for a seven-course relationship at B.B.C. It's a quick lunch. The volume of the music, louder than at any other disco in Chicago, drowns out conversation, so everybody has no choice but to communicate with his or her body. Women are likely to leave immediately with a man they like rather than go through the whole evening doing the okee-doke. And they're more likely to respond to the Sylvester Stallone approach than the David Niven.

Just as most of Chicago's discos are located within a six-block radius of North Rush, so are nearly all of its singles bars. They line Division Street for a block east and west of Rush. On Friday and Saturday nights, literally thousands of people may wander in and out of all of them in search of that magic eye contact. It is a movable crowd, if not a movable feast.

The four hot singles bars, in order of heat, are She-Nannigans, which has gradually eclipsed the legendary Butch McGuire's, P.S. Chicago and Wood Hue's. Because the same people move among all the bars, one can't really say that any of them has a distinct clientele.

Playboy's Chicago Telephone Survey revealed that 30 percent of the people who had been to singles bars had gotten lucky. An informal survey, conducted by the writer, supported this finding. Only about a third of the women sleep with men they leave with the first night, except for Saturday night, "desperation night," when maybe four out of ten do. (continued on page 206)Sex in Chicago(continued from page 176) On the second date, however, the majority do.

"We see a lot of girls here who come from the suburbs, girls from the western and southwestern neighborhoods, who've just gotten their first job and first apartment in this area. Girls who lived with their parents," says Larry, a bartender at P.S. Chicago who's also worked at Butch's. "They come in with low-cut dresses and crosses around their necks. They're so scared that they won't get picked up and even more scared that they will that they just sit and quake, literally quake, man."

On the other hand, there are women who make the men quake.

"I love to fuck," says a 28-year-old blonde secretary who lives in the professionally hip Old Town district, just northwest of the Rush Street area. She goes alone to She-Nannigans whenever she wants to pick up what she passingly refers to as "some hunk." "Trying to find a man who can just fuck without any problems is very hard in this scene. Fortunately, I like to get head more than I like to fuck, and everybody, I mean at least 90 percent of the guys down here, will give head. Not necessarily good head, but head."

But the discos and singles bars are, for most of Chicago's singles, a phase of their lives, to be endured until they can find a more or less monogamous relationship: love, at best; a satisfying one-to-one sex relationship, at least. And amazingly, they do.

The vast majority of young working singles are more inclined to look for love among their friends, in their neighborhoods or at work than in a disco.

Chicagoans find love at work so frequently that there are a number of restaurants whose primary function is to enhance intra- (and sometimes inter-) company romance. Among them are Sweetwater, Harry's Café, Arnie's, Melvin's Outdoor Café and The Brassary, all on the Near North Side. They're all your basic plant-and-tastefully-ornate-natural-wood type establishments, with clever menus to inspire clever conversations. For intracompany romance, lunch is a crucial repast in Chicago, and the restaurants can barely seat all the customers at noon.

Even more essential to the development of long-term one-to-ones than all the discos, singles bars and ornate restaurants are Chicago's neighborhood bars. It is Chicago's good grace to compensate for its puny and qualitatively mediocre singles-bar and disco scene by having every kind of neighborhood bar one could possibly imagine. In a neighborhood bar, a casual familiarity can develop between men and women that easily leads to the friendship necessary for a long-term affair.

Chicago blacks have their own places, and the best of these are on the Southeast Side, where most of middle-class black Chicago lives. Just as all the North Side bars have the same genuine-wood look, the popular South Side bars also have a standard look: pastel decors (with pink, white and red being a favorite combination), carpeting, lots of mirrors and an aquarium over the bar.

Four main bars support a good singles scene: the two Godfather taverns (Godfather I at 4640 South Cottage Grove Avenue and Godfather II at 1545 East 87th Street), the Dating Game at 8926 South Stony Island and the South Side's most famous bar, Flukie's at 8211 South Cottage Grove. Flukie's is solid mirrors, reflecting the red, black and white decor into infinity. There are bar counters along both walls and an oval counter in the center of the room. The counters are lined with thickly padded Naugahyde, so that anyone happening to pass out mid-drink can do so without banging his head. The pickup technique is the same as on the North Side: Buy her a drink.

Other similarities to the North Side scene are that fashionable and tasteful attire is preferred, that lawyers and doctors are extremely successful in picking up women and that oral sex, once considered by most Chicago black men to be a disgusting white perversion, has now become an essential technique in the repertoire of singles-bar movers.

Ralph, a 34-year-old used-car salesman who works the Godfathers I and II and takes some of the prettiest black women on the South Side to his one-bedroom $300-a-month high-rise apartment, expresses the sexual shift this way: "Earlier in my life, I went by what the older men said. You'd hear 'em say, 'Afor I ate one, I'd fall in a hole,' and I thought it was filthy. But once I did it, I thought, 'Hey, this ain't so bad,' and the view of the chick from down there just killed me. I think more guys, particularly young guys, would have gotten into it sooner if it wasn't drilled into our heads so much that it's nasty. And the fact is, you get more young chicks that way. Seems like every chick I meet 25 or younger wants me to give her some cap [head]."

But despite the recent liberalization of sexual attitudes toward oral sex, Chicago's black community is still basically more conservative than the white one. Straight fucking without a whole lot of fooling around is the preferred sexual activity.

JoAnne, a 38-year-old black career woman who admits to a healthy sexual appetite, sums up the general attitude this way: "Once I had this brother over who said he'd like to put whipped cream all over me and lick it off, and I told him there was a can in the refrigerator. Why didn't he just go and drink it straight, and when he'd had his fill, then, come back and make love?"

Prostitution

While Chicago is, at the neighborhood level, a moral city, it is also a convention city; the number-one convention city, with the largest exposition center in America, McCormick Place. Last year, Chicago hosted 1089 conventions, 174 trade shows and 15,692 confabs, bringing a total of 2,500,000 people into the city to spend about $525,000,000. If only five of every 100 male conventioneers are looking for paid sex when they come to Chicago, the lack of it would disappoint some 125,000 male visitors a year. And Chicago likes happy conventioneers. Thus, moral though Chicago is, it needs prostitutes to promote business. But it just doesn't want to see them.

Street hookers provide most of the sex for sale in Chicago, followed in order by B-clubs, massage parlors and discreet callgirl operations. Chicago vice policemen estimate that 80 percent of Chicago's prostitutes are black, 15 percent are white and 5 percent are Hispanic.

Most of Chicago's hookers come from the black ghettos and housing projects and from nearby poorer cities: Gary, East Chicago, East St. Louis, Moline. Compared with prostitute populations in other major cities, Chicago has fewer drug addicts. This is reflected in the relatively low number of crimes involving hookers robbing or pickpocketing Johns. And while most Chicago prostitutes have boyfriends, relatively few have pimps. Chicago's hookers tend to be independent businesswomen, fending for themselves in a legal and political atmosphere that demands that they be subtle, clever.

Chicago prostitutes cannot be too brazen, for brazenness is taken as a challenge by the police, who have developed an eerie sense of how obvious prostitution can be before it begins grating on a neighborhood's sense of morality. The mode of dress cannot be too whorish. A slightly short skirt, long hair or (as with most black prostitutes) a shoulder-length wig, boots in the winter, heels in the summer. The manner of pickup cannot be too obvious. The customer must make an offer first. No running out into the street and hawking from car to car, no congregating in bunches of 12 and 15. The girls generally travel in pairs (particularly after a couple of murders of prostitutes in 1977 on the Near North Side) and take their stations on or near street corners, standing in doorways.

The most common piece of business is fellatio--first, because the customers want it and, second, because it often takes no more than five minutes and can be done in parked cars on side streets, gangways, alleys or basement parking lots. Some prostitutes don't take car tricks because they fear being picked up by an undercover cop. These girls like to work at intersections where there are three or four nearby points of rendezvous, or on major avenues or strips. The main areas, as of this writing, are:

• Rush Street, north of Chicago Avenue and south of Division and in the streets off Rush.

• In the four square blocks surrounding Dearborn and Oak, sufficiently west of the Rush Street section not to be included in it.

• Broadway, from Belmont north to Wilson Avenue, and in the side streets off Broadway, is the main street for prostitutes in Chicago. It cuts through Edgewater, New Town and Uptown, and most of the white streetwalkers work these neighborhoods, along with a considerable number of black and Latino streetwalkers.

Prostitution, like nearly everything else in Chicago, is divided racially. The trade on the South Side is all black, as is most of the West Side trade. In the black areas, prices are cheaper: $25 gets you a hotel room and a fuck. The same $25 in the Rush Street area or on Broadway will get you no more than a blow job in an alley. To lie with the North Side ladies costs a total of $40 minimum, between the hotel room and the sex, and more, usually $50 to $75. On the South Side, extras (fellatio or letting a man perform cunnilingus) are $10-$15. On Broadway and on Rush, extras cost $15 to $25. Many white and Latino prostitutes don't take black customers, and if they do, charge them extra.

Obviously, conventioneers have to vie with natives for the attention of Chicago's streetwalkers. But if they choose not to do so, they can always go to the B-lounges, those "clubs" that advertise bottomless dancers and charge incredible money for a glass of Seven-Up. Native Chicagoans seldom go to these places more than once or twice if they can find sex any other kind of way, because the B-lounges are unquestionably the least value for your money.

There are a few B-lounges scattered through Chicago's northwest suburbs, most notably Club Taray and the Roman House, which cater to the hotel trade around O'Hare Airport. But the largest concentration of B-lounges is, of course, in the Rush Street area. Within a one-block area, one can find more than a half-dozen joints, replete with shills on the sidewalk, competing for the out-of-town dollar.

At a typical operation, one is escorted to a table after having paid six dollars at the door for the prerequisite two drinks (at some places, you pay four dollars at the door just to get in, then you have to buy two drinks). A young woman soon joins you and introduces herself. The next part is tricky. She whispers in your ear all the things she would like to do for you and offers you the opportunity to go to a back room with her to split a bottle of champagne.

A bottle of champagne usually runs about $50. In some clubs, it goes for as high as $150. In other places, you buy the champagne and, when you get to the back room, she tells you if you want to do anything except talk, you'll have to come up with more money. Often the B-lounges do not actually have liquor licenses, so the "beer" available is near beer, and the champagne is grape juice or soda water. After the proposition has been agreed on, comes a great moment in merchandising. Since most of the conventioneers and salesmen who are the B-lounges' lifeblood don't have that kind of cash on them, the B-lounges put the total bill on a credit card. American Express, Diners Club or Carte Blanche are preferred.

A somewhat better deal than the B-lounges can be had in Chicago's massage parlors, though they're dying out fast. At present, there are only five well-known "leisure spas," and all but one are on the North Side.

Unlike New York and Los Angeles sex spas, Chicago's advertise little, picking up most of their customers from word of mouth and walk-ins. All five are private clubs, which means that before one can sample the goods, he must become a member. To become a member requires a $5 to $25 fee and extensive identification, including proof of one's place of employment. The stringent identification requirements are primarily to weed out vice cops, who nonetheless manage to raid most establishments at least five times a year.

Once a member, one is offered fellatio or fucking for $25 to $50 "complete," which means that one can get satisfaction without tipping the girls extra. Most parlors offer kinky "extras" for extra money, and the most exclusive and well-appointed of them has rooms equipped with racks, chains and whips. There the specialty is "English"--the girls spank you or whip you lightly with thin wooden rods.

While Chicago's B-girls are generally pretty and the streetwalkers range from good to bad to ugly, the girls in Chicago's massage parlors (about half black and half white, with an occasional Latino) are among the plainest, most foul-tempered women in the world. We are told the story of one unfortunate man whose fetish involved dressing in a nun's habit and then being humiliated (spat upon, whipped, reviled, etc.) by a woman. He went to a North Side massage parlor with a paltry stable of four girls, was led into the back room with a girl and, after telling her about his fetish, changed into his habit. "Humiliate me," he said. She burst into laughter and shouted, "You want to be humiliated? I'll humiliate you, you sick motherfucker," at which she threw open the door to the room, ran out to the street and began calling to passers-by, shouting, "Hey, everybody, this nut here wants to be humiliated! We got some weirdo in here in a nun's outfit who wants his ass humiliated!" The customer, too horrified to enjoy his humiliation, ran from the parlor, leaving his regular clothes behind.

The poor fellow should have known that there are better ways to act out one's sexual fantasies in Chicago. They are expensive, but worth it. They're called callgirls.

"I do not consider myself a madam," says tall, svelte, 36-year-old Geraldine B., Chicago's top organizer of erotic delights. "I prefer to call myself a fantasy broker. I can arrange anything a man wants for the right price. Anything."

For a city as large as Chicago, it's surprising that, according to Geraldine, there are only seven or eight women like herself, women who operate exclusive callgirl services for those who can afford to spend $100 a flat hour, $500 a night and $1000 for a three-day weekend with a genuinely beautiful, fashionable and reasonably intelligent young woman who considers it her job to please her customer totally. Between them, these call-girl madams use the services of perhaps 250 girls. Each madam has six to ten "regular girls," who get the largest part of her business, and a list of 20 or so others who meet the standards expected of a high-priced callgirl and are willing to take occasional jobs. A large number of these part-time girls are stewardesses, secretaries and clerks in fashionable North Michigan Avenue stores. The standard arrangement between the madams (most of whom are in their mid-30s) and the girls is that out of every $100, the girl gets $60 and the madam $40.

Geraldine sees her service as a broadening, educational experience for many of her clients. "Chicago executives are more uptight than execs in other cities, like New York and L.A. I have introduced many of them to the experience of multiple sex--threesomes, orgies. I have given them the chance to see two women making love. I have introduced hundreds of them to cocaine, marijuana, Quaaludes and poppers. They learn these things from me, then take them home to their wives. Many a businessman and his wife feel they have one up on their counterparts if they've snorted coke or smoked Maui Wowie. We teach our customers about fashion, new lifestyle trends, and so on. My customers are enriched by their experience."

According to Geraldine, most orgies and other forms of kinky sex occur in private homes. Her kinkiest customer by far is a fellow who lives alone and has a large house in an exclusive suburb. "He tore down all the walls on the first floor and put tracks in on the ceiling. He's got a harness rigged up so he can hang from the track in mid-air, push a button and float from one end of his house to the other. The service I provide is to send over three or four girls who dress up like flowers, with petals around their heads and everything, and stand on platforms alongside the track. Then this gentleman puts on a bumblebee outfit and flies through the air making buzzing noises with his penis out and 'pollinates' ail the flowers. But please don't mention this, because he might recognize himself and I wouldn't want him embarrassed."

Suppose, we suggested, we change the story to his being a hummingbird, flying along, licking nectar out of the flowers?

"Well, I guess that's all right He wouldn't recognize himself that way, I don't think."

We found one final comment from Geraldine interesting. She admits that despite her service, Chicago isn't really the place to be when one wants to blow one's circuits on sex. "When people with money in Chicago really want to go all-out sexually," she says, "they generally fly to New York."

Swingers

The right to remain anonymous is a cardinal law in Chicago's swinging underground. The Playboy Telephone Survey revealed that six percent of the adults in the Chicago area had been to sex parties at least once. There are probably no more than 6000 couples in Chicago involved in some sort of organized swinging, and the threat of discovery compels most of them to live double lives. Experienced Chicago swingers say they've met many a famous public figure passing himself off as John Smith, and even at swingers' "socials," where no one actually disrobes, an awful lot of couples are John and Mary Don, who give out only a P.O. Box rather than a phone number or address.

Mike LaCroix is a rather anonymous type himself. He's of medium build but hard and lean, like a wrestler, and he wears his longish blond hair in the manner of Dennis Hopper, a droopy mustache rounding out his basic late-Sixties look. He wears tight-fitting clothes and leaves his shirt unbuttoned two-thirds of the way down. His girlfriend, Robin, is sleek and very sensuous-looking, with dark hair, dark complexion and a small, erotic mouth with perpetually pursed lips. (She's also "versatile," meaning she swings both ways.) They look like any other mid-American couple on the way to a rock concert.

Mike, 36, makes his entire living off swinging. With Robin's help, he holds "socials," which are opportunities for swingers to meet other swingers. Working from a mailing list of 3000 (comprised of personal contacts, members of a club and bar he used to run and from a swinging magazine he used to publish), LaCroix invites 60 couples once a month to a suburban-hotel banquet room, usually in Rosemont, near Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Many times, couples arrange to rent a room that night if they meet couples equally primed, while other couples merely go home with a few phone numbers and make their arrangements later.

For those hot to trot on the premises, LaCroix is prepared. He rents a large party suite along with the banquet room, and "in the party room," he smiles, "it's orgy time." In the orgy room, you don't have to swing, but you do have to take off your clothes at the door.

"Disrobing breaks the ice," says LaCroix, "but it also has its risks. It all depends on the first six or seven couples who arrive. If the first people up in the orgy suite are potbellied men smoking cigars, the good-looking people are going to say, 'This ain't for us.'"

Because Mike's is such a popular club, and because the people who attend his socials have a lot of money to spend, the hotels he operates in wink at the goings on. Mike collects $15 per couple ($20 if hors d'oeuvres are served) at the door, lets the hotel operate a cash bar and gets the banquet room free (the hotel knowing a lot of rooms will be rented that night).

Mike is an entrepreneur. His pride comes not from his sexual prowess ("For me, twice in one night is a good night") but from his ability to get rich off Chicago swingers. He now nets about $800 to $1000 a month from Executive North, the name of his swinging club, but he says he has the backing to open the first on-premise swing club in Chicago, modeled after Plato's Retreat in New York. He'd charge $25 per couple, which he figures would net him about $20,000 a month. Mike says he's completed all the legal research; the only thing he sees standing in his way is Chicago's conservative political atmosphere.

"Chicago is five years behind New York, ten behind Los Angeles. Running an on-premises club in Chicago will be difficult until the Daley-created Irish-Catholic machine cracks. Cardinal Cody dictates the sexual attitudes of Chicago, not Bilandic. Anything else, crime, murder, can run rampant here, but not sex."

•

Once a month, at nine P.M. on Saturday night, 50 or 60 people, mostly married, mostly in their late 20s to mid-40s, gather in Don Jameson's four-bedroom bungalow in a predominantly Polish neighborhood on the Northwest Side of Chicago. At the door, each couple gives Don $15. Don, a 40-year-old former semipro football player, is holding an orgy.

For their $15, couples get a few drinks in Jameson's basement bar, where socializing and negotiations for the evening are conducted. Occasionally, someone will walk into the basement without clothes, but most nights, it's like any other cocktail party down there.

Upstairs is where the action takes place. Two of the bedrooms have no doors. "Those are for foursomes to eight-somes," Don says. "Anybody can just walk by and climb in." One of the rooms is equipped with two double beds. Another is all pillows and carpetings "I get a lot of people who come to watch," he says. "Why should I care if a guy just wants to watch?"

Don's about 6'2", a rugged 190 and something of a peacock: His clothes fit perfectly, he wears expensive jewelry and perpetual sunglasses. A native Chicagoan, Jameson has been swinging for nine years and says he knows 2000 swinging Chicago couples. He admits that swinging is "85 percent of my existence," and his total income comes from his parties and a few real-estate investments. He has no regular job but drives a white Cadillac.

Don has seen it all. It is mere routine when one of his friends calls to invite Don over to watch a dog fuck the friend's wife. It is just another day's work when he picks up a girl, blindfolds her, ties her up and delivers her to a friend's house with a dungeon in the basement, where the girl (whose fantasy he's creating) is chained to a gigantic wheel and tortured by Don's friend. Meanwhile, Don goes upstairs and, along with another friend, sandwiches the wife of the man who owns the house. "We have had fantastic times," says Don, "and we always part friends."

Don has seen so much, in fact, that your ordinary kink hardly moves him at all anymore. "Like, I was in my friend's dungeon one night and he's chaining his wife to a cross. He put a hood over her head and a rubber dildo in her mouth. Then he put her in this corset that shrunk her waist and pushed her hips out. Then he used a vibrator on her. It was interesting, you know, and I kind of got involved, but it wasn't the kind of thing where I thought, 'Gee, I can't wait to do it again.'"

•

Since blacks in Chicago are virtually excluded from the organized swinging circuit, they have to swing on their own. Most orgies are held by private men's clubs, which invite an assortment of free-thinking women and prostitutes to a jointly kept secret apartment (if any club members are married) or a hotel or motel. Live sex shows are popular warm-ups for these orgies, along with fun contests such as "whose dick can fill a shot glass." There is a certain sense of humor about the whole thing on the South Side that the North Side swingers lack.

The Gents are a club whose members are mostly professional or managerial blacks between the ages of 30 and 40, who live in or near the upper-income residential section of the South Side called Chatham. When the Gents hold a "club set," they charge $10 per person at the door (many single men come, since the Gents make sure there are extra women there) and $15 per couple.

"Black swingers are even more cool about their thing than the whites," one member says, "and a lot of the black swinging isn't really organized at all. Two dudes decide to do it to one of their girlfriends. Or a pair of couples just decides to trade off. Or a party with a bunch of folks inclined to get naked suddenly becomes an orgy. That kind of thing. But when blacks swing, they sometimes go on for two, three days. They don't do it so often, but when they do, one comes to such a party prepared to savor flesh with people also there to savor flesh. We immerse ourselves in flesh until we are satisfied."

Black swingers are more wary of newcomers than are whites. "You have to be around for a while," the member says. "We get to know someone in, say, a bar. If a couple keeps dropping hints that they're looking for a scene, eventually someone who's connected to a scene will subtly question them until everybody has an understanding. Then, maybe the new couple gets invited to a party."

Gays

Chicago has always had a surprisingly liberal attitude toward the estimated 160,000 homosexuals who live in the area. The state legal code is more protective of gay rights than are the laws of most states. But everything in Chicago hinges on discretion, and in return for its benign neglect, Chicago has asked only that the gays refrain from running it, so to speak, into the ground.

Most Chicago homosexuals work, and many in high-paying jobs. Most of them live on the North Side and, like every other special group in Chicago, they have their own neighborhood. Gay real-estate developers have nearly taken over a roughly mile and a half square area of the North Side called New Town. New Town (not to be confused with Old Town or Uptown) was once called Lake-view, and it died as a neighborhood ten years ago, as whites were replaced by transient black, Latino and American Indian families. Rents were cheap, the apartments large; the buildings were rich in architecture and there were plenty of empty storefronts available. Its nearness to the lake gave it great investment potential, which gay businessmen immediately recognized. Gays began buying up New Town property, restoring it, and very soon, property values in New Town began to skyrocket. Apartments that ten years ago rented for $120 a month now rent for $400 a month. Almost overnight, New Town became the gay ghetto, "Homo Heights" as some call it. About three quarters of New Town's population is male, between the ages of 17 and 40. Their salaries range from $12,000 to $60,000 and many of them have college degrees that are doing them no visible good, since most gay men in Chicago strive to obtain "creative" jobs that allow them flexible hours: hair stylist, photo stylist, creative director, art director, window-dressing consultant, etc. Chicago gays have learned New Town's lesson well, and the single most popular goal for working gays is to purchase a piece of property. Chicago respects property.

Because of the high rents in the areas where gays choose to live, many share apartments with one or two other men, not so much for love as for sex and economics. Having relatively high combined incomes and no families to support allows them to spend a considerable amount of money on their sexual lifestyles; in New Town, the average pair of gay roommates may, between them, have three to six sexual partners during any given week.

Because Chicago is a two-season city, gay cruising also has two seasons: indoor and outdoor. The outdoor season is summer and, aside from the streets of New Town, the main cruising areas are (where else?) along the lake front. There are two hot spots, one major and one minor. The minor one is the rocks at Belmont, which has become Chicago's first real gay beach. Both gays and lesbians go there, and police make very rare visits, despite the fact that dope is smoked openly.

The major spot for men is Lincoln Park, which, like Griffith Park in Los Angeles, has been a gay cruising ground for many years. But each year, as Chicago gays have felt a little more powerful, a little more daring, the scene in Lincoln Park has gotten a little closer to the edge. Most of the action takes place at night behind a refreshment stand at the north end of the park, where pathways so worn they will never grow grass lead in and out, around, and up and down two small hills (dubbed "homo hills" by park regulars). Most of the sex is oral, the ever popular group grope (three or more men feeling each other's crotches) and ass fucking, which gays say is somewhat of an art form. Those into getting fucked are easy to spot because they never drop their pants and wear long raincoats to conceal the fact that their pants have a split seam in the back.

Male prostitution is also an outdoor activity, and historic Bughouse Square, the nickname for the park in front of the Newberry Library on Walton Street, where people used to gather to hear public debates on weighty social issues, has now become a prime location for gay hustlers. Most of those who hang out there are young runaways and men trying to look younger than they are. The boys, ranging between 15 and 18 years of age, are for sale. The men who drive to the park to purchase their services are from the suburbs or from farther out of town. Many of them are married and only have homosexual sex far from home.

Probably the number-one indoor cruising arena on the North Side is The Century, a multilevel indoor shopping mall just north of Diversey on Clark.

"You're just not gay if you haven't cruised The Century," says a 34-year-old gay waiter. "I mean, The Century has all but saved the life of the diehard winter cruising gay. You take the elevator to the top, then slowly come down the circular ramp or pose on the rail. And try to make eye contact with someone."

Just as there are two heterosexual Chicagos, the white and the black, so there are two gay ones. "There's a lot of ethnic pride among black gays," says a black 34-year-old bisexual teacher, "and the blacks who go to the North Side are just trying to get away from momma." (The pressures of the neighborhood again.)

Black gays seem to feel that black straights are more tolerant of them than white straights are of white homosexuals. "I'll put it this way," says the school-teacher. "If a black faggot accidentally hits on a straight black man in Chicago, he's less likely to get his head beat in than if a white faggot hits on your average white straight. It's just safer to be homosexual in the black community.

There aren't many exclusively gay black bars, because (unlike the North Side) gays and straights mingle fairly comfortably in the popular South Side singles bars. The Godfather bars are prime places for gay pickups as well as straight. The most popular black gay bar is the Jeffery Pub, a very ordinary-looking small room with one counter, seats along the walls and a narrow aisle between. The atmosphere in the Jeffery Pub is usually subdued, reflecting the generally casual and low-key style of most Chicago black gays. Gay life on the South Side does have its kinky moments, however. One South Side proctologist who has a number of gay patients recalls removing ten ping-pong balls from one patient and three navel oranges from another. Has Anita Bryant heard about this?

•

In closing, one observation: Although Chicago is the sex capital of the Midwest, one probably has to be a Midwesterner to appreciate it. It's a cool city, surprisingly reserved for one of its size. Between the cold winters and the pervading influence of Catholic morality, people don't readily remove their clothes together. And when they do, it's not the casual sex one finds in warmer climes. It's sex for a payoff: money, security, marriage.

More than any other single ingredient, Chicago sex is fueled by money. No matter how a man looks or makes his living, he's bound to have better luck if he's upwardly mobile. Or, put simply: If you're looking for sex in Chicago, you not only have to work at it, you have to work for it. Only the flush survive.

" 'In Chicago, most of the women are looking for marriage, love or security, or all three.' "

(Text continued on page 217, "Sex and the Law in Chicago" follows on page 212.)

Sex and The Law in Chicago

Legally, Chicago is a fairly liberal city when it comes to sex. There are no laws that prohibit specific sexual acts between consenting adults and no laws aimed at homosexuals. The Chicago Police Department concentrates most of its efforts on holding down prostitution and pornography.

We say holding down rather than stamping out, because no one in the city government, least of all the cops, has any hopes of eradicating prostitution and porn. It's doubtful that they would even want to. Chicago is America's number-one convention city, and a bit of available sin is good for convention business.

The only time the Chicago Police Department goes into high gear against pornography is just before a mayoral election. It was a tradition under the administration of the late Mayor Daley and it was continued by his city council-appointed successor, Michael J. Bilandic, in the late spring of 1977, just before Bilandic went up for election.

Bilandic declared a much-ballyhooed "porn war," using the city's housing code to inspect adult book-stores, find minor violations and close them down. But a Federal judge ordered the reopening of most of the 34 stores closed down, saying the city was making selective use of the housing ordinance to attack the bookstores.

Two months later, the city council passed an antiporn ordinance (by a 45-0 vote) that requires that any new adult bookstores, adult moviehouses or nude and topless bars be confined to specially zoned commercial areas and not be located within two blocks of a church, school or residential area. In effect, the ordinance restricts porn shops to their present number (about 40) and location in Chicago, meaning that as far as the city council is concerned, Chicago has just enough porn to satisfy the local trade and the convention trade as well.

One administration official--who pleaded anonymity for obvious reasons--says the new attitude goes back to the death of Mayor Daley.

"The old man really hated pornography and he really wanted to get rid of it," he said, "but now he's gone--God rest him--and the new bunch isn't interested in being zealots. Live and let live as long as nobody complains too much--that's the attitude."

Whatever the official attitude, the vice-control division of the Chicago Police Department has to justify its pay checks, so somebody's got to get busted.

In 1978, vice cops made about 63 arrests on charges of selling or distributing obscene matter, and almost all of those resulted from raids on porn stores.

The boys in vice also conducted three raids in 1978 on the Festival, a porn moviehouse on the northern end of the Gold Coast at 3912 North Sheridan Road, where porn-film queens frequently appear in person to pose for customers with cameras.

But pornography is by far the lesser of two evils in the eyes of Chicago. The greater is prostitution.

•

After a series of scandals in the early Seventies concerning police corruption in tavern shakedowns (largely in the infamous 18th Police District on the Near North Side and in the West Side Austin District), then-police superintendent James B. Conlisk reorganized vice operations, creating an organized-crime division handling narcotics, prostitution and gambling. Because of the breakup of the old district-controlled vice units, organized prostitution--whorehouses, pimp stables, Mob-controlled prostitutes, etc.--cannot be assured of police protection. And because organized prostitution has pretty much died out, except for the B-lounges and a few exclusive callgirl services, the sex-for-pay field is left largely to the streetwalkers.

Police estimate that, including part-time callgirls, there are 1500 to 2000 women in Chicago who will sell their bodies for money. Of these, an estimated 1000 are streetwalkers. As a result, the majority of the more than 8000 arrests last year for prostitution were made by beat cops rather than by vice cops. (The Chicago Police Department also arrested more than 2000 men last year for prostitution-related charges, including pandering, pimping, engaging the services of a prostitute and prostitution. Few of those arrested were male prostitutes, and many of those were transvestites posing as women to heterosexual customers.) The 25-man vice-control unit specializes in underground and off-the-street prostitution, and by the end of 1978, vice officers had made 97 raids on B-clubs, 33 raids on massage parlors, 218 raids on callgirl operations (which could range from one girl to a stable of girls), 116 raids on houses of ill fame (many of these are included in the callgirl busts) and 114 arrests for pandering--the only felony in Illinois' prostitution statutes.

Soliciting is a class-A misdemeanor under Illinois law, punishable by a maximum $1000 fine and one year in prison, and a minimum of time served--the 24 to 48 hours a hooker is jailed before she goes to court.

Therefore, 95 percent of the prostitutes arrested plead guilty for time served, and the judges usually let them go. The reality is that prostitution busts in Chicago are a mere ritual designed to keep both the girls and the cops on their toes. Until 1976, the C.P.D. placed more emphasis on arresting streetwalkers than on arresting customers. But increased citizen complaints from the districts where streetwalkers congregated compelled the C.P.D. to begin using customer arrests as a deterrent to street prostitution. From 1976 through last year, the C.P.D. has conducted at least two "John raids" a year using police decoys. The most massive one occurred last December. Code-named Operation Angel, the operation involved 100 police decoys and resulted in the arrests of 40 prostitutes and nearly 600 customers.

According to police public-relations director Lieutenant Dave Mozee, "We know prostitution can never be eliminated. But we try to keep the prostitutes in constant motion. We don't let them settle in one area too long. That way, they don't get to be a chronic nuisance in any single neighborhood."

B-clubs, those bars with nude dancers and sperm-stained back rooms, are considered a chronic nuisance. The Chicago City Council had a long-standing ordinance against B-girls until 1977, when the ordinance was ruled unconstitutional by a state court because it discriminated against women. Before then, undercover police agents played a cat-and-mouse game with B-lounge operators, closing them down occasionally in flurries of raids. But now, Chicago's dozen or so B-lounges operate freely until an ordinance to replace the first one is drafted under the post-Daley administration of Mayor Bilandic.

Prostitution and pornography will never flourish in Chicago. An assistant state's attorney who prefers to remain anonymous said: "Law-enforcement officials in New York and San Francisco consider us a Bible Belt town. But it's not that we have a moral war against sex traffic. It's that excessive prostitution and pornography lead to seedy neighborhoods and seedy neighborhoods are dangerous. We just want visitors to feel that Chicago's a safe place to walk around."

Playboy's Chicago Telephone Survey

Chicago is the birthplace of PLAYBOY. We've been here for over 25 years, but we feel that we are just beginning to get to know the city. The rest of the country thinks of Chicago as the second city, the place where your luggage gets lost. The city of wide shoulders and the women who like to ride them. The Chicago Seven. The Democractic machine. The city that works. We wondered what our neighbors thought of themselves, and so we commissioned an outside firm to conduct a telephone survey of 554 randomly selected people between the ages of 18 and 40. We wanted to define the community standards of our home town, to ascertain the sexual temperature of the Windy City. The results, when compared with our first telephone survey of Miami, were enlightening.

How do Chicagoans rate their city? We asked people to estimate the sexual temperature of Chicago and four other major cities. Chicagoans were fairly restrained. They ranked Miami a frigid 65, placed themselves at a moderate 70, behind New York (74) and Los Angeles (77). Las Vegas was given a warm 83. Apparently, Chicagoans are used to the cold. The average of their ratings (73.8) is a good deal cooler than the average of the temperature ratings given by Miamians (their average--an astounding 82.8). A bare majority (52 percent) thought that Chicago had become more sexually permissive in the past five years, and 56 percent thought that the over-all temperature was on the rise. Once again, we found a high degree of loyalty: 24 percent thought Chicago was their kind of town and a great place to live. Forty-nine percent thought that it was a good place to live. And 83 percent thought there was a lot to do.

What kind of things? We asked the citizens to agree or disagree with various statements about Chicago.

Sixty percent thought that organized crime had a free hand in the Chicago area. So much for The Untouchables.

Eighty-two percent thought that drug use had increased over the past five years.

Eighty-nine percent said that if a person wanted to, he could find a place to gamble in the Chicago area, even though it was illegal.

Sixty-six percent thought that there had been an increase in the number of adult bookstores.

Ninety-four percent acknowledged the existence of gay bars in the area.

Eighty-one percent knew of places where prostitution was openly practiced. Fifty-seven percent noted that the number of massage parlors had increased over the years. An astonishing 46 percent thought that police were closing their eyes to prostitution in the Chicago area.

Those figures give a rough picture of the general moral climate of the city. How comfortable are Chicagoans with that climate? Not very. The Miami telephone survey revealed that our Southernmost city was surprisingly tolerant of homosexuality, prostitution and porn. In contrast, Chicagoans revealed a strong urge to repress the sexuality of their brothers. Graft and corruption are business as usual. Sex is not. Consider:

Adult movies: Fifty-nine percent of our sample thought adult films should be allowed in the Chicago area. Seventy percent knew someone who had been to an X-rated flick, while 53 percent had gone themselves. Of the later, only a third reported that they had enjoyed the experience. Chicagoans, apparently, know what they don't like and, not liking it, are less inclined to subject their neighbors to it.

Pornography: Only 48 percent of the people with whom we talked thought that adult bookstores should be allowed in the Chicago area. Fifty-one percent said they knew someone who has used a porn shop and one third reported having browsed in them. Thirty-two percent of those confessed to having purchased erotic material and 68 percent said they had found those purchases stimulating. Only 23 percent of the people we polled had ever opened a sex manual, such as Masters and Johnson's or The Joy of Sex.

Prostitution: Only 47 percent of the people we interviewed thought massage parlors should be allowed to exist--a slightly higher percentage than those who tolerated the women on the street (37 percent). Twenty-seven percent knew someone who had been to a prostitute, but only 1.7 percent had been themselves.

Homosexuality: Sixty percent of the people we interviewed thought that gay bars should be allowed to exist. Twenty-eight percent knew someone who had been to a gay bar, while a surprising 17 percent had gone to a gay bar themselves.