During every week this Pride Month, we’ll ask one of our contrubutors to compile a list of essential queer works of art. We start with books. My death plan includes being cremated with a copy of this book. I first encountered this graphic novel as an undergrad out in Iowa, and I reread it every January—it’s literature that grows with me, mostly because of Alison Bechdel’s delicate recollection of her late father, who lived his life in the closet, and the hesitant empathy she holds for him....

Of course there’s no such thing as magic. Not in the supernatural sense, anyway. Not in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sense, where Mickey Mouse dons his master’s glowing cap and casts a spell on a broom, making it tote buckets of water for him. What we choose to call magic comes down to a strategic partnership between physics, psychology, dexterity, and hope. But soon enough his show is invaded by an apparition: the memory of a competitive diver—called, yes, the Diver—who became the Magician’s lover after the two met cute over a card trick....

Open up any horror auteur’s toolbox, and you’ll likely see some recurring devices: tracking shots, audience immersion, startles, simmering dread—elements that are notably difficult to achieve onstage. So Wildclaw Theatre’s mission of bringing the world of horror to the theater is an ambitious one, and one I’ve seen yield truly creative results from this innovative company. Couple that challenge, though, with the addition of another stage-averse genre—spaghetti westerns—and the outcome is a little more strained....

Commissioner Richard Boykin’s resolution requesting the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Homan Square, an alleged off-the-books detention center operated by the Chicago Police Department, sailed unanimously through the Cook County Board meeting Wednesday. Boykin plans to hand deliver a copy of the resolution to Lynch, along with Illinois U.S. representative Danny Davis. Both Boykin and Davis asked for the feds to probe the facility when the Guardian broke the story in February 2015....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, November 8, 2017. Emanuel slams Trump for “pointing fingers” at Chicago again Mayor Rahm Emanuel slammed President Donald Trump for “pointing fingers” at Chicago’s gun violence issues again instead of focusing on gun control measures after a devastating massacre at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, left 26 people dead. Trump used Chicago’s gun laws as an example of why he refuses to support stronger gun control legislation....

Last month I saw Chicago footwork producer DJ Taye perform in the middle of the afternoon in 38-degree weather on a stubby stage set up in the street next to the Empty Bottle. His set was part of the club’s annual daylong outdoor festival, Music Frozen Dancing, which historically favors rock—every headliner has been a rock band, and this year psych-rock rebels Oh Sees topped the five-act bill. Taye was the only performer to use a DJ rig, and I had to wonder how many people in the crowd knew what to expect when he powered it up....

This summer in Gravy, the journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance, John Kessler, a former restaurant critic for the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, published a bemused and amusing essay about the Chicago restaurant community’s current obsession with southern cliches and its penchant for clumsy cultural misappropriation. Before McKenna opened his barbecue joint he was also a veteran of fine-dining restaurants such as Avenues and Tru, and at Dixie he seems to be celebrating the slaves’ food through that lens, taking elements, or in some cases just the ingredients, of classic southern dishes and placing them in new, sometimes dissonant contexts—on small, shared plates....

The cover art for Celine Neon There’s party music that tries to drown out the sad stuff, and then there’s the party music that brings the baggage along for the ride. Celine Neon’s new self-titled EP blasts the beats, but it doesn’t shy away from heavy emotions. On the Chicago trio’s debut, singers Emily Nejad and Maggie Kubley dive into lyrics about depression (or “depresh,” as they abbreviate it), exhaustion, and meaningless sex....

In early January, I contracted COVID-19 on an international flight home to the United States. It started with the symptoms of a simple cold, then within a couple of weeks, chest pain, abdominal pain, and shortness of breath. That was followed by unrelenting fevers starting in early March and exhaustion even with the most basic tasks like talking or taking a shower, as I moved into the basement to isolate myself from my wife and nine-year-old child....

Savage Love Live at Denver’s Oriental Theater last week was epic. But we couldn’t get to all the audience questions during the show, so I’m going to race through as many that went unanswered as I can in this week’s column . . . A: Judging by how many people tell me they’re having a hard time finding sex-positive, kink-positive, open-positive, and poly-positive therapists, I would definitely file “sex-positive therapist” under “world needs more of....

Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority has released nine videos capturing the lead-up to and aftermath of the police shooting of 18-year-old Paul O’Neal, an unarmed African-American man killed by Chicago Police Department officers in South Shore on July 28. O’Neal is then seen fleeing from the Jaguar toward the backyard of a home on South Merrill Avenue. He’s chased by several officers. Then shots ring out. He walks away. Then someone can be heard asking him whether he indeed shot at O’Neal....

Darling Shear is a mover and shaker—literally. The Chicago-born choreographer produces movement-oriented pieces that are closely tied to healing from trauma. Trained in ballet, modern, jazz, and African dance, Shear ties in styles of burlesque and contemporary movement that includes intense emotion, bare feet, and crossing the barrier between audience and dancer. In the piece Querida, first performed at Links Hall in November 2018, the artist opens up about personal experiences and how movement can regenerate, soften, and disrupt our ways of navigating the past....

Frank Micelotta/Invision/AP Owes it all to community college, folks. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, amuse, or inspire us. • How “very” became “v”? —Drew Hunt • A theater blogger’s parody of the new plays she reads? —Tony Adler

Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images It’ll cost you at least $1,000 to watch these dudes ride around on ice skates. Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About Obamacare’s home stretch? —Drew Hunt

Liz Lauren Axis of evil, Little Foxes style A few Sundays ago, while we were waiting for a matinee to start, I had the pleasure of listening to the unvarnished commentary of the elderly man on my right as he flipped through the program. He made some remarks about the photos and credits of the cast, and then he reached an ad for the Goodman’s new production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes....

Picture James Dean riding a Divvy bike instead of a motorcycle. You can’t without snickering, can you? That’s because I, you, and every other human being on earth looks dorky in the clunky-ass saddle of one. The powder-blue cruisers were designed to evoke Chicago’s starry flag. But they’re more like the dad jeans of bicycles—which is ironic considering the incredibly cool origins of the community bike-share program. Two years later, Provo pitched a more serious plan....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, September 23, 2016. Judge: Illinois residents should be able to get medical marijuana for postoperative chronic pain Cook County judge Neil Cohen ordered the state of Illinois to add postoperative chronic pain to the list of medical conditions eligible for medical marijuana. In June, Cohen ordered the Illinois Department of Public Health to add post-traumatic stress disorder to the list of approved conditions....

LGBTQ sketch-comedy group GayCo put on its first revue, Whitney Houston, We Have a Problem, at the Second City in 1996. The Reader‘s Mary Shen Barnridge wrote that it kept its “focus tight and its humor accessible to audiences straight and gay, in the know or out of touch.” The performance was born out of a comedy workshop created after Second City administrative director Ed Garza discovered the word “fag” scrawled across the wall in one of the training-center classrooms....

This morning the city announced the lineup for the Millennium Park Summer Music Series, which is a new name for a familiar program—the free concerts at Pritzker Pavilion. The series effectively replaces Downtown Sound, which covered a variety of different styles last year, and the Made in Chicago jazz concerts. If you’re already agnostic about genre, the name change might not mean much, but if you’d only attended Downtown Sound or Made in Chicago, the Millennium Park Summer Music Series might surprise you with unfamiliar sounds or artists....

Q: I’m a 32-year-old straight guy. My wife and I have been married for four years and together for nine. We have a great marriage and all is well. We have been quarantining at home since March. During this time, we have been exploring things sexually, which has been really fun. We have also been talking more about our kinks and fantasies. One thing my wife really wants to try is an MMF threesome....