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 | | Jacques Cristion | | | Inducted 2006 [Posthumous] | | | Photo: Israel Wright | | Jacques Cristion (1936-2003), dancer, costume designer, and dressmaker; for more than 31 years of hosting and performing in the annual Halloween drag ball on the South Side, which created a community of gay men and lesbians that continues today. | |
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| A lifelong Chicagoan, Jacques Cristion
was introduced to Chicago’s drag Ascene during the 1950s by a beautician
friend, Donald Caraway, who attended the
famous Finnie’s Club Halloween balls each
year, costumed as Olivia de Havilland. As
Cristion recalled in a 1995 interview with Allen
Drexel: | |
| “[My friend] was telling me how fabulous the
ball was, and how, you know, you really hadn’t
lived until you went to the ball, and he said you’d see the lights and . . . oh, the
loudspeaker outside. It was really fabulous, with people getting out of the
limousines and whatnot, and just, it was beautiful—and it sounded so
interesting, and I just began to go right after that.”
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| After high school, Cristion attended the Sammy Dyer School of the Theatre and
toured as a dancer. In 1969 or 1970, having performed in, choreographed, and
designed costumes for drag balls and dance concerts for almost two decades,
Cristion hosted the first of his own annual Halloween drag balls, which lasted
until about 2000 as virtually the only balls still held annually on the South Side. | |
| It is a little-known but significant fact that drag balls were among the most
central, and certainly the most publicly visible, features of Chicago’s gay
landscape from at least the 1930s until the 1970s. Amid intense societal
homophobia, these balls—which appear usually to have been held on the city’s
predominantly African American and working-class South Side—offered gay
and lesbian Chicagoans of varied ethnicity and class background rare
opportunities to socialize publicly in spaces they could claim, if only
temporarily, as their own. | |
| The events, advertised mostly by word of mouth and on neighborhood placards,
at once created, affirmed, and drew public attention to an emerging solidarity
among or even between gay men and lesbians in the years before the gay
liberation movement. | |
| Jacques Cristion was born in Chicago in 1936. In a 2000 interview with Sukie
de la Croix he reported having grown up around 46th Street and Michigan
Avenue. He said his mother was a dressmaker, and in 2000 he still operated a
dressmaking shop at 7906 South Drexel Avenue. | |
| He died in Chicago in 2003. His landlord threw away all of his memorabilia and
other possessions before friends could arrive. | |
| This biography is as of the induction date. It has not been updated. |
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