Gold Coast: Chicago’s Leather Bar, The Pit, and International Mr. Leather

Gold Coast was a gay leather bar in Chicago, and one of the early rooms the U.S. gay leather community built and ran for itself. It was open from 1960 to 1988, twenty-eight years. The tone inside was hardcore leather, and the bar is where a title system that still travels internationally got its start.

The story begins in 1959. Chicago leathermen, including Chuck Renslow and the artist Dom Orejudos, were already regulars at the Gold Coast Show Lounge, 1130 North Clark Street. After the original owner died, Renslow and his partners Herbie Schmidt and Art Marotta bought the place so the new leather crowd would not lose its room. On 15 March 1960 it reopened under the shortened name Gold Coast. Over the next few years, rent and the way the business ran pushed it to 1110 North Clark Street and then to 2265 North Lincoln Avenue. In 1962 the bar held a license that allowed alcohol service with a hard close at 2 a.m. After a move in 1965, it settled in 1967 at 501 North Clark Street. That address is the one the stories stick to.

At 501 North Clark, Gold Coast was famous for the basement called The Pit. Chuck Renslow did not apply for a dancing license. He thought his crowd wanted hardcore leather, not a dance club. Raids were a problem. He paid bribes to the police to cut them down, and raids still happened. The look of the room was shaped by his partner, Dom Orejudos, who worked as Etienne. Etienne made posters for the bar and, with Chuck Arnett, painted the murals people still talk about. Much of that art was later given to the Leather Archives & Museum. Some of it still hangs in the auditorium. Opening Gold Coast also pulled other gay businesses into the neighborhood, an early local “gay district.” In 1969 the basement shop Leather Cell opened, selling hankies, harnesses, leather pants, and toys. It later became Male Hide Leathers, one of the first shops aimed specifically at gay leather.

The piece that outlasted the address is the pageant. From 1972 the bar held an annual Mr. Gold Coast contest. John Lunning was the first winner. In 1979 the contest was renamed International Mr. Leather, and it still runs. That is the start of one of leather’s global title systems, and Gold Coast is where it began.

In 1984 the bar moved to 5025 North Clark Street in Andersonville. The next year Renslow sold it to Frank Kellas. The deal included stock in the newspaper GayLife. After the management change, the crowd thinned. On 10 February 1988 the liquor license was revoked and Gold Coast closed for good. The room is gone. The reputation is not. Dazed later wrote that in years when LGBTQ+ sex lives were heavily policed, a bar like Gold Coast was about freedom and about fucking, and that The Pit, Leather Cell, Etienne’s murals, and the line from Mr. Gold Coast to IML made a set of signs that lasted longer than the bar. On 25 May 2018 the Chicago City Council honorarily named the eastern stretch of Clark Street between Winnemac and Ainslie “Chuck Renslow Way,” for that boss and for the block where his businesses had been. For adult gay leather customers, the address is still a place to look if you want to see how American leather-bar culture built institutions and a sense of who belonged in the room.