As someone who came of age as a gay man in the '90s, I missed most of the events that brought our movement to where it is today.

I’ve always been curious about what it was like “back in the day,” though—in the '40s, '50, '60s (and before), when it was nearly impossible for gay men and women to live out and proud lives as so many of us do now.

That probably explains my fascination with books like Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City (later a TV miniseries that aired on PBS in 1994), plays like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (brought to the small screen in 2003) and films like Rob Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk (a 1984 documentary about the career and eventual assassination of the first gay man elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors).

So when a copy of Martha Miller’s Tales From the Levee arrived on my doorstep a month or so ago promising “hate, lust, bigotry, love—it all happens in that place in town called ‘the Levee,’” my curiosity was piqued instantly. As I paged through the book’s 168 pages, I quickly came to realize the curiosity was well-founded and more than pleasantly fulfilled.

Miller’s tale isn’t as dramatic or newsworthy as those mentioned above, but it’s just as captivating. Before delving into the story of the gay men and lesbians who lived on the Fifth Street Levee in Springfield, Ill., between 1965 and 1976, the author mentions the book is an attempt at a gay mythology rather than a gay history. “Like all mythology,” she writes, “it’s an attempt to explain through stories how things were and how they got the way they are.”

Mythology is a good word to use to describe Tales From the Levee. Miller does an exquisite job of not only transporting the reader back in time to 1960s Springfield (at the beginning of the story, the Levee’s residents bemoan the loss of an ornate, turn-of-the-century theater while smoky, dusky bars and other businesses struggle to survive in its wake), but bringing to life many of that area of the city’s most colorful citizens.

It doesn’t take long to develop strong feelings about the ladies who make up Miller’s real-life version of The ‘L’ Word. There’s butch Ella, the Levee’s matriarch of sorts, along with other “bulls” like Little Red and Casey, whose paternal family was West Texas Apache. A group of ladies known as Roz, Little Sis and Queenie head the femme contingent of Miller’s tale, along with an assorted group of barmaids, strippers, drag queens and gay men.

Tales From the Levee reads like a Midwestern take on Maupin’s transcendent serial, though that’s not to imply it’s a knock off of any sort. Miller has her own voice and style and she uses both beautifully to depict the harrowing and heartbreaking stories of a group of “gay girls” who lived and loved in 1960s Illinois.

Tales From the Levee is available from The Hayworth Press .

Until next time!