![]() Zych joined the Nutbush about a year after it opened. Zych's former partner, who opened the bar, borrowed the name from Tina Turner's song about her hometown in Tennessee. Inside, the lights are dim and regulars start gathering in the afternoons. There is a door out in back for those who, in the past, wanted to slip in without being noticed. It is a nondescript wood-and-brick structure, its windows bricked in to provide the privacy and safety its customers once demanded. Located on Harlem Avenue a block south of the Green Line `L' station, the Nutbush presents a poker face to the middle-class community around it. "So what they've done really is quite amazing." "The Nutbush has been going it alone for a long time," Johnston said. Where such bars have succeeded, they have tended to be surrounded by a large gay and lesbian clientele, as on North Halsted, which has become "the Main Street of gay Chicago," Johnston said. Twenty-five years ago, gay bars tended to last little more than four years, facing pressure from police and other authorities, said Art Johnston, an owner of Sidetrack, which opened on North Halsted Street in 1982.
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