Sway debuted this month in the Northalsted neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. It is a history-making moment that honors history.
The new cannabis dispensary, at 3340 N. Halsted St., sits across from Sidetrack, one of the most successful gay bars in the nation. Sway is “one of the first queer-owned and BIPOC-owned cannabis companies in the nation,” its owners say. The brightly lit, spic-and-span-clean pot store is adorned in trademark rainbow “pride” colors and shimmering glass cases that display the drug’s paraphernalia, gummies and other products.
It’s a collaboration between Edie Moore, an African American cannabis equity advocate, and longtime gay activists Art Johnston, José “Pepe” Peña and Kevin Hauswirth. Johnston and Peña, who are married, also own Sidetrack, the longtime anchor of Chicago’s LGBTQ+ entertainment district and the heartbeat of the political civic and social life in the queer community. Moore, an Army veteran, co-founded Chicago’s regional chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML, as well as the Illinois Minority Cannabis Business Owners Association.
I recently met Johnston at Sway for a tour. (I wasn’t there to partake — the stuff just puts me to sleep.)
Sway pays homage to the fact that “the entire movement to legalize marijuana across the United States begins with our community in San Francisco,” Johnston said.
He is a co-founder of Equality Illinois, the state’s oldest and largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization. Sway “is built on the strong, sassy shoulders of those who dared to challenge the status quo,” its mission statement reads.
The young gay patrons who drop by for their pot may have no memory of that history. Sway is deeply rooted in the history of America’s AIDS crisis. Several years ago, Johnston traveled to San Francisco, America’s original gay mecca, to learn about the movement. That city is “the beginning of so many things in our community,” he said. There, “we learned a lot of things that I was, frankly, ashamed that I did not know, because I try to be a bit of a gay historian.”
In the early to mid-1980s, young gay men were dying in grim numbers from AIDS, even before it had a name. The epidemic was eventually recognized, and treatments were developed, but the suffering continued. Toxic HIV medications took a toll on the bodies of people with AIDS. Those early treatments prolonged lives but also produced harsh side effects. People with AIDS “were desperate,” Johnston said, to find ways to relieve their pain, anxiety, loss of appetite and nausea.
So, advocates took to the streets to help them find comfort in weed. In San Francisco, “people from our community and friends opened illegal dispensaries, often across the street from police stations,” Johnson said, “where they were giving out … marijuana, to assist people with the usual loss of hunger that came with the illness, with the pain.”
People like “Brownie Mary.”
“Mary was an active member of our community, actually, originally from Chicago, who would bake hundreds of pot brownies every day and hand them out for free to folks who were impacted.”
These underground efforts blossomed into NORML, the movement to legalize marijuana, and spread across the nation.
Lori Cannon is Chicago’s Brownie Mary. Cannon is a co-founder of Open Hand Chicago, which delivers meals and other vital assistance to people with AIDS. Back in the 1980s, she was smuggling bootlegged HIV drugs and illegal weed to people with AIDS.
“And if we go back to the years of the AIDS activism in the streets, and how the community responded, when so few would, to the fact that our friends were dropping like flies. Everything was underground in the beginning,” Cannon told me.
She helped run an unofficial “buyers club,” where advocates were “actively involved with the stockpiling of lifesaving HIV meds.”
Sway pays homage to those times. “We are thrilled to be trying to use our space to help remind people of some of those beginnings,” Johnston said.
The dispensary also recognizes another kind of history. Since the war on drugs was launched in the 1970s, Black and brown people have been criminalized and incarcerated at disproportionately high levels. Sway’s owners are prioritizing buying products from diverse suppliers, and the staff at Sway is about 75% people of color and 90% LGBTQ+, Hauswirth says.
The legal marijuana market was designed to help right past wrongs by assisting people of color in obtaining the lucrative dispensary licenses. Few are getting them. Moore, a Sway co-owner and activist, hails from Chicago’s Southeast Side. She is working to open two dispensaries in Black communities but has met stiff resistance from community and political leaders. The lack of cannabis dispensaries in her community “has been a real thorn in my side, because that’s where I’m from, that’s where I live, that’s where I grew up,” Moore told the Windy City Times earlier this month.
The persistent stigma of cannabis use remains a barrier to access and opportunity.
“Some of these Black communities are just not very welcoming to this type of business, and I’ve been fighting that since 2015,” Moore was quoted as saying. “Folks need to understand that this is about wellness. It’s not always about getting high. Sometimes it is, but most of the time, for me, it’s not.”
It’s about reciprocity.
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Monday. Write to her at LauraLauraWashington@gmail.com.
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