Pat Cummings: forging a relentless path to progress

"I want a life that when I sit down in a rocking chair, I will have stories to tell.”

Growing up, Pat made a silent vow in the shadow of sacrifice. She watched her mother, a woman who had once trained for a life on stage -- studying dance in Chicago’s Fine Arts Building, playing the piano, enjoying arts and culture -- gradually surrender her deepest passions to the relentless demands of raising nine children. Her passion for the performing arts died a long, slow death.

So Pat made a solemn promise to herself: “No marriage, no kids, no nothing. I want a life that when I sit down in a rocking chair, I will have stories to tell. I will follow my heart in anything and everything.”

Now in her seventies, living in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, Pat Cummings has done exactly that.

Her life has been a vibrant, colorful, and often chaotic tapestry woven across the American landscape. Her trail runs from the quiet suburban streets of Milwaukee to the seedy, fascinating underbelly of Los Angeles; from the rigid structure of the U.S. Navy to the political and emotional front lines of Chicago's AIDS crisis.

Pat didn't just passively observe history: she participated, documented, and fiercely defended the marginalized, becoming an accidental historian of queer liberation, profound resilience, and the power of showing up.

She remembers Castaways, The Rooster, The Nite Beat… but moreso, she remembers everyone being out on the streets, hanging out, walking around, and feeling free.

“You always traveled in groups, never alone,” she said. “There was nobody around except hippies. We hung out on Farwell, Brady, Wisconsin Avenue, 5^th Street.”

She used to use her birth name, Mary Pat, until she started hanging out in gay bars. She’d never used her middle name in public, only at Catholic family gatherings where there were many different Marys present.

“Everyone called each other Mary, but nobody was talking to me,” she laughed. “It surprised me the first couple times it happened. Finally, I said, this has to stop. I just started using my middle name Pat and dropping my first name, when I went into the Navy and started going to gay bars. Only my mother called me Mary Pat or Mary Patricia and only when she was mad at me.”

Pat took a job at the Knight Owl (173 S. 2^nd St.,) an early gay-owned and gay-operated restaurant in Milwaukee’s emerging gay village of the 1970s. Her brother, who worked at Beyond the Sea and Pieces of Eight, got her the job.  She was couch-surfing by then, and hanging out at places like Loop Café, Granfalloon, and Marc’s Big Boy on Wisconsin Avenue.

“That was a very interesting place to work,” she said. “I don’t remember who the owners were, and I don’t really remember any of my co-workers. But I do remember the older lesbians coming in after the bars and hitting on me! ‘You’re a baby dyke now, but when you’re legal, I’d love to go with you,’ they’d tell me. I didn’t think I was that cute, but it sure piqued my curioustiy.”

“The Knight Owl building was old, run-down, and in terrible shape,” she said. “Can you imagine a restaurant with NO windows? It was this long, narrow place with tables up front, the kitchen in the middle, and a bathroom in the back. That bathroom was always busy, if you get my drift. They didn’t sell any liquor, but they did stay open until almost bar time.”

“I called my parents and let them know where I was,” said Pat. “And my mother said, I’ll give you a plane ticket, but you can’t cash it in. You have to come home.”

Eventually, Kim hitchhiked back to Milwaukee, and even brought Jim back with her. But that was the end of her California circle. The friendships came to a quick end.

Back in her hometown, Pat was legally able to drink at 18, allowing her to explore the local queer scene, which included The Beer Garden, Gas Lite East, and The Neptune Club.

"Hormones were raging back then and the smoke was plentiful if you knew who to hang out with," said Pat. "I remember the first Milwaukee Fest where the cloud of smoke hung over the field where the stage was set up. Those were the days."

But the rigid social codes of the time (especially the insistence on the butch/femme divide) baffled her. When older lesbians asked which she was, she would say "both," a simple truth that would floor them.

"I thought, why do you want to take out half the fun?"

Her next chapter was dictated by chance. She walked with a gay male friend into the Navy recruiting office, and in a spur of the moment decision, they decided to take the entrance test. She scored high. When the recruiter asked the mandatory question about same-sex desire or activity, she hesitated. “Just say NO,” he coached. She took his advice.

That was December 16, 1971. And she was in for the next five years.

Her parents, who had to sign for her enlistment since women couldn't sign for themselves even at age 18, believed she was finally getting "straightened out."

Pat saw it differently. It was simply another experience to collect. She challenged authority, once going AWOL for a week to attend the first Gay Pride Day march in Wisconsin, resulting in a demotion and restriction. But her ambition persevered.

After being forced out of Corpsman school, she challenged the cooks at her base in Virginia, who insisted women couldn't handle the work. She beat them at their own game and charmed her way into a prestigious assignment to commissary school in San Diego, securing a coveted cook position.

“A charmed life,” she says, “all because I said yes to things.”

While stationed in Norfolk, Pat got a reputation as a pinball wizard. Her parents would never have let her hang out in pinball arcades – that was gambling, after all – but as an adult, that’s where everyone knew to find her in the bar. 

“If you wanted to talk me, or ask me to dance, or ask me to play, I’d be by the pinball machine,” said Pat. “The guy who taught me how to play pinball eventually stopped playing with me. He didn’t like that I’d always beat him.”

The end of her naval career was a final act of integrity. After meeting a new lover in San Diego, the Navy discovered the relationship and summarily kicked her girlfriend out, but refused to discharge Pat, who was well-regarded and served on discrimination and housing boards. To leave with her lover, Pat had to write a letter to Congress to demand her own expulsion from the service. She received an honorable discharge, short of five years, but triumphant in her refusal to compromise her life.

She left the Navy on October 28, 1976. 

 "I have two honorable discharges," said Pat. "One of them is from my 2-year enlistment. I reenlisted the day that I received the first honorable discharge. I spent almost 3 years on my second enlistment."

Pat and Denise headed to Milwaukee, planning to live there, but it had just started to snow.  Denise, who was from Mobile, didn’t want to spend the winter in the cold and snowy north. She suggested they move to her mother’s house, where they could live free for several months.

It was decided. They were moving to Alabama.

"I was in my heaven," she says, reflecting on her arrival at Clark and Belmont.

She took a job at Lamour’s Adult Books, near the X-rated Admiral Theater (3940 W. Lawrence Ave.)

“I didn’t know what the job was until I moved up here,” laughed Pat, “and then John informs me I will be working in an adult book.”

After living with sex workers in L.A., nothing shocked her anymore – not even the men who made passes at her and tried to take her home to their wives. She moved through a series of jobs, including the long-lost Venture department store, the Social Security Administration (where she experienced workplace harassment,) and the restaurant Genessee Depot.

But the move coincided tragically with the start of the AIDS crisis, a decade-long crucible that would define her life and test her soul.

Pat dedicated herself to service, becoming an indispensable part of Chicago’s homegrown AIDS response. She supported Horizons (now the Center on Halsted,) delivered meals for Open Hands Chicago, volunteered for the tiny, struggling Howard Brown Health, and, understanding the emotional toll on families, co-founded the Circle of Care, a support group for the parents, partners, and families of People with AIDS (PWAs).

She was witnessing the unimaginable, unspeakable impact of AIDS with a bedside view.

“I had people open up to me and tell me about their feelings, their desire to be done,” she recalls.

Pat, who had always sought peace in her own chaotic life, became a quiet anchor for others in their final moments. Friends, desperate in their pain, sometimes asked her to help them pass. Her unwavering counsel, born of deep respect for life, was “I can’t do that for you, but you can tell your body it’s okay to die.” Pat’s peace was found in providing comfort and documenting the human cost of the plague.

The crisis peaked on her birthday, April 3, 1989, when John passed away.

While devastating, Pat describes it as a “strange gift,” as she had been providing 10-20 hours of daily care while simultaneously looking after her five-and-a-half-year-old niece. It was an intensely emotional and physically exhausting period. By 1989, she had already known over 300 people whose lives were stolen by AIDS.

“At John’s memorial, the priest said ‘I met John at the Country,’ and nobody knew what that meant but me,” Pat laughed. “Once I said, Man’s Country, they got it. Oh John!”

The politics of reconciliation

Pat’s grief was compounded by her parents’ struggle to accept John’s life and death. When John was dying, her mother’s comment was a devastating act of rejection: “What are you doing there with him?”

Pat confronted her: "All my life you told me I am my brother's keeper, when he needs a keeper why would you say this to me? When he’s ready to pass, ‘let him die.’"

Despite the pain, Pat’s greatest pride remained her ability to bring her brother back into the family fold before he died. At their parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, she insisted John attend, defying anti-gay relatives. Her brother Bill, who had previously gone out of his way to avoid John, eventually visited him in Chicago to make amends.

The final breakthrough came years later. In 1994, Pat attended the March on Washington and photographed the passion of ACT UP and the Radical Faeries. Her mother called to criticize her.

“I hope you’re not one of those people in the streets screaming,” she said.

Pat, exhausted by years of emotional combat, slammed the phone down. A few days later, her mother called back, a rare act of contrition: "Mary Pat, I am sorry for the way I treated you."

Eventually, her mother realized that her Florida neighborhood friends were gay and lesbian themselves. She finally understood the cost of stifling her children’s true selves.

"Mother, John and I had been trying to tell you this since we were young," Pat responded, a moment of fragile peace achieved.

Her father, who was very ill and living in Florida, reached out after John’s funeral.

“It was my place, not your place, to be there with him,” he tearfully confessed over the phone, admitting his regret at his absence. At age 35, it was the first time Pat had ever heard her father cry.

“It made me realize that he understood the pain that their intolerant religious beliefs caused us.”

When asked what lessons she would pass on, she is blunt, quoting AIDS activist Larry Kramer: "Learn your history. White closeted gay men are going to be the reason we lose our rights. I’m tired of people going into hiding and still running the show. Love who you are.”

For Pat Cummings, self-acceptance was never a mere philosophical choice—it was a survival mechanism, a political imperative, and the blueprint for the life she had pledged to herself as a teenager. She never once denied who she was, even when she was an out lesbian running for student government in Alabama in the 1970s.

Her life is a testament to the power of writing your own story. Every adventure, every tragedy, and every act of service was on her own terms.

“Someone once said to me, Pat, you have really lived. I considered that the highest compliment of all.”