‘Open Secret’ in Chicago’s high society
A look back on what happened when a member of the city’s elite adopted longtime lover
The first lines of Nicholas Syrett’s third book, “An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton” had me hooked: “On March 4, 1960, Robert Allerton became a father. He was 86-yearsold at the time and his newly adopted son, John Gregg, was 60. The pair had already been living together and calling themselves father and son for almost four decades.”
It is here that Syrett, a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Kansas, takes us into the world of an Illinois couple — one born into a rich family with ties to the founding of the Union Stock Yards and the First National Bank of Chicago; the other an orphan in his early 20s, attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for architecture with a part-time job and inheritance money. The Allerton legacy continues today:
One only has to go to the Art Institute of Chicago; visit estates in Monticello, Illinois, or Lawai Ka on the Hawaiian island of Kauai; or the Chicago landmark hotel the Warwick Allerton on Michigan Avenue. Allerton’s exploits were often the fodder of society columnists for the Chicago Tribune through the years and when he became “fatherly” with Gregg; their travels, too, made the paper.
Syrett said he stumbled across the duo when doing research at the U. of I. for another book. The Allertons donated their Monticello home and all their papers to the university, and an archivist who knew of Syrett’s interest in gender studies told him about the property that was once occupied by a couple who referred to themselves as father and son. Syrett said he liked the idea that their story complicates the history of queer couplehood.
The archivist “said lots of people around here, and lots of queer people, don’t believe that they were really father and son,” Syrett said. “I thought these people are interesting and also probably anomalous in the narrative of queer history, which was something I already knew about because I’ve taught queer history. I found them interesting because we don’t have many examples of public couples from this era, and while they were not publicly a couple, they sort of were at the same time.”
We talked to Syrett about how Allerton and Gregg met during a time when persecution of same-sex couples was on the rise and how the pair fashioned a cover story that was some
thing of an “open secret,” enabling them to navigate in the world. The following interview has been condensed and edited.
Q: Why write this book now?
A: I think (the Allertons are) interesting, because as of 2015 it was possible for same-sex couples to get married in the United States — that was in the background of my thinking when I was doing this. They had a very different solution to being together. Obviously, marriage was not available to them, and we don’t even know if they would have married if it had been available, because that would mean “being public,” which they never were about their sexuality. I think it’s very easy, especially in Pride Month, to celebrate all gay and lesbian people in the past. In part, I am interested in thinking about them as gay people, but also they were not always that appealing. I write about instances of racism and anti-Semitism, and they’re colonizing in Hawaii, so I think we need to be measured in our evaluation of people who were indeed pioneering in some ways, but that does not mean they did not have flaws.
Q: Do you think the Allerton adoption story adds to the lexicon of gay historical literature?
A: That is my hope. The field of gay and lesbian history as compared to the field of women’s history or the history of African Americans is really pretty young. There have not been people doing this for nearly as long as people have been writing political history or presidential history. So, every new story that we can find and write about is really enriching the overall picture of what life was like for queer people in the U.S. This is just one more story that helps us provide greater context.
Q: Can one still adopt an adult in Illinois?
A: Yes. It’s not super common, but it is possible. It was the 1960s when they did it. They were doing it for inheritance reasons. It was, for sure, a workaround that some gay people used, even though that was definitely not why the laws were passed. Granted, you can make a will and give someone anything you want in that will, but if it was someone who you raised as a child but never formally adopted them, you could do it as an adult.
Q: Did you find any research on why the state made adult adoptions possible?
A: A law like this is hardly going to be used by most people in a state. My guess is that when it did happen — generally speaking — it might have come about because of pressure by some people in particular who wanted this to exist. There’s been some speculation that I could never confirm that Allerton may actually have tried to influence a legislator in Illinois to pass this legislation. It wouldn’t shock me if it were, in the various states where it happened, someone was really interested in this and got the ear of a legislator who was sympathetic. Lawyers had written that they were well aware that people were using it as a way for samesex couples to protect their inheritances. But If I’m in a same-sex couple, I can leave my estate to anyone I want to in a will. But the issue is whether my family will contest that will. So that’s the problem. I think as more and more people gained acceptance, they probably don’t need marriage, or adoption; they just write a will and leave everything to their partner if they want to.
Q: In your research, did you find anything that said Allerton’s or Gregg’s family knew about the relationship?
A: I did talk to John Gregg’s niece. She told me that when she was growing up, she remembers Gregg and Allerton coming to visit and she did not fully understand what their relationship was at the time. But she remembers as she got older that she understood from her father (Gregg’s brother) that they were gay and that her father did not approve of the relationship. But he also loved his brother and did want him to be able to visit. It was not something that she believed they talked about openly, so the fiction of the father and son allowed them not to talk about it, even though everyone was pretty much aware of what was going on with their relationship.