upcoming events
Celebrate love in all forms!
About
Hull-House reformers actively re-imagined what love and family looked like at the turn of the century. Join us as we bring the museum alive with performances of poetry in dedication to an expanded definition of love inspired by this history.
The Hull-House Settlement was home to single men and women, married and partnered couples, romantic friends and many other arrangements of kinship and care that allowed creative ideas and revolutionary spirit to thrive within its walls.
With this in mind, we asked our crushes to share their favorite queer love poems with us -- poems that disrupt commonplace understandings of love and make space for new definitions. Pick up a poem for your Valentine and take a moment to learn about one of Chicago's great love stories: the relationship between Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith.
Poem written to Mary Rozet Smith by Jane Addams
The "mine" and "thine" of wedded folk
Is often quite confusing
And sometimes when they use the "ours"
It sounds almost amusing.
But you and I may well defy
Both married folk and single
To do as well as we have done
The "mine" and "thine" to mingle
Click to download queer love poems:
Kevin Coval, Poet, Educator, and Organizer | Young Chicago Authors
shiska angel by Kevin Coval
Samantha Irby, Writer and Performer
TWENTY-ONE LOVE POEMS II. by Adrienne Rich
Alice Kim, Writer, Director of The Public Square
If I Could Sing by Keorapetse Kgositsile
Lisa Lee, Director, School of Art and Art History, UIC
Something, A Miss by Dorothy Parker
H. Melt, Poet, Young Chicago Authors
SALONATHON @ BEAUTY BAR by H. Melt
Yasmin Nair, Writer, Activist
Exerpt from An Interlude by Algernon Charles Swinburne
Coya Paz, Writer, Director, Educator | Co-founder, Teatro Luna and Proyecto Latina
Love Poem by Audre Lorde
Therese Quinn, Director, Museum and Exhibition Studies, UIC
A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg
Tony Alvarado-Rivera, Multi-issue Community Builder | Youth Coordinator, Chicago Freedom School
Excerpt from My Lady by Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz
Anthony Romero, Assistant Director, The Guild Literary Complex
Witch-Wife by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Fred Sasaki, Associate Editor, Poetry Magazine
TO YOU by Frank O'Hara
Clarisse Thorn, Writer, Feminist BDSM activist
Excerpt from 'The End Of An Age' by Clarisse Thorn
________________________________________________________________________________
* All views expressed are those of the guests and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, or the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Architecture and the Arts.