Windy City Media Group Frontpage News

THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Social Media home search facebook twitter join
Gay News Sponsor Windy City Times 2023-12-13
DOWNLOAD ISSUE
Donate

Sponsor
Sponsor
Sponsor

  WINDY CITY TIMES

PASSAGES Jim Oleson, partner of historian John D'Emilio, dies
by Yasmin Nair, Windy City Times
2015-04-05

facebook twitter pin it google +1 reddit email


Jim Oleson, 77, a longtime Chicago resident and partner of gay historian John D'Emilio, died at their home on April 4, surrounded by loved ones. He had severely weakened lungs and heart, and had recently begun home hospice care.

Oleson came to Chicago in 1999 with D'Emilio, who was appointed professor of history and gender and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Prior to their life here, the two men lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, where D'Emilio had been a professor of history at the University of North Carolina. D'Emilio was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, but the migration to Chicago was a return to the Midwest for Oleson, who was an Iowa native.

Oleson was named Jim by his parents—the name was not a shortening of James. According to D'Emilio, he was born in 1938 to an unwed mother, in a time when the stigma surrounding unmarried pregnant women meant that keeping their children was unthinkable. Oleson spent the first four months of his life in an orphanage before being adopted by Hazelle and Clarence Oleson of Bondurant, Iowa, a farming community.

His years as an undergraduate at Cornell College in Iowa, where his father had preceded him, would prove to be catalysing and formative for Oleson. He began school in 1956 but was soon forced to withdraw, along with another student, because of being gay. Tragically, the fellow student committed suicide. Oleson's father, who always supported his son, refused to accept the school's decision and angrily petitioned to have him let back in. His strenuous efforts succeeded and Jim Oleson graduated in 1960 but "not without having to endure the stigma of being queer," according to D'Emilio.

Oleson went on to get a masters in American studies at the University of Iowa, then began to get his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965, where he met and eventually married Clara Rodriguez, who took and kept his name even after they divorced some years later. She became a reputed feminist and labor lawyer and remained close friends with him and D'Emilio till the end.

In 1973, freshly divorced, Oleson decided he no longer wanted to pursue his graduate studies and literally set fire to all his dissertation research. ( He was, by then, ABD—All But Dissertation. ) As he put it to D'Emilio and friends, he wanted to live a gay life and that, for him, meant cutting ties to everything that kept him tethered to a past life as in Iowa and moving to New York City.

Once there, he embarked on a series of jobs to make a living, but chief among them was as a seller and distributor of recordings of classical performances to people and institutions around the world, including collectors, music libraries, music agents, and musicians. He created a company, Good Sound Associates, and became a well-known purveyor of highly desired recordings. At the time, this was not an illegal activity but part of the reality of the music market, when recordings of concerts and performances were not as easily made or available as they are now.

"Maria Callas might perform at La Scala, and someone in the audience might happen to be there with a tape recorder [this was before the age of corporations surveilling audiences to ensure they wouldn't lose a cent in profits], and they would contact Jim who in turn created a tape for wider distribution," said D'Emilio. Oleson was not merely a seller, but, as D'Emilio put it, "the world's biggest opera queen." He owned a personal music collection of the genre and classical music in general of thousands of CDs and vinyl records, and spent hours listening to them. He ended the business when the technology changed, deciding that he would not be able to take on the challenges of shifting to accommodate the changes.

D'Emilio met Oleson over a decade after the latter had moved to New York. As he describes it, "We met in the way many gay men met before AIDS: in the back room of a porn shop in Manhattan, on Dec. 8, 1980. We exchanged numbers and began dating. He wanted to move in after the second week, but I insisted we might only do that after we had dated for five years. We ended up moving in together after two and a half years, when I got the job in North Carolina."

Oleson always said that while D'Emilio had a career, he himself had jobs. These included being a case worker at an agency that worked with non-violent felons on alternative sentencing to keep them out of jail, as student advisor, at AIDS agencies in Washington, D.C., and Greensboro, and in various office administrative positions.

As anyone who knew him even briefly can testify, he was also a passionate man and unafraid to speak his mind. The first time I met him was at an event from which he and D'Emilio gave me a ride back home, and my most vivid memory is of him discussing the US at war and describing this as a "racist country," using an unpublishable epithet before the phrase. He was not the sort to pontificate at length and would often sit and absorb conversations, only inserting himself when he had something to say, which was usually pithy, incredibly smart, droll, and incisive.

He remained "intellectually curious down to the end," said D'Emilio, saying that Oleson regularly read the New York Times, New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. But D'Emilio also remembered him as someone who "lived by the philosophy that we must love one another; there wasn't a mean bone in his body. He was a completely good person."


facebook twitter pin it google +1 reddit email

  ARTICLES YOU MIGHT LIKE

Gay News

PASSAGES Dorothy Elizabeth McGroarty 2024-03-14
- Dorothy Elizabeth McGroarty, 82, of The Breakers at Edgewater Beach, and a former resident of Andersonville, passed away Feb. 16 surrounded by her loving family. Born in Dearborn, Michigan, Dorothy was raised on Chicago's South and ...


Gay News

PASSAGES Bryan Dean Wilson 2024-03-14
- Bryan Dean Wilson, 64, of Chicago, passed away March 11. Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Bryan graduated from Washington High school in Cedar Rapids before earning his B.S. in Biology from Mount Mercy University, also in ...


Gay News

PASSAGES: Former Chicago Commission on Human Relations chair Clarence Wood 2024-03-13
- LGBTQ ally and former Chicago Commission on Human Relations (CCHR) Chair and Commissioner Clarence N. Wood died March 5. He was 83. Wood was born April 14, 1940, in Alabama. While primarily raised in Alabama, Wood ...


Gay News

Longtime LGBTQ+-rights activist David Mixner dies at 77 2024-03-12
- On March 11, longtime LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS activist David Mixner—known for working on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign but then splitting from him over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" (DADT)—died at age 77, The Advocate reported. ...


Gay News

LGBTQ+ Victory Fund remembers co-founder David Mixner 2024-03-12
--From a press release - Today, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund President & CEO Mayor Annise Parker released the following statement on the passing of LGBTQ+ civil rights activist and LGBTQ+ Victory Fund co-founder David Mixner: "Today, we lost David Mixner, a founding ...


Gay News

PASSAGES Charles R. Tobin 2024-03-03
- Charles R. Tobin, 81, peacefully passed away on Dec. 23, 2023, in the company of his husband, after living with Lewey body dementia for several years. Charlie was born and raised in the Fernwood neighborhood on ...


Gay News

PASSAGES Trailblazing judge and attorney Patricia M. Logue passes away 2024-02-26
- The Honorable Patricia Logue ("Pat" to her friends, Trish" to her family) was a brilliant lawyer, a trailblazing jurist and a hero to the LGBTQ community. Pat's legacy includes numerous landmark cases she litigated over her ...


Gay News

Oklahoma non-binary student dies after being assaulted 2024-02-21
- Officials acknowledged there are unresolved questions about a 16-year-old non-binary Oklahoma student who died one day after a fight in a high school bathroom, NBC News noted. Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, ...


Gay News

GLAAD remembers Cecilia Gentili, transgender Latina, actress, activist, health care activist, journalist 2024-02-06
--From a press release - (New York, NY - February 6, 2024) GLAAD, the world's largest LGBTQ media advocacy organization, is responding to the death of transgender actress and advocate Cecilia Gentili and elevating voices of transgender and political leaders honoring ...


Gay News

More information emerges about death on Atlantis gay cruise 2024-02-04
By Lu Calzada - Further details have emerged following the death of a Chicago man on a Royal Caribbean's Oasis of the Seas Atlantis cruise targeted towards gay men. Following a Reddit post by the man's sister — which has ...


Gay News

PASSAGES Imperial Court's Scott Archer remembered as selfless, devoted 2024-02-04
By Alec Karam - As the old saying goes, we all have an angel on one shoulder, and a devil on the other. Well, Scott Archer was all angel, his best friend Herman Coen believes. "Everybody wanted to talk to Scott, because Scott was Scott," ...


Gay News

Broadway star Chita Rivera dies at 91 2024-01-30
- Chita Rivera—a Broadway legend with more than seven decades of credits—has died at age 91 after a short illness, People Magazine reported. "It is with immense personal sorrow that I announce the death of the beloved ...


Gay News

PASSSAGES Chef Michael Thomas Zito 2024-01-02
- Chef Michael Thomas Zito, 55, ("Chef Bear Italia" and "Big Chef") passed away December 12, 2023, unexpectedly at home in Chicago's Belmont Gardens neighborhood. Born in Kentucky to Pentecostal missionaries from New York, Mike began cooking ...


Gay News

Gay political trailblazer Ken Sherrill passes away at age 81 2023-12-30
- Kenneth Sherrill—a pioneering political scientist who was also the first out gay elected official in New York history—died in early December at age 81 from surgical complications, Gay City News reported. He is survived by his ...


Gay News

PASSAGES Paris Johnson 2023-12-29
- Paris Johnson, 29, of Chicago's West Loop neighborhood, passed away unexpectedly Nov. 28. He would have celebrated his 30th birthday Dec. 20. Born into a military family in Sacramento, California, Paris moved often in his youth, ...


 


Copyright © 2024 Windy City Media Group. All rights reserved.
Reprint by permission only. PDFs for back issues are downloadable from
our online archives.

Return postage must accompany all manuscripts, drawings, and
photographs submitted if they are to be returned, and no
responsibility may be assumed for unsolicited materials.

All rights to letters, art and photos sent to Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago
Gay and Lesbian News and Feature Publication) will be treated
as unconditionally assigned for publication purposes and as such,
subject to editing and comment. The opinions expressed by the
columnists, cartoonists, letter writers, and commentators are
their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Nightspots
(Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature Publication).

The appearance of a name, image or photo of a person or group in
Nightspots (Chicago GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times
(a Chicago Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender News and Feature
Publication) does not indicate the sexual orientation of such
individuals or groups. While we encourage readers to support the
advertisers who make this newspaper possible, Nightspots (Chicago
GLBT Nightlife News) and Windy City Times (a Chicago Gay, Lesbian
News and Feature Publication) cannot accept responsibility for
any advertising claims or promotions.

 

 

TRENDINGBREAKINGPHOTOS







Sponsor


 



Donate


About WCMG      Contact Us      Online Front  Page      Windy City  Times      Nightspots     
Identity      BLACKlines      En La Vida      Archives      Advanced Search     
Windy City Queercast      Queercast Archives     
Press  Releases      Join WCMG  Email List      Email Blast      Blogs     
Upcoming Events      Todays Events      Ongoing Events      Bar Guide      Community Groups      In Memoriam     
Privacy Policy     

Windy City Media Group publishes Windy City Times,
The Bi-Weekly Voice of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Community.
5315 N. Clark St. #192, Chicago, IL 60640-2113 • PH (773) 871-7610 • FAX (773) 871-7609.