An Open Secret

The first lines of Nicholas Syrett's third book, An Open Secret: The Family Story of Robert and John Gregg Allerton, had me hooked. . . [Syrett] 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 twenties, attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for architecture with a part-time job and inheritance money. * Chicago Tribune * The book brings a critical view to the gay intergenerational relationship. It reveals how same-sex love was transformed into familial ties but also into an open secret where the boundary between knowingness and unknowingness was always in suspension. * DNA Magazine * In 1922 Robert Allerton-the richest bachelor in Chicago -met John Gregg. Virtually inseparable from then on, they publicly referred to one another as father and son. In 1960 Allerton, nearing ninety, legally adopted the sixty-year-old Gregg, the first such adoption of an adult in Illinois. Syrett tells the story of these iconoclasts, locating them among their queer contemporaries and exploring why becoming father and son made a surprising kind of sense for a twentieth-century couple who had every monetary advantage but could not be together openly. * Law & Social Inquiry * Syrett's expert portrait shakes up modern assumptions about queer coupledom. His richly nuanced interpretation reveals that the kinship claim of these men was not merely a front to hide their sexuality, but a deeply meaningful structure for their emotional and physical intimacy. Not quite the story of a same-sex marriage, An Open Secret shows that the history of male same-sex companionship is much queerer indeed. * Rachel Hope Cleves, author of Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality * Syrett escorts us into a world of wealth and privilege and creatively examines the decades-long intimacy of Allerton and Gregg. Filled with surprising revelations, Syrett's account offers a new angle on the forms that queer life and love has taken in the past. * John D'Emilio, author of Queer Legacies: Stories from Chicago's LGBTQ Archives * Syrett has crafted an eye-opening and engaging narrative, making a provocative contribution to queer history in his assertion that Allerton and Gregg may have had a relationship akin to bothmarriage and father to son-and that the two are not mutually exclusive. The story of this moneyed conservative couple disturbingly reveals how the privileged found community and refuge in open and secretive ways during a time of heightened homophobia. * Amy Sueyoshi, author of Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi * An Open Secret is a beautifully written, powerful account of queer domesticity, sympathetically humane but never simplistically celebratory of its subjects. Syrett deftly situates his biography in a broader history of twentieth-century LGBTQ communities and culture, offering a hot new take on the expansive queerness that defined some same-sex relationships before the emergence of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. * Jen Manion, author of Female Husbands: A Trans History *