Part of the Gay Chicago Guide — bars, events & things to do.
Chicago, Illinois
A historic Chicago drag revue, female-impersonation shows since 1969.
The Baton Show Lounge is Chicago's landmark female-impersonation revue, founded by Jim Flint in 1969 and run for roughly five decades on North Clark Street in River North before moving to its Broadway address in Uptown in 2019. Its showgirls — several of them national title-holders — perform lip-sync and live numbers across multiple shows on weekend nights, with a Sunday brunch seating. This is a sit-down show room, not a bar-hopping stop: you reserve a seat, the queens work the floor, and tipping is part of the night. New owners HV Entertainment took over in 2025 and have begun folding the building into a Chicago Eagle leather-bar concept, with the Baton revue continuing as its own room — so it's worth confirming the current schedule before you go. For a first-timer, it remains a polished, old-school drag experience of a kind that's getting rarer.
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