Queer Places:
410 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605, USA
Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, USA
Anna Morgan (February 24, 1851 – August 27, 1936) was a pioneering American drama teacher, director, and dramatic reader who played a foundational role in establishing
speech and theater as respected intellectual disciplines in the United States. She was instrumental in paving the way for the American Little Theatre Movement.
Born on February 24, 1851, in Fleming, New York, Morgan moved with her family to Chicago in 1876 following her father's death. She studied elocution at the Hershey School of Music and gained early fame in the 1880s as a dramatic reader known for her unusually naturalistic delivery.
Joining the Chicago Conservatory in 1884, she introduced modern European dramatists to American audiences. In 1898, she founded the Anna Morgan Studios on the 8th floor of Chicago’s Fine Arts Building (410 S. Michigan Ave).
Morgan trained students using the Delsarte method (connecting physical gesture directly to emotional states). She directed the U.S. premieres of plays by Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw—including an all-female production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra in 1902.
She authored three books on speech and theater and published her autobiography, My Chicago, in 1918. She retired in the mid-1920s and died on August 27, 1936, in Chicago.
While 19th- and early 20th-century public figures rarely used contemporary LGBTQ+ terminology, Anna Morgan moved at the very center of Chicago's queer, bohemian, and non-conforming artistic networks:
Morgan was a key founder of The Little Room, an influential bohemian social club hosted in the top-floor studios of the Fine Arts Building. The club served as an essential social sanctuary for gay, lesbian, and gender-nonconforming artists at a time when open homosexuality was criminalized and socially taboo.
Notable queer members of the circle included illustrator J.C. Leyendecker and his brother Frank Xavier Leyendecker, along with writer Henry Blake Fuller, whose 1898 novel The Bertram Family and subsequent writings subtly explored homosexual themes.
Many prominent women in The Little Room network—including social reformer Jane Addams, poet Harriet Monroe, playwright Alice Gerstenberg, author Edith Wyatt, and artist Lou Wall Moore—lived independent lives outside traditional heteronormative marriage, often forming lifelong domestic partnerships (frequently termed "Boston marriages") or remaining unmarried.
Morgan herself never married and spent her life embedded in Chicago's vibrant women-led cultural scene. Her studio functioned not just as a classroom, but as an avant-garde salon where gender norms were routinely pushed—exemplified by her staging of all-female casts in major theatrical works and her mentorship of women seeking artistic independence in turn-of-the-century Chicago.
References:
 To Believe In Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America - A History – A Compelling Landmark Account of 19th and 20th Century Rights by Lillian Faderman |
Other references:
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