Individual | Inducted 2024
Demetrius “Dem” Hopkins (1955-2023) made important contributions to Chicago’s LGBT community and to the city at large through his work as a bar owner, music promoter, lawyer, and activist. In 1977, when he was a 22-year-old bartender at a Rogers Park gay bar called the Greenleaf, he bought the venue and transformed it into the punk music nightclub Oz, eventually relocating the club to a new location in the River North nightlife district and then to another location in the Lakeview neighborhood. Oz was one of the first venues in the city to give punk and new wave bands a place to perform their original music. Seminal Chicago bands such as Naked Raygun and the Effigies got their start playing at Oz. A live album recorded at Oz’s Lakeview location, Busted at Oz, helped establish Chicago’s punk scene on a national level. As Hopkins told the Chicago Reader in 2020, “punk really grew in Chicago out of queer culture. They’re inextricably linked.”
After closing Oz in 1981, Hopkins went on to operate several other popular LGBT bars, including F-Beat, known for its drag shows, and Different Strokes. In 1989, he enrolled in law school at the University of Illinois Chicago. While there he interned for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and began doing pro bono legal work for people with AIDS/HIV.
Hopkins understood homelessness first-hand: he himself was homeless on the streets of New York as a teenager after his parents kicked him out of their house when he came out to them as being gay. Once he gained his footing, he never stopped advocating for the rights of those in crisis. In 2010, Hopkins, now a lawyer, organized a reunion concert of bands from the Oz era to raise funds for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Though the event was initially intended as a single concert, thanks to Hopkins’ tenacity and vision, the relationship between CCH and Riot Fest has continued and has raised almost $300,000 for CCH over the following decade. Hopkins served on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (now the Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness) in 2011-2014 and remained a staunch supporter until his passing in 2023.