Individual | Inducted 2024 [Posthumous]
Gloria “Mama” Allen, inducted posthumously, was the trailblazing founder and director of the nationally acclaimed “Charm School” at the Center on Halsted. Established in 2011, the school served young unhoused transgender people in their teens or early 20s. The school was informal and free and Allen often paid for students’ meals out of her own limited budget as she offered lessons on table manners, dating etiquette, and job-interview comportment as well as tips on hygiene, dressing, and makeup. She also taught safe sex, dealing with substance abuse, healthy relationships, and life.
Her school gained national attention and inspired a play by Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins, Charm, which premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2015 and ran Off-Broadway in 2017. The New York Times praised it as “first-wave theater about a newly empowered cultural identity.” Allen was also the subject of a documentary, Mama Gloria, which premiered in October 2020 at the Chicago International Film Festival. In 2014, Allen received the Living Legend Award at the Trans 100 awards, and in 2021 she received the Carmen Vázquez Award for Excellence in Leadership on Aging Issues from SAGE (Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Elders).
Born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on October 6, 1945, and raised in Chicago, Allen became part of Chicago’s South Side drag ball culture as a young adult and transitioned four years before Stonewall with the support of her mother and grandmother. Gloria Allen passed away on June 13, 2022, in Chicago.