Ralla Klepak, Chicago lawyer who championed LGBTQ rights, has died at 82

Ralla Klepak “was fighting and advocating for the gay community at a time when even the gay community wasn’t fighting for ourselves,” said longtime Chicago activist Rick Garcia.

A celebration of her life was held Tuesday for Ms. Klepak, whose health had been in decline before she died April 25 at Illinois Masonic Hospital, friends said. She was 82.

In 2017, Ms. Klepak was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame as a “Friend of the Community.” She was an attorney for Mattachine Midwest, one of the city’s first gay rights organizations.

“People who were arrested for being in a gay bar or entrapped on the street, she took their cases, and I think she won all of them,” Garcia said.

Ms. Klepak recounted the bar busts of the 1960s and 1970s in an interview last year with Windy City Times.

”I know people who jumped out of windows at the police station, risking broken bones rather than to be processed,” she told the newspaper. “Another cruel aspect was that some of the officers enjoyed taking arrested transgender people and cross-dressers and putting them in cells with the toughest-looking guys. The next morning, they would be ushered into the courtroom in heels, with their beard showing, make-up smudged and wig askew. There was such cruelty in the process, an intentional humiliation.”

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“When you got raided, the city would take your liquor license,” said her friend Marge Summit. By arguing in court that licenses shouldn’t be removed without due process, Summit said, “She saved a lot of people’s bars.”

Jim Flint said Ms. Klepak was his defender through many court appearances after he was charged in 1965 with keeping a disorderly house, just for being a bartender at the Chesterfied club. Now 77, he owns the Baton Show Lounge, which bills itself as “America’s premiere drag showcase.”

“She was the lawyer who saved me from those charges,” Flint said. “She was our protector.”

She was protecting one of the era’s few gathering places for gay people, said Gary Chichester, longtime co-chair of the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. The bars “were our town halls,” he said.

Ms. Klepak was a friend of Sr. Margaret Traxler, an activist Roman Catholic nun who joined her in advocating for civil and women’s rights, visiting women in jail to counsel them and lobbying for them to be given access to law libraries.

Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, wrote about their efforts when they all traveled to Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia in 1975. Day said Ms. Klepak and another attorney “probably did more for the prisoners than any of the rest of us.”

Ms. Klepak also served as a court-appointed lawyer representing children in many contentious custody cases.

In the 1970s, she owned Togetherness, “one of the best drag bars at the time,” said Summit, who helped manage the club at 61 W. Hubbard St. “Everybody was there — girls, guys. Everybody got along, and they just had great shows.”

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Young Ralla grew up on the old Jewish West Side. As a child, she liked spending days at the law office of her father, Jack Klepak, according to her nephew Robert Klepak. She went to Senn High School and Northwestern University, where she studied drama. Friends said her theater training boosted her persuasive powers in court.

Ms. Klepak got a doctorate in child development from Northwestern and worked as a teacher on the West Side, according to her friend Carole K. Bellows, a retired Cook County judge. To get her law degree, she took night classes at John Marshall Law School. And she taught at Chicago-Kent College of Law, according to her friend Nancy Mynard.

In 1971, she told the Chicago Sun-Times that women lawyers were still getting assigned menial work. “They are glorified pencil-pushers,” she said.

To the end of her days, she enjoyed going out with a group of friends who called themselves “OWLS” — Old Women Lawyers.

She loved ethnic restaurants, especially ones featuring Cuban and Puerto Rican fare, Mynard said. She liked spending winters in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Mynard said, her voicemail message intoned, “I’m probably out watching the dolphins.” Ms. Klepak listened to jazz, especially the will-o’-the-wisp voice of Blossom Dearie.

“She was hell on wheels,” Mynard said.

An avid playgoer, Ms. Klepak left bequests to her favorite Chicago theaters, friends said, directing that some of the money be spent on activities for children.