In 1922 Robert Allerton—described by the Chicago Tribune as the
“richest bachelor in Chicago”—met a twenty-two-year-old
University of Illinois architecture student named John Gregg, who
was twenty-six years his junior. Virtually inseparable from then
on, they began publicly referring to one another as father and son
within a couple years of meeting. In 1960, after nearly four
decades together, and with Robert Allerton nearing ninety, they
embarked on a daringly nonconformist move: Allerton legally adopted
the sixty-year-old Gregg as his son, the first such adoption of an
adult in Illinois history. An Open Secret tells the striking story
of these two iconoclasts, locating them among their queer
contemporaries and exploring why becoming father and son made a
surprising kind of sense for a twentieth-century couple who had
every monetary advantage but one glaring problem: they wanted to be
together publicly in a society that did not tolerate their love.
Deftly exploring the nature of their design, domestic, and
philanthropic projects, Nicholas L. Syrett illuminates how viewing
the Allertons as both a same-sex couple and an adopted family is
crucial to understanding their relationship’s profound queerness.
By digging deep into the lives of two men who operated largely as
ciphers in their own time, he opens up provocative new lanes to
consider the diversity of kinship ties in modern US history.
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