Make it Shimmy

I have been intrigued by a series of billboards in my neighborhood since I moved here. The latest one’s tagline is “A loan officer and a gentleman”. The last one was “Don’t drag out your mortgage” and like this one featured the same man with drag queen.

It turns out the man is Shimmy Braun a mortgage lender at Guaranteed Rate. He grew up an an orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn that was “so religious that he was engaged to his Chicago-born bride to be after knowing her for only 12 days.” They moved to Chicago and he built up a business as a mortgage lender in the orthodox Jewish community of Rogers Park. But when he came out as gay and got divorced at 40 he lost that clientele and needed to build up a new one. Hence the drag queen ads in the Boystown neighborhood!