It's difficult to convey how exciting—sometimes even thrilling—it was to work in gay and lesbian media during the 1980s and early 1990s. All those passionate discussions we had about the burning issues of the day, and marches, and demonstrations, and kiss-ins!
At the same time, the appalling horror of AIDS—the plague that came out of nowhere and snuffed out so many gay lives—cast its shadow over everything and everyone I knew. The highs and lows we experienced were steep, to put it mildly, and sometimes followed so closely on one another that there was hardly room to take a breath in between.
By 1985, I had been writing for Chicago's GayLife for several years as a freelancer. Tracy Baim was the paper's managing editor, Jeff McCourt ( under the pseudonym Mimi O'Shea ) was arts and entertainment editor, and his lover Bob Bearden was sales manager.
Late that summer, Jeff and Bob were in negotiations with owner Chuck Renslow to purchase GayLife. Then Jeff told me that after reviewing all the finances, he and Bob were thinking of simply starting an entirely new paper. Tracy trusted and admired Bob, and if he went, so would she, she said. And I trusted and admired Tracy, so if she was going to leave GayLife to help start a new paper, I was onboard with that. The art director, Drew Badanish, came in as the third investor ( with Bob and Jeff ) to start the new paper.
Jeff came up with the new paper's name: Windy City Times. He told me he thought it would be best—easier to sell ads to non-gay businesses—if there was nothing "gay" in the title. I didn't like that—to me it sounded closeted. But I was just a freelancer and part-time typesetter, after all—and after a while I warmed to the name.
I no longer have a copy of the first issue of Windy City Times, from Sept. 25, 1985, but I recall the herculean efforts, the long hours, and cycles of excitement and exhaustion during those initial months, as the paper started to get off the ground. I had a lot of new ideas for things to write for Windy City Times that had never occurred to me at GayLife. Being there at the beginning of the new enterprise, I felt more involved. All sorts of exciting topics in feminist, lesbian and women's writing in general began to emerge for me on this expanded writing horizon, and gay men's literature was, at the time, just at the beginning of an astonishing burst of creativity, one that was fascinating to follow.
At first, the Windy City Times office was in Jeff and Bob's big condo apartment on Melrose Street just off Lake Michigan. We had use of typesetting equipment in a Loop office building at Lake and Wabash right next to where the el tracks curved, but we could only use it on nights and weekends. This typesetting machine was quirky; it didn't run properly if the room temperature was higher than 60 degrees. Tracy, Toni Armstrong Jr.—who also typeset—and I spent many an evening in this uncomfortable cold, working from late evening until dawn.
I remember nights when Tracy and I took turns, one typesetting while the other tried to get an hour or two of sleep on the office rug. The huge empty office building was creepy enough, but braving the Loop streets at 4 in the morning meant you had to navigate your way through hookers, pimps, drug addicts, bellicose drunks and gang kids on the prowl, with the frequent loud sounds of smashing glass in the alleyways to keep you frosty. ( In the '80s, the Loop had not yet been transformed into the evening entertainment hub it is today, with its many office-to-residential building conversions, late-night dining establishments and high-end hotels. )
By that November, Jeff and Bob somehow managed to install a typesetting machine into the empty basement of their condo building. I don't know how they placated their neighbors, and there was a spot of trouble with a city inspector since it was a residential building. I was very glad I didn't have to be in the Loop at midnight anymore, but if anything, it was colder than in the creepy office building, since the basement was unheated and had a broken window. In fact, the door that led to the street was broken off its hinges, and you had to lift the whole door to move it.
Imagine trying to type in an unheated basement when it's eight degrees outside. The bulky typesetting machine surrounded you like the flat faces of giant ice cubes, freezing to the touch, and a penetrating cold kept leaching into the room. Bob reinforced the windows with plastic and tried to arrange plastic draperies around the machine to keep the heat in for us—and not incidentally to keep dirt and debris from the basement ceiling from falling on the typesetting machine. In short, working conditions were less than ideal. But we were activists on a mission, so we pressed on. Everyone worked really hard, determined that the new paper should succeed.
AIDS Hits Home
By November, just about everybody got sick from spending extended periods of time in that unhealthful basement atmosphere. Bob, however, never got better. He became noticeably thinner and continued to be sick into December. I saw him now and then in his bathrobe upstairs in the office part of the condo, where at least it was warm. By late January, he was hospitalized, near death from AIDS, on a respirator. He got better, and worse, and better again. Bob managed to fight off the pneumocystis but then developed some other immunodeficiency-related problems, including a blood infection.
Understandably, Jeff was a basket case, and Tracy, who was a lot closer to Bob than I was, was devastated. But Jeff had to double up and do Bob's job as well as his own. For a while, Jeff alternated between stoically going out with his attaché case to sell ads, and lying in what appeared to be a semi-catatonic state on the living-room sofa of their condo, staring at the ceiling. We struggled on, very demoralized and sad, but gathering new recruits and supporters and advertisers.
We published issues that I thought were far better, more comprehensive, more wide-ranging and readable, more balanced in reporting, than GayLife had been. After a while, Jill Burgin assumed the sales rep responsibilities. Drew Badanish continued as art director for a few more months. Tracy was running the entertainment section as well as the news. Jon-Henri Damski divided his time between writing his whimsical, philosophical columns and visiting Bob in the hospital.
As it happened, the first actual Windy City Times AIDS death was not Bob Bearden's but that of our travel writer, Richard Cash, who was a longtime friend of Bob and Jon-Henri. He went into the hospital to get tests to see if he had AIDS and died there two weeks later. It was another serious shock to the barely 4-month-old newspaper.
That spring ( rather miraculously, under the circumstances, and largely because of Tracy's dedication ), Windy City Times was still going ( GayLife had by then gone out of business ) and the "office" finally moved into an actual office space—in the building behind the Rodde Center on Sheffield just north of Belmont. A new mood, more businesslike, set in. There was far more space, on two floors ( having no basement with falling debris or broken windows was also a big plus ), and the paper was finally functioning like an actual business, with more freelancers and staff coming on. I kept on writing and typesetting, but also became the books editor.
Every LGBT newspaper back then had to figure out how to balance the tension between business practices and advocacy. Windy City Times wasn't "just" another newspaper, but a political voice for gay and lesbian rights and for the community. Different people, both on the staff and in the community, had different ideas about what that political voice meant, and different levels of concern, and different opinions of what should be done, and how. We were all pretty much making it up as we went along.
But Jeff became more and more rigid, possessive and dictatorial, though he often clearly didn't know what he was talking about and had little patience for learning about the dynamics of community organizations. I remember one big staff meeting where we were all sitting with our chairs in a circle. Jeff, in a major freakout over some little photographic arrangement he didn't like, leaped into the middle of the circle, threw down several copies of the paper and vigorously stomped up and down on them, screaming all the while, like a child having a tantrum. Everyone, myself included, froze. But I thought to myself, okay, he's under a lot of pressure, but I can't put up with this abusive crap much longer.
At the time, Bob was still alive, home from the hospital but not capable of returning to work again or of doing much of anything. He mostly stayed in his bedroom at home. After a final, terrible bout of seizures, Bob died in January 1987.
In the year of Windy City Times' founding, 12,000 people in the U.S., mostly gay men, were diagnosed with AIDS—and half of them were already dead. It was a chilling, alarming statistic then—two years before ACT UP was founded, two years before the first AIDS quilt panel was sewn. Today, while it's estimated that 14,000 people become infected every day, it's no longer the science-fiction-like apocalyptic crisis it was within the LGBT community when every week young, otherwise healthy gay men, whom you knew and liked, vanished off the face of the earth. There was plenty of theorizing about the cause of the disease, but no one yet knew what it was.
After Bob's death, Jeff's behavior spun further out of control. He became even more erratic and irrational—insufferable, really. There were murmurs that he had become addicted to cocaine. I don't know if that was true but, judging by the way he was acting, it was certainly plausible.
Tracy initially tried to buy Windy City Times ( with investors ) through an anonymous offer but, when Jeff found out, he was outraged—even though he had considered selling it after Bob died. By the summer of 1987, many of the staff of Windy City Times, including Tracy, myself, Jill Burgin and others, were poised to start a new paper yet again. There was a certain inevitability to this, since Jeff was no longer someone any of us wanted to work for, but we still wanted to do gay and lesbian journalism—and there was an attitude that, hey, we'd done it once, so we could do it again.
Outlines
Outlines, the newspaper that was founded by refugees from Jeff McCourt's Windy City Times, began publishing in June 1987. ( In 2000, Tracy Baim and her company bought the name Windy City Times from McCourt, and the Outlines name was transformed back into WCT. ) After driving his staff away with his crazy behavior, Jeff's animosity toward his new competition was sometimes cloak-and-dagger, sometimes Laurel & Hardy. I recall one organizational meeting of Outlines in which a columnist who had previously written for WCT, sitting on a sofa, bent over and a tiny tape recorder fell out of his pocket and bounced onto the rug—he was recording our meeting to take back to Jeff! I never found out if Jeff had sent him on this burlesque attempt at espionage, or if it was his own idea, but this same fellow was spotted more than once lurking in the street, looking up at the Outlines office windows late at night. Weird stuff like that went on during Outlines' beginning year or two. [When Nightlines was launched a couple years later, as a sister publication to Outlines, all of the computers and disks were stolen from the office.]
The owners who invested in Outlines included Tracy, Nan Schaffer and Scott McCausland. Schaffer and McCausland were, luckily, very hands-off, allowing the paper to grow and giving Tracy the latitude she needed to make well-considered, independent editorial decisions.
I joined Outlines as its arts and entertainment editor. It was my first full-time job on a gay and lesbian paper—full-time meaning hovering around 80 hours a week. Some nights I'd have just enough time to go home and take a shower, nap for two hours with my girlfriend, and go back into the office. I was never so exhausted in my life. Yet I remember those intense years at Outlines now with great fondness.
Tracy had a vision of a truly balanced gay and lesbian newspaper—in the sense of providing equal coverage of men's and women's news. Previously, gay and lesbian papers were generally aimed at one group or the other: papers run by gay men that were exclusively gay or overwhelmingly gay with a smattering of lesbian news thrown in, like GayLife, and small all-volunteer newspapers like Blazing Star that were strictly for lesbians, or for feminists and produced by lesbians. The fact that our paper consciously strove for parity between men and women was something quite innovative. Outlines also featured stories by and about bisexuals and transgender people—though it would be years before the community "officially" recognized itself as LGBT. I am very glad to have witnessed that evolution.
When I think back to all the LGBT newspaper offices I spent any time in, the first Outlines office is the space I remember best, probably because it was filled with light. It was essentially one large open space, on the third floor of a loft building on Belmont Avenue at Lakewood, about six blocks west of the Belmont el stop and eight blocks west of what was then fast becoming "Boys Town" on North Halsted Street. The building housed a number of little corporations, arts groups and some light manufacturing.
The loft building was run-down but exuded a bohemian charm I found very appealing—real exposed brick walls in places, big, tall windows that let in thick columns of sunlight during the day, and beautiful high ceilings. This charm could fade quickly when the heat didn't work or the bathroom pipes clogged, but it was a great space for a newspaper. Our office furniture was, well, let's say eclectic; each of us had gone to the used furniture warehouse on Western Avenue north of Lawrence and picked out the desk and chair and lamp we preferred, so nothing matched and some pieces were quite scuffed, but we were all comfortable, having chosen to our own liking. The look of the place was unified visually by the original solid wood flooring and the equally old ornate ceiling tiles.
Rather than the standard behemoth typesetting machine, Tracy invested in multiple early Apple computers—which themselves would be considered antiques now, of course—that were a great advancement over laying out typeset pages by hand like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Now writers could "typeset" their words onscreen or, if they had a home computer, bring them in on a floppy disk. Moreover, the art director could flow them right into the layouts without the need to have them retyped. This was a huge time saver. But every story that came into the office on paper from a freelancer still had to be hand-typed into the computer, because there was no such thing as email.
Plus, every phone call still came through a single land line that had an extension at each desk. How was that even possible? How did reporters ever find out about anything in a timely fashion, all of us clicking extension buttons and shuffling through paper Rolodexes to find phone numbers? And anyone who was out of the office and not at home was simply unreachable.
Of course, there were no digital cameras, either. Ages ago, I had taught adult-education courses in film-developing. I took up photography again while at Windy City Times and, by the time Outlines started, I'd built a darkroom in my apartment. I spent a portion of my working time painstakingly ( compared to today ) developing my film and that of other staff photographers who had no darkroom facilities, then making prints for the paper. ( Once made, those prints would still have to be professionally transformed into halftones by an outside firm. )
Outlines staff members I recall most clearly, almost 30 years later, are Scott Galiher, Jill Burgin, Stephanie Bacon, Richard Small, Janet Provo, Bill Burks, Rex Wockner, Johanna Stoyva, Pat Bechdolt, Rhonda Craven, MJ Murphy and Rachel Pepper. Tracy Baim, freelancer Michèle Bonnarens and Angie Schmidt are still among my close friends today. There were many others—freelancers, activists from various organizations—who were in and out of the office frequently, and even more writers who sent in stories from California, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
You never knew when a well-known gay author or a nationally known activist might stop by, as they often did. It was fantastic to be able to call up Larry Kramer for information and to interview Audre Lorde or Lily Tomlin. It was a time of further discovery for me, too—freelancers would send in eye-opening interviews with Hollywood celebrities, stories on new filmmakers such as Gregg Araki, reviews of a groundbreaking new book by Vito Russo.
And every week, I found out more about authors and artists and historical figures who were gay or lesbian, as new books about them came out, and I'd turn what I'd learned into an article on Joe Orton, or Constantine Cavafy, or Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap. I did a lengthy series of articles on Sappho—the original Lesbian—and what was known about her, in articles that formed the basis for my later "Tenth Muse" columns in HOT WIRE: The Journal of Women's Music and Culture.
In my capacity as a writer, I continued to concentrate on cultural events but also did some news reporting. For instance, I did Outlines' ongoing updates of Karen Thompson's efforts on behalf of her lover, Sharon Kowalski, who had been severely disabled in a car crash in 1983. The legal battle went on for years, as Kowalski's homophobic father, who was her legal guardian, kept Kowalski isolated from Thompson in a nursing home with no rehabilitation and refused to accept that his daughter was a lesbian. The case inspired books, plays and a documentary film, and it brought attention to the need for durable powers of attorney for gay and lesbian couples. It was finally resolved in Thompson's favor in 1991 and became a landmark in establishing gays and lesbians as legal guardians of their partners.
I did movie reviews, interviews, opinion pieces, puff pieces, pieces about housewares and real estate and jewelry and wines, all sorts of things, basically whatever we needed written that I couldn't or didn't have time to assign to anyone else. To make the paper appear to have more writers than we did ( a strategy Jeff McCourt had used at GayLife ), I came up with several pseudonyms. I wrote Lyric Opera reviews under the regal name Johanna Buckingham ( a composite of my two grandmothers' names ); I did theater reviews under another name—Lisa something; and home lifestyle reviews as Randy Levertov.
A lot of us who worked at Outlines lived and breathed community current events, and the sense of community-building was palpable. When we weren't actually working on specific newspaper tasks, we'd sit around the office and discuss the waves and waves of controversies that were always swirling around and, in one way or another, making news. Some of these discussions resulted in opinion pieces.
I recall especially a "debate" in the form of two opinion pieces side by side, that began as an office conversation when Rex Wockner complained that he wasn't being allowed entry to cover a debate about racism in the women's community that was held at Mountain Moving Coffeehouse, a local all-women's venue. Rex argued he should have been admitted; I argued for the coffeehouse's right to keep men, including reporters, out if they wanted to.
I also did a lengthy interview with the newly selected International Ms Leather at the time S&M was just beginning to be discussed widely. I knew little about it, but that turned out to be an advantage since I asked basic questions, and the few leatherdykes I knew ( and I didn't even know I knew any till they came out to me after the interview ) were quite happy to see the topic featured in the newspaper. I also did long interviews with Mary Daly and Sonia Johnson. I could go on and on. I found almost all of this intellectually engaging, even when I didn't agree with others' opinions about some aspect of culture or politics or sexual psychology.
There was always more to do and a feeling of urgency about the time I had to do it in. On the nights when I wasn't working late at the office, I'd be going to gay and lesbian plays, readings, musical performances, dances—or going to a funeral. The reality of AIDS intensified my commitment to gay and lesbian rights, and I think this may have been the case for many LGBT people at that time.
Growing Visibility
The Wikipedia article on LGBT history dismisses the 1980s as "a dismal period for homosexuals." "Dismal" is not how I'd describe it at all. Frightening, yes, and calamitous, with AIDS hanging over the heads of so many talented, earnest young men I knew, and with the obituary section of the paper ever-growing, week after week. But the '80s were also a time of enormous expansion in activism ( most prominently, the rise of ACT UP ), advances in gay rights, and the birth of cultural institutions.
Not dismal. Energizing. Often even amazing. The gay and lesbian movement was coalescing into some primordial landmass rising from the sea, right in front of my eyes. I had the freedom to let my mind roam wherever my curiosity about new gay and lesbian cultural territory would take me, and to write about it, and enlist other writers who wanted to write about it, too. Though the pay was meager, the hours were endless, and the deadlines were often stressful, I felt that those of us working at Outlines were involved in important, meaningful work that was effecting real social change.
Local gay cultural organizations—choruses, art groups, bands, drama and dance troupes—and professional organizations that had begun in the late '70s and early '80s had, by the mid-to-late '80s, sprung up in so many places that they were starting to have annual regional and national gatherings that we covered. And there were the many annual women's-music festivals back then. Out gays and lesbians were still nowhere to be seen on television ( the first ongoing gay TV character I ever saw was played by Martin Mull on Roseanne, in the early 1990s, though there were apparently a few such roles on earlier shows ). But there were enough independent films made about us by then to spark the growing number of gay and lesbian film festivals. As arts and entertainment editor, part of my job was to make sure these events were given ample coverage, and the films, presentations and concerts were reviewed with thoughtfulness and care—especially since we knew that some of these LGBT-themed offerings, no matter how excellent they might be, would not be covered anywhere in the mainstream media.
In the early years of my involvement in gay and lesbian journalism, I had assumed that most mainstream stories simply had no gay or lesbian "angle." By the late 1980s, as an editor at Outlines, I realized that there were very few stories that didn't have one—though you might have to look a little more closely to find it.
The mainstream press was still loath to report anything at all about gays and lesbians except AIDS-related news. This became glaringly obvious after the "Great March"—the October 11, 1987, National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, in Washington, D.C. Those of us who worked in the gay and lesbian press scurried from event to event there, taking notes for articles, snapping photos, doing interviews and viewing the AIDS Quilt at its unveiling.
Almost everyone from Outlines had made the trip to D.C., and the emotional impact of that trip served to further cement us together as a newspaper team. The number of marchers was estimated by activists during the day as half a million, and by the police at close to that number, but it was reported in The New York Times as 200,000. This blatant minimization of the crowd numbers underscored the ongoing vital need for our own media, since the mainstream was still bent on ignoring our issues and our impact.
The same muting of our visibility by the mainstream news was apparent at the Olivia Records 15th-anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall in 1988, with a gala reception afterward in the Waldorf-Astoria's Grand Ballroom. I was part of a large Chicago contingent at the event, and it was quite spectacular, with hordes of dykes in tuxedos strolling up Park Avenue from the concert hall to the Waldorf. Today, mainstream newspapers and magazines would be all over a story like that. But back then, according to Wikipedia, "the two [Olivia] concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York were the largest-grossing concerts at that venue in its history. Yet The New York Times barely mentioned the show." We did a full-page spread on it, of course, with lots of photos.
I have an especially vivid memory of one night at the office in early December 1987. James Baldwin, the most eminent Black gay author of the 1950s and 1960s, had just died—only three days, in fact, after the sudden death of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington. It was snowing outside, beautiful fluffy flakes, and I was alone in the office all night writing my full-page tribute to Baldwin, which was due the next morning, and would be the opening feature of the arts and entertainment section in the next issue.
It was more than a bit eerie, alone in the cold winter quiet of this big space, with a desk phone ringing once in a while in the empty office. But I remember what a deep sense of satisfaction I had, putting into words what Baldwin had meant to me growing up, and explaining the extent of Baldwin's importance as an out gay Black intellectual to people who might not know, or be too young to remember, how groundbreaking his books had been during the 1960s.
I started writing a humor column in 1991, called "Lesbomania," that first appeared in a little weekly offshoot of Outlines called Nightlines, then in Outlines itself and, coming full circle, in Windy City Times. Most of my humor writing was designed to show the irrationality and illogic of homophobia—an easy target, really, but it gave me great satisfaction to ridicule anti-gay bigots and pundits. I did gay spoofs and parodies of television shows and movies, too, and I also poked fun at some of the crazy things that went on inside the lesbian community. Among my shenanigans, I examined the "scientific evidence" that lesbonauts from outer space visited the Earth in prehistoric times. I "reported" on the "War Between the Butches and the Femmes." I revealed the secret lesbian codes embedded in great Renaissance art works. I outed ( quite convincingly, I think ) Santa Claus, Godzilla, the Abominable Snowman, and the Loch Ness Monster as lesbians, and wrote gay and lesbian versions of The X-Files, West Side Story, Star Trek, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and more.
The column was syndicated in a number of LGBT papers around the country, and in 1994 and 1996 many of the pieces were gathered into two book collections, Lesbomania and Tales From the Dyke Side. I did theatrical readings from the columns—with visual enhancement in the form of cartoons—at the Bailiwick theater in Chicago during Pride Week, at the Center in New York, and in a number of bookstores and other venues in the U.S. and Europe. I had a blast—and a good laugh, I hope, was had by all.
Working for Windy City Times/Outlines was a rare opportunity to combine activism and culture, and to feel that I was contributing something tangible to the movement for LGBT rights. And I was constantly learning new things and meeting fantastic, admirable people. I look back almost in awe on the hope and the triumphs of those heady days amid the poignancy of our tragic losses. I saw many instances of bravery and actual heroism in those days, of otherwise ordinary people who realized that coming out, however difficult for them, was an act of dignity, of personal integrity, of openness, of risking personal safety for the sake of honesty.
The LGBT media solidified and amplified our collective courage. I feel privileged to have been among the people who documented those landmark times as they unfolded.
This piece is an excerpt, adapted for WCT from "The Passing Parade: Cultural Reporting in an Age of Heroes," a chapter in Gay Press: Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America, edited by Tracy Baim.
