Entries associated with the tag "Windy City Times":

Verbal self-defense is an art of calibration. If they see you sweat when you're settling scores, you lose. If you sound like you're feeling sorry for yourself, you lose big time. 

Tracy Baim, publisher of Windy City Times, used her column last week to stand up for herself. What bugged her was a review in the Sun-Times of Out & Proud in Chicago, a new documentary airing on WTTW. The author, Misha Davenport, whom Baim had never met, regretted the absence of certain notables from this history, the "glaring omission" being Albert Williams, best known today as a Reader theater critic and a Columbia College instructor but also a central figure in the development of the gay press.

There's no love lost between Williams and Baim, frequent journalistic rivals over the years, but she could abide a friendly word on his behalf. What ticked her off was what came next. "Instead," Davenport went on, "the documentary features Tracy Baim . . . as both a subject and a contributing resource. [Coproducer Dan Andries] insists that Baim didn't control access to the information and had no editorial input, but it's hard to believe she had no influence over the documentary, given that producers used her own interviews for research and relied heavily on her newspaper archives. It would be an understatement to say that, as a journalist, Williams is far more respected by members of the community than Baim is. But Baim is here. Williams is not. Andries doesn't see this as a problem. I'm sure many will beg to differ." 

Baim read this with astonishment and anger. "It's one thing to say someone's missing," she says. "It's something else to say someone else took their place and didn’t deserve it." 

Baim was righteously upset. But that's when you need to keep your cool.

She didn't. "First, let me say that I warned WTTW that if I were to help them in any way with the documentary, the same people who have attacked me in the past would very likely do so again with this project, and in fact this has happened," she wrote. "I don't mean to sound paranoid, but for more than 20 years the same few people have been saying the same negative and untrue things about me."

With that Baim had passed the point of no return. When you catch yourself sounding paranoid, don't explain that it's not how you mean to sound. Delete and start over. Since the 80s Baim has been a major figure in local gay publishing, whose history of schisms and scandals guarantees anyone involved in it a healthy crop of enemies. Having decided to publicly nurse her grudge, Baim, whose column was very long and nominally a  survey of LGBT history, could not let it go. "I hesitated, because I did not want critics of me personally to taint the WTTW project. But in the end I decided . . . that I would not let those same few critics harass me yet again. . . . I congratulate WTTW on this first step. I hope they do not take the critics to heart. . . . Let's see who is the real enemy here? WTTW, which made tough decisions on this first film, or those who would bomb us?"

Baim changed subjects, or so I thought, and began a discussion of her own Chicago Gay History Project. But she circled back. "Our differences often keep us apart, and are often used to try to keep others down," she reflected. "I sometimes feel upset by how personal the attacks can be on me, and how those attacks could create collateral damage to others (in this case WTTW). . . . No one is perfect, but I believe that even more imperfect are those who never 'do' except to criticize those who try to make a positive contribution."

Out & Proud in Chicago debuted during a pledge drive and made WTTW a lot of  money; what's more, it got a glowing review on WFMT by Andrew Patner. Baim needn't worry about WTTW suffering collateral damage. The damage was done to Baim alone, and most of it was self-inflicted.

Jeff McCourt exasperated, offended, and alienated so many friends and admirers in Chicago’s gay and lesbian community that they eventually walled him off: McCourt died March 26 at Swedish Covenant Hospital and no one knew until – well they may not know until they read this blog. McCourt vanished from public life in 2000. I learned of his death when his younger brother Dan e-mailed me. 

McCourt was a major figure in Chicago journalism over the last quarter century, and I've written about him many times in Hot Type, usually when things were going wrong. In 1985 McCourt was an options trader who'd contributed theater reviews and a gossip column to Gay Life under the pen name Mimi O'Shea and then become features editor. His lover, Bob Bearden, was Gay Life's sales manager. They believed Gay Life's audience deserved and would support a more serious newspaper, and followed by other renegade staffers they walked out and launched Windy City Times. But Bearden soon died of AIDS, and WCT became McCourt’s. Desolate at Bearden’s death, McCourt wasn’t sure he wanted to be a publisher, but adversity – as I wrote about McCourt years ago – “has always focused him.” He built WCT into a newspaper marked by professional reporting standards and political engagement -- the paper was instrumental in the passage of the city's Human Rights Ordinance in 1988.

Yet McCourt could never manage to avoid antagonizing the people around him. In 1987 his editor, Tracy Baim, another founding staffer from Gay Life, walked out and created Outlines. In 1999 a large contingent of WCT staffers led by editors Louis Weisberg and Lisa Neff collected their last paychecks and quit on McCourt while he was out of town. They promptly launched the Chicago Free Press. McCourt was thunderstruck. “I operate in an atmosphere of trust,” he told me. “I don’t operate in an atmosphere of paranoia. If I did, perhaps I’d have been more suspicious.” But a McCourt loyalist in the WCT ranks had written himself a memo while the coup was being plotted, rueing the plotters’ failure “to empathize with a man who embodies so many of the demons they themselves can’t shake. . . . I hope Jeff finds balance and happiness and hope he finds peace from the suffering of the life that he’s living.”

McCourt found none of that. He kept Windy City Times going without missing an issue or dramatically cheapening the product, but ultimately the defection defeated him. He had to compete now against not just one newspaper but two, and to hang on to advertisers he gave them enormous discounts. He owed his printer, Newsweb, so much money that Newsweb took him to court. He was about to shut the doors in 2000 when Baim -- whom he’d reached out to for the first time since 1987 -- bought the name of the paper to keep it going. Gay activist Rick Garcia told me at the time, “I think Windy City Times has been horribly undervalued and unrecognized for the critically important contributions it has made to the gay and lesbian community in Chicago. McCourt has never gotten the credit he richly and rightly deserves. People bitch and moan because he’s had the courage to expose organizations and activities when they fuck up.”

McCourt had one friend at the end, possibly the only one who knew about his death when it happened. Gregory Munson says he was hired seven years ago by McCourt's sister, Diane, his legal guardian, to be his "chaperone." At the time Munson was working for an agency, Always Caring. "He had gotten mugged when he was staying in the Talbott Hotel," Munson told me. "To my understanding, they found him in an alley unconscious and he went into Northwestern Hospital in a coma." When McCourt was transferred to a nursing home, Munson went to work for him. "I was originally with him five days a week," he says. "As time went by it dwindled down to two hours once a month. [His sister] said he was broke. He disputed that but he was afraid to go to court to fight. He just hated that he couldn't have more control over his own life." 

Munson said that "in the beginning he had a lot of visitors, but as time went on they stopped coming. He had a good memory for things that happened in the past but his short-term memory was his problem. I took him to restaurants, parks, the theater. The last thing I took him to was he wanted some doughnuts, so we went to Dunkin' Donuts. We had coffee there. Before that he wanted to see Brokeback Mountain -- that was the last major place we went." I asked how McCourt died. "He had HIV for almost 30 years," Munson said. "So he had that very much in control. It seemed more to me like he just gave up." The last time Munson saw McCourt, which was a couple of days before he died, he gave Munson a copy of a play he'd written back in 1992, "The Midnight Room." "He told me to keep it and maybe I could get somebody to enact it.

"We grew very close," said Munson. "Jeffrey was a good person. He did a lot to help a lot of people and he'll be greatly missed." 

Dan McCourt says that he and Diane and another brother will scatter some of Jeff’s ashes around his birthplace in upstate New York and other ashes in Chicago.

There was a strange shooting early New Year’s Eve on the south side. At about 5:30 in the morning two gunmen in masks kicked open rear and side doors to a house in the 7900 block of South Woodlawn, sprayed semiautomatic gunfire from the doorways into the ground-floor apartment, where a party was still under way, then took off. Police said around 100 people were in the apartment; six were wounded by bullets, two seriously.

The Tribune and Sun-Times both said the place had a reputation for noisy parties that drove neighbors nuts and often attracted the police. The Sun-Times also reported that the place was known locally as the “Gay House” and that the police civil rights unit was investigating whether “the shooting was a hate crime.” This angle attracted the gay press. The Chicago Free Press ran the story on its front page with the headline "Gunmen open fire on South Side gays." Windy City Times asked, "6 Shot; Hate Crime?" and quoted an official of the Chicago Commission on Human Relations condemning the incident.

The Tribune kept all such information to itself. Police hadn't declared the attack a hate crime, so the Tribune didn’t report that the police thought it might have been one -- let alone report why they thought that. (The problem, a police spokesperson told me days later, was that the intruders said nothing when they shot up the place, so their motives were a mystery.) “I have no problem with the decision people made here, that’s for sure,” said deputy metro editor Peter Kendall when I asked why the Tribune had left some of the story’s most interesting details out of the story.