Out There
When the brilliant and erratic Jeff McCourt founded the Windy City Times in 1985, he began a 15-year run that changed the way gays were regarded. But his volcanic personality caused countless rifts, and he died this year at 51, largely alone.
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An October 1985 issue reported on the actor Rock Hudson, who admitted shortly before he died that he had AIDS.
“I wonder if Jeff was one of the last of the spectacularly self-destructive gay men,” says Mark Schoofs, the paper’s editor in the late 1980s who went on to work for The Village Voice in New York, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Now living in Los Angeles, Schoofs is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal.“He was definitely a gay publishing visionary,” Schoofs says. “The gay community was coming into its own in those years, and Jeff was one of the people who recognized that gays were part of mainstream America. He understood that gays were like Jews and blacks and Puerto Ricans and Irish people—another tile in the mosaic of America. He was incredibly flawed to the extent that he himself could not be part of that mainstream. But he was one of the people who made it happen.”
So much has changed in the intervening 20 years that it is difficult to reconstruct what the gay world was like in the 1980s. Back then, the issues that most people associate with gay rights today—marriage and adoption, joint partner benefits, and joining the military—were barely conceivable, let alone debatable. Despite the birth of the gay-liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the gay community was still very much underground and went largely unnoticed by the larger culture. The few existing gay publications tended to be either sex sheets or what were commonly known as bar rags—basically going-out guides that might occasionally squeeze in a story or two on the latest police raid or gay-bashing incident.
McCourt got his start freelancing for one such publication, GayLife, a weekly tabloid owned by the gay businessman Chuck Renslow and edited by Albert Williams. Later Williams was briefly the editor of Windy City Times before moving on to the job he has held for most of the past 20 years: theatre critic of the Chicago Reader.“Chuck thought of GayLife as a charitable thing he was doing for the community,” says Williams. “He didn’t believe a gay paper could ever make money.”
Politically, the gay community was missing in action. In Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Angels in America—which McCourt loved and later produced in Chicago—the Roy Cohn character delivers a speech that perfectly sums up the position of the gay community in those years.
Homosexuals, Cohn says, are people who “in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout.” Cohn is speaking about New York, but the same conditions applied in Chicago, where, in fact, a gay-rights bill had been languishing in the city council for more than a decade.
“We weren’t taken seriously,” says Rick Garcia, an early gay activist who is currently the head of Equality Illinois, a civil-rights group. “The attitude among activists was to not rock the boat.”
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Photograph: Courtesy of Windy City Times
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