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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(From left) McCourt with the reporter Lisa Neff at the paper’s 11th anniversary party at the Sidetrack bar in 1996. McCourt with the photographer Victor Skrebneski and the public-relations consultant Margie Korshak in 1998. Tracy Baim, now the publisher of the Windy City Times, bought the paper from McCourt in 2000.
In the summer of 1985, after a failed attempt to buy GayLife, McCourt organized what was basically a mass defection of the management team—himself, Bearden, Baim, and the art director, Drew Badanish—for the purpose of founding Windy City Times. This is essentially what happened to McCourt at the end of his career—only then the positions were reversed.
The paper was founded on a relative shoestring, with McCourt, Bearden, and Badanish each putting up $10,000. The offices were located in McCourt and Bearden’s third-floor walkup apartment on Melrose Street near the lake. “All sorts of things were going on in that apartment,” says Baim. “My office was in the front. We did layout in the kitchen, and the typesetting machine was in the basement because it was too heavy to bring up three flights of stairs.”
The first issue, dated September 26, 1985, was 28 pages and included a slightly breathless publisher’s note in which McCourt forthrightly explained that even though his journalistic credentials were limited, he intended to produce “a newspaper broad in scope, exciting in presentation, and, above all, honest in its political and social motives. Our ultimate goal is to expand the gay sensibility in positive, progressive directions.”
From the beginning, Windy City looked and sounded like an actual newspaper with news and feature stories, columns, an editorial page, and an extensive entertainment section featuring a gossip column written by McCourt under his old pseudonym Mimi O’Shea. The overall tone—in contrast to McCourt’s at times operatic personality—was sober and professional. “It was very much about community empowerment, mainstreaming, and business success,” says Williams.
“Jeff had the force of a visionary,” says Steve Alter, who joined the paper in its early days as an ad salesman and admits to having been dazzled by McCourt. “He was so driven by the goal of creating a great newspaper.”
Looked at today, the first issue seems inadvertently portentous. The front page has three stories, one on Mayor Harold Washington assembling a 15-person committee on gay and lesbian issues—a first for Chicago—and two on a subject that would dominate gay life and politics for the next decade: the AIDS epidemic.
The epidemic crossed an important psychic threshold in the national consciousness that summer when the actor Rock Hudson announced his diagnosis amid a blaze of media coverage. The number of deaths at that point—especially in Chicago—was still relatively small, but predictions were dire for the future. For the most part, those predictions were realized.
For McCourt, the story quickly took on personal dimensions. “Bob started getting sick very quickly,” says Baim. “The first issue was in September, and by Halloween he had caught something that he couldn’t seem to shake.” Over the next year, Bearden—formerly a stabilizing influence in the office—began to spend more and more time in his bedroom at the back of the apartment.
“Bob was in denial a little bit, but that’s all you really could be then,” says Baim. “Nothing could help you.”
Bearden died in January 1987, almost 16 months after the founding of the paper. Days later, McCourt composed his partner’s obituary, which took up half the front page of that week’s paper. Given what friends remember of his emotional state at the time, it is a model of journalistic restraint, carefully noting the facts of Bearden’s life and the circumstances of his death. “He was admitted to the hospital Jan. 24, 1987, after suffering a brain seizure,” McCourt wrote. “He died peacefully in his sleep at approximately 5:30 a.m. Jan. 29, after failing to respond to treatment.” The only personal remark is a one-sentence addendum noting, “His lover, this writer, was at his side at the time of death.”
“I was there when Bob died,” says Williams. “Jeff cried for three hours nonstop. He had carried this load for so long. The two of them had started Windy City Times together. On some level, it was supposed to be their ma-and-pa store. Bob was the love of his life. I don’t think he ever got over him.”
Shortly afterward, the words “In memory of Robert F. Bearden—1950-1987” were inserted at the bottom of the paper’s masthead, where they remained until McCourt’s involvement with Windy City Times ended.
Bearden’s death also raised the question of McCourt’s health. There was no AIDS test then—only a test that revealed the presence of antibodies to the virus in the bloodstream—and doctors were divided about the implications of those antibodies. McCourt, however, never seemed to doubt that he was infected. “I think that fact ran his life after that,” says Dan McCourt. “He had a death sentence hanging over him, and he knew it.”
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Photography: (Image 2) Hal Baim/Courtesy of Windy City Times; (all others) Courtesy of Jasonsmith.com
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