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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Suddenly the people “who know nobody and who nobody knows” were being perceived as an important swing vote well worth courting in future elections. McCourt, as the publisher of what was often referred to as the “paper of record” for the gay community, became the official power broker. “I had calls from so many candidates asking, ‘Do you think I can meet with Jeff McCourt? Do I have a chance of getting an endorsement?’” says Garcia. “George Ryan came. Judy Baar Topinka came. It was important to them.”
The success of the paper was also evident on the business side. “He recognized that we needed to bring in standard publishing ideas,” says Schoofs. “We were one of the first gay papers in the country to have a real-estate issue, a fashion issue. Jeff’s thinking was that if we created these advertising venues, the advertisers would come. He also wanted straight advertisers like car and beer companies. He understood that this is journalism, it’s a business, and it needs to be done right.”
“Jeff always said, ‘My competition is not GayLife. It’s the Reader and the Tribune,’” recalls Williams. Over the years, McCourt would get almost every advertiser he wanted—everyone from Neiman Marcus to IBM.
The paper also benefited from the government deregulation of the telecommunications industry in the late 1980s, which, among other inadvertent side effects, spurred the development of the telephone sex industry—the ubiquitous 900 sex numbers of the era. The back pages of many lifestyle publications—including Windy City Times—were flooded with full-page come-hither ads for those services. “It was like money that dropped out of the sky,” says the ad salesman Steve Alter. “Suddenly what was a $300,000- or $400,000-a-year paper became an $800,000-a-year paper.”
McCourt also enjoyed a good fight. When Tracy Baim left to found her own publication, Outlines, five months after Bob Bearden’s death, she touched off what will probably go down in history as Chicago’s last great newspaper war.
“I don’t know how we survived,” she says. “It was only the worst of times, never the best of times. He played the gender card expertly, telling advertisers I was doing a women’s publication, which wasn’t true, but it still hurt us because, back then, lesbians were not considered an attractive demographic. There were all kinds of dirty tricks relating to ad rates and circulation figures. He was ruthless.”
The increased revenue also allowed McCourt to implement what may have been his most radical innovation of all—hiring first-rate writers and editors and paying them accordingly. “When I started in 1991,” says Louis Weisberg, the paper’s editor for five years in the 1990s, “I was making $30,000 a year, which, when you consider that this was a community paper with a circulation of about 18,000, was a lot.” Over the years, the paper would prove to be the launching pad for a number of people who subsequently went on to have solid careers in journalism and publishing. “He hired very well,” says Baim.
In general, he went with his gut. For instance, Schoofs was a 25-year-old philosophy major from California who had published a few articles in gay newspapers on the West Coast when he contacted McCourt about whether the paper would be interested in running a report from a gay conference Schoofs was planning to attend.
“He called me up and said, ‘Yes, we’d like to run this—and by the way, would you like to apply to be editor of the paper?’ I thought this was completely absurd and told him no. Then I thought about it for a few days and called him back and said let’s talk about it. He flew me out to Chicago and I interviewed and he hired me.”
In addition to the already-noted writers and editors, figures as diverse as Studs Terkel, the novelist Achy Obejas, the columnist Jon-Henri Damski, and the filmmaker Maria Maggenti all contributed to the paper in its heyday. If McCourt had no problem attracting top talent, however, retaining it was another story. Four years seems to have been the limit for most people. Some left for better jobs, but most simply were burned out from dealing with a person who—for all of his intelligence and drive—seemed at times completely oblivious of the impact of his actions on people.
“He was an enfant terrible, an impossible child,” says Alter. “You couldn’t sit with him for any length of time because he didn’t know how to stop talking and pontificating. It was a maddening dynamic. He read people with great sensitivity and accuracy, but he didn’t really have a clue how to connect with them emotionally. It almost seemed like he lacked some kind of gene that way. Everything was organized around his own monumental ego, and it was hard for him to understand that you had a separate existence outside of his sphere. There was an infantilism about it.”
“At the core of him was this insatiable insecurity,” says Schoofs. “Not your garden-variety insecurity about ‘Am I good enough?’ or ‘Am I a lovable human being?’ This was like a beast inside of him that needed to be constantly fed. Any slight perceived lessening of affection that he might feel from you could spark this sort of emotional crisis that would have to be attended to. And then you would have to deal with all the other staff members who were feeling abused. It just felt like an emotionally unhealthy environment, and ultimately I didn’t want to be there.”
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