On April 17 Tracy Baim, who co-founded the Chicago gay media outlet “Windy City Times” in 1985, spoke at a Parker MX about her experiences growing up as a gay woman in the world of journalism and activism and what it’s like now to serve as Publisher and Executive editor.

“I had a poetry professor in college who helped me understand I could be whoever I wanted to be in life despite what others told me,” Baim said. “He risked his career in coming out to me with three words on a poetry essay I wrote about being gay–‘It gets better.’”

Baim was originally invited to Parker by upper school French teacher and department co-chair Lorin Pritikin and junior Chloe Wagner to speak about activism at an “International Women’s Day” evening event coordinated by the Students Affirming Gender Equality club.

“I was initially introduced to Tracy through ‘Chicago Women Take Action,’ and we worked together on the ‘Illinois Youth Chapter for the Women’s March on Washington,’” Wagner said. “The theme of International Women’s Day was women in activism, so it seemed fitting that Tracy would come to speak to the Parker community about the work that she has done.” After the event, Principal Dan Frank suggested Baim would be a good presenter for an MX, so Wagner and Pritikin set it up.

Baim began her speech discussing her experience in high school at Lane Tech, a magnet school in Chicago. She said, “It wasn’t really until college that I felt like I could be who I was.”  

With both parents working as journalists, Baim had known that she wanted to become a journalist since she was 10 years old. Yet she immediately faced difficulty. “Any career in the 1980s that you wanted to be out and gay in—well, there weren’t really many of them,” Baim said. “I was told that I couldn’t be a journalist and be out and gay, and that was almost as devastating to me as anything you could imagine.”

Because of these job limitations, she struggled to find job openings for gay journalists and felt that she had to make her own path. The reason for this lack of availability, she was told, was that as a gay person she had a bias that would prohibit her ability to be a neutral journalist.

More than 30 years later, she is now a member of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Hall of Fame. She has published several books including “Gay Press,” “Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America,” “Obama and the Gays: A Political Marriage,” and “Out and Proud in Chicago.”

In addition to her writing, she is also an activist and advocate for Chicago’s homeless youth. After working on a news story called “Generation Halsted” about homelessness in Boystown, she felt frustrated by the lack of change that followed. She held a forum on youth homelessness that led to the creation of the Chicago Youth Storage Initiative, a project that organizes for homeless youth locations in which to store their belongings while at school and out for the day so that they are not harassed by police.

In addition to this storage initiative, Baim is also currently working on the Chicago Tiny Homes project, through which she hopes to create affordable, dormitory-style housing using minimal space that would serve the city’s youth in need of a home and at the same time work towards cutting the local government’s costs. Baim said, “Tiny homes can be built for less than 20% of the city’s costs for current large quantity housing and takes a week to build.” During the last year, she has been talking to the city for approval for the project.

Although gay marriage is legal across America, nine out of ten homosexual teens report being bullied in the last year because of their sexual orientation. “In the current climate, people tend to think that we have come as far as we can with rights, but that cannot be further from the truth,” Pritikin said. “I think it’s great to hear from someone who can share her personal journey and her message that we are in an age of activism.”

Freshman Scottie Ingall agreed. “It is important for all of us to understand that we have come a long way,” Ingall said, “but we still have a long way to go, and it’s always important to learn the history of the LGBTQ+ community.”

For students who are gay, or questioning their sexuality, or in any other way in a non-dominant group sexually, Baim’s mere presence was, Baim suggested, a help. Baim said, “For me, knowing there was somebody like me that was willing to help was the most important thing growing up.”

Pritikin hopes that this MX inspired students to become activists in their own lives. “I hope students saw a woman in front of them who started at a very young age caring about issues and made herself more aware of issues and from there acted on these issues,” Pritikin said. “She really wanted to make a big difference in others lives, so I hope that students will now take the time to learn about an issue and become an activist in some way.”