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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.
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.”
