Tracy Baim

Mom, A Life Well Lived

My mom was a pioneer in so many ways, a "jill of all trades" so much so that she never stayed in one place long enough to be honored for her work.

On Jan. 28, my sister Marcy and brother Clark and I will give the second annual Joy Darrow Memorial Scholarship in her name to an aspiring female journalist, as part of the Chicago chapter of the Association for Women Journalists.

Our mom died in 1996, at age 63, but had she lived, she would have been in Washington, D.C. to be part of the swearing in of the first African-American President, Barack Obama. It would have meant for her the culmination of decades of civil-rights work that took many forms.

As a journalist, she interviewed Hank Aaron early in his career as he faced racism in Major League Baseball. She interviewed Fidel Castro in the mountains of Cuba before the Revolution, and re-visited Cuba many times after, including in the years before her death. She did a story on AIDS in Cuba for me in the 1980s, having snuck away during an "official" visit to see the AIDS camps. She was an anti-Apartheid activist and loved South Africa.

In the 1960s, she covered many of Martin Luther King Jr.'s marches, in both Chicago and the American South. I recently found an article she wrote about one march where she described how well dressed Dr. King and his wife Coretta were, showing a different face to the world. She admonished other 1960s activists to follow that example as a way to further their cause.

She and my step-dad Steve Pratt covered the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots in Chicago, as they both worked at the Chicago Tribune then. But she was discouraged from covering hard news, and eventually smashed into the Tribune's glass ceiling. After the Tribune, she went in many directions, often at the same time.

Her myriad work included: 

-- Helping architect Buckminster Fuller in all his unique dreams of a geodesic dome.

-- Being a critical part of Environment Inc., an early environmental organization in the 1970s.

-- Working on and off at the Chicago Defender, back then one of the few remaining Black daily newspapers. She even had a section, Joy, named for her. She was managing editor for several years, and as a kid I went with her to the production plant and learned newspaper layout. I was published first in the Defender, at age 10, writing a children's consumer column in 1973.

-- She assisted Dempsey Travis on the national Black mortgage work he did, fighting to free mortgage funds for African-Americans. She also helped him with his book, An Autobiography of Black Chicago.

-- She travelled extensively on human-rights trips, including to China before and after Tiananmen Square; to Germany before the wall came down; to Russia; to Laos and Cambodia when they first opened to outsiders; to India several times; to South Africa during their first free elections after Apartheid; to Haiti to monitor elections; and again and again to Cuba, usually with a religious human-rights group.

-- Because my mom was a relative to famed attorney Clarence Darrow, she also often did work in his honor. She didn't like her stepmom's name, and after her divorce from my dad Hal removed the Baim name, so she instead claimed the Darrow name. Her work included being part of Darrow committees on public housing reform, and an annual dedication in Darrow's honor still held in Hyde Park every March. 

-- She also did public relations work for former Mayor Jane Byrne, Columbia College, and others.

She was constantly hustling, trying to find her way as a journalist and photographer, and as someone who cared deeply about human rights. But she never quite had the luxury assignments as a freelancer she might have had if the Tribune could have broken their sexist ways earlier in her career. I am not sure she ever quite got over the push and shove of that sexism, the way it can crush your spirit and dreams. But she didn't show it, she just kept plugging along.

In some ways, my mom was an enigma. She was a white Catholic girl from Milwaukee who married a Jewish man from Chicago, converting before they were married so that his parents would attend the wedding. Yet she pushed so hard for civil rights, cared so much about the rights of others, especially Asians, Cubans, South Africans and African-Americans, that I often feel it was a way to avoid the crushing defeats of her own life. It was a way to avoid the pains she endured when she was gang raped at a very young age when she first moved to Chicago. I did not even know about that attack until our family experienced a home invasion and attack in 1978 (which I write about elsewhere on this blog). The men who attacked her were Black, as was the man who tried to attack me in our home, stabbing me, Steve and Joy. So my mom finally opened up to me, only briefly and very cryptically, about her own experience. She wanted  to make sure I did not allow that incident to drive my life, to turn me racist, or to cripple my dreams. But she never spoke of it again, it was too painful.

So I feel I don't really know my mom, despite having been very close to her, and despite following as best I can in her very big footsteps. I think each of us knew a part of her, as did her hundreds of friends. But none of us quite knew all of her. Maybe that was the safest way she could handle her pains, to keep working on her passions, to try to overcome the frustrations of her life.

But had she lived to see Obama sworn in, I think she would have felt validated. That even though she suffered greatly, it was worth it. That society may change incrementally, that those changes may not always pass on to all people, but it does move forward. Mom, this victory was for you.

Obama has changed views on gay marriage since 1996

During his run for Illinois state Senate in 1996, Barack Obama stated his unequivocal support for gay marriage, according to an exclusive story in the Jan. 14, 2009 Windy City Times newspaper. It will be available online starting Jan. 14.

President-elect Obama's answer to a 1996 Outlines newspaper question on marriage was: "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages." There was no use of the phrase "civil unions". [Outlines purchased Windy City Times in 2000 and merged companies; I co-founded WCT in 1985 and Outlines in 1987, and was able to bring them together in 2000.]

This answer is among those included in this week's Windy City Times feature on Obama's evolving position on gay marriage. Windy City Times also includes his answers to the candidate questionnaire of IMPACT, at one time a gay political action committee in Illinois. In that survey he also stated his support of same-sex marriage.

During the final weeks of the presidential campaign last fall, several media outlets contacted Windy City Times because of an old internet story from the 1996 Illinois state Senate race. In that campaign, Outlines newspaper reported that 13th District candidate Barack Obama supported gay marriage. Reporters wanted to know what exactly Obama had said. 

Outlines summarized the results in that 1996 article by Trudy Ring, but did not list exact answers to questions. In that article Outlines did note that Obama was a supporter of same-sex marriage; that article was never challenged or corrected by Obama. Just recently, the original Outlines and IMPACT surveys were found in our archives (sometimes me being a pack-rat matters). I have been scanning old files as part of the Chicago Gay History Project I founded as a labor of love in 2007.

More recently, as Obama has run for higher office, from U.S. senate to president, he has further shaped his views on marriage, and now he does not back same-sex marriage, but favors civil unions.

My Jan. 14 Windy City Times article looks at Obama's marriage record, including from a 2004 interview I conducted with the U.S. senate hopeful. The paper also has an article by Timothy Stewart-Winter, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, who is writing his dissertation on lesbian and gay politics in Chicago. Stewart-Winter provides a look at the context of Obama's race in 1996 against incumbent Alice Palmer.

As the inauguration nears, it is interesting to look back at the evolution of Obama's views, from at first full acceptance to gay marriage, then to a "practical" approach on wording, to now a more religious take -- not backing marriage itself because of religious reasons, but still backing civil unions. The problem is, governments (federal and states) use the word "marriage" in very non-religious ways, providing more than 1,000 federal and countless state benefits. For now, civil unions are separate and quite unequal.

The full articles and copies of the Outlines and IMPACT 1996 questionnaires are available online at www.windycitymediagroup.com or click here  starting Jan. 14, and  at hundreds of Chicago-area delivery locations.

Survival

A little more than a year ago, I wrote an essay for the Chicago Tribune about an incident that happened to me at age 15, in 1978. Recently, some lesbian police officer friends asked about it -- they missed it when it ran. Because the Tribune doesn't keep essays online forever for free to the public, I am running it again below. 

Last night I had a major full-color dream about that old neighborhood, on Fremont near Willow in Chicago. After this essay originally appeared, I was validated in writing about it for many reasons. First, many of my parents' friends at that time were also strongly impacted by this event. I didn't know it at the time, but many of them wrote me after they saw this to tell me about it. Both my my mom and stepdad, who I write about below, have since passed away, but their friendships and love live on, and their friends have been a great support. [Some are helping fund a Joy Darrow Memorial Scholarship in my mom's name thru the local Assoc. of Women Journalists chapter.] 

Second, some teenage girls wrote to me saying this helped them, and one said her dad showed her the essay just in case anything should happen to her as she went away to college. 

Third, many of my own friends and colleagues had never heard this story. I had written about it maybe twice in those 29 years since, and rarely speak about it. But putting this out there was very cathartic for me, and I thank all those people who reached out to support me after it ran.

And there was some closure, too. The man who owned the home this happened in (after my family moved out) called me after seeing the essay. He guessed it was about the house he had because he had heard stories about its past -- there had been a similar attack in the same building on another teenage girl before my family moved in. Anyway, he called to tell me he and his wife had torn down that structure and that a new home now occupies that space, as of 2007. He thought I'd like to know that the building was no longer there. So oddly, last night I dreamed about the house, and the new home that occupied its space. You can't tear down memories as easily as a building, but it helps to know that the building's own nightmares are now set free.

The 30th anniversary of "the incident" (as I had referred to it in family newsletters I wrote as a teen)  came and went quietly last Memorial Day. I am reminded of it almost daily, and was again this past weekend in seeing the First Breath of Tengan Rei, a less-stereotypical rape-revenge film than The Brave One. And I was reminded again in reading about the horrific gang rape of a lesbian Dec. 13 in California; see here. You don't forget these things; all you can hope is they never control you -- or turn you into the character Jodie Foster played.

Here is that essay from the Chicago Tribune

Film triggers brave look at the past

by Tracy Baim, Oct. 14, 2007: 

In her latest movie, "The Brave One," Jodie Foster displays all her vulnerable rage and power as a survivor of a violent attack who turns vigilante. The role is a return to form for Foster, the acting goddess of my generation and a personal role model. And it is as a character who speaks to me in a most profound way.

Foster was born just two months before I was, and I have followed her films as a parallel to my life through many of its tragedies and triumphs. Foster is a fellow tomboy made good, and while she is not "out" in the sense that I am -- as a publisher of a gay and lesbian newspaper -- she also is not using any "covers." She is simply trying to live a private life while being hugely public in her career choice.

Foster delivers a mesmerizing performance in "The Brave One," and my friends and I found the movie's tension and moral complications absorbing.

Driving home afterward, I found myself listening to a beautiful song called "Indiana" by Jon McLaughlin. It's a haunting ballad about avoiding risk to avoid regrets, a lament about the way things could have been.

Suddenly, I was overcome by grief.

This I was not ready for, not at age 44, not over an attack that happened nearly 30 years ago.

I have not by any standard definition "blocked" the memory of the attack, in which a man with a knife invaded my bedroom when I was 15 years old.

I have talked about what happened, and I consider myself a strong survivor. There was no moral ambiguity in this attack, which resulted in my parents also being knifed. The intruder was ultimately caught and imprisoned. He was wrong, we were right.

While nightmares have plagued me these 29 years, and I often sleep with either a knife or a baseball bat (or both), I still feel as if I have "gotten on" with my life. I have fears, but I do not allow them to paralyze me. In fact, perhaps they have driven me to be a workaholic, starting a newspaper at age 22 and never looking back.

But when I faced my drive home on the Dan Ryan Expressway the other night, all I could do was cry.

My stomach cramped and I felt like throwing up. When I got home, my sister was playing Scrabble with her 10-year-old son, and I felt the same dead stare coming over me that Foster's character grew into in her film.

When I saw my nephew, all I could think about was the stolen innocence I suffered and the hope that he would never meet the same fate.

"The Brave One" did not spark any vigilante heroine within me. In fact, at its heart, the film is not about violence. The core of the movie is more subtle and true: how the characters change. Maybe they manifest that change in bloodshed, an easy tool for revenge movies; but in reality, the protagonist's changes in "The Brave One" go far deeper.

Those changes are reflected in the eyes of Foster's character. And the actress brilliantly captures the physical and psychological characteristics of a woman altered by external forces.

Most women who are victims of violent crimes do not seek vengeance (just think how murders committed by women would skyrocket if they did). But they are all changed, forever. Foster's character is not made better for her vigilante behavior; she is still damaged by the attack that left her severely injured and her fiance dead.

What Foster's movie caused in me was a deep mourning for the child I was before that attack on Memorial Day 1978. Before the knife sliced into my left thigh, before I grabbed for the knife and cut my right hand, before that man jammed his knife 27 times into my stepfather, before he broke my mother's ribs, before I had to face him in the back of a police car, identifying him as the intruder even as my dad was being rushed to a hospital ... before ... before ... before.

I had never mentally buried the "incident" -- I could not. My parents, who also survived the attack, worked in the Chicago news media, my dad for the Chicago Tribune, my mom formerly for the Tribune and more recently for the Chicago Defender. The news media covered the case extensively and the students in my high school, Lane Tech, knew about it the next day. Months later, a state law was passed to toughen punishment for crimes like the one inflicted on my family. So, more media coverage.

I had not denied to myself that the attack had an impact on me every day. But I don't think I had ever mourned for the lost child. I had not realized how profound that loss still is.

I do not know who I would have become had that attack not happened, and I will never know. I was already a lesbian, so the violence did not "make me gay." I did not become a racist (I am white, the attacker black). I was already a writer. And the attack did not make me seek revenge or death; I was against the death penalty and remain so. So in many ways, I was able to "maintain."

But I would have killed, if I had the means with me that early morning of the attack. To protect myself, to protect my family. As it was, my 4-foot-10-inch, 120-pound soccer player's kicks could barely hold the man off.

Had I been able to, had that Stridex bottle I threw at him instead have been a metal pole, I could have killed him. In the heat of that moment, for survival, I could have. Right then, to save my dad, my mom, my siblings, myself. But not after that, not days later or years later, would I have turned into The Brave One.

I believe most of us are capable of violence if pushed far enough, at least in self-defense. Foster's character in the film took that beyond her initial attack, a path some women may go through in their minds but never would actually follow.

I am not sure most critics can interpret just how a film like "The Brave One" can affect individuals who faced similar circumstances. The film goes beyond culture and into our consciousness. It is not just cinema. In some ways this can be a catharsis, in other ways a painful reopening of wounds. Maybe, on the whole, not a bad thing.

Foster's piercing stare still fills my mind. Tears still fill my eyes. What Foster did was pure screen magic. I thank her. And maybe my 15-year-old self thanks her too.

----------

Tracy Baim is publisher and executive editor of Windy City Media Group, publishers of Windy City Times, a weekly gay newspaper, founded in 1985.

editor@windycitymediagroup.com