Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow
Tracy Baim is publisher and executive editor at Windy City Media Group, which produces Windy City Times, Nightspots, and other gay media in Chicago. She co-founded Windy City Times in 1985 and Outlines newspaper in 1987. She has won numerous gay community and journalism honors, including the Community Media Workshop’s Studs Terkel Award in 2005. She started in Chicago gay journalism in 1984 at GayLife newspaper, one month after graduating with a news-editorial degree from Drake University. Baim is the author of Obama and the Gays: A Political Marriage (Prairie Avenue Productions, 2010). She is also the co-author and editor of Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City’s Gay Community (Surrey/Agate, 2008), the first comprehensive book on Chicago’s gay history, and is author of Where the World Meets, a book about Gay Games VII in Chicago (2007, Lulu.com—Baim served as co-vice chair of the Gay Games board). Her most recent book is a novel, The Half Life of Sgt. Jen Hunter, about lesbians in the military prior to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. She also has an essay in the book Media Queeried. Historian and writer Owen Keehnen’s fiction, essays, erotica, reviews, and interviews have appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies worldwide, including the upcoming Windy City Queer from University of Wisconsin Press. His newest novel, The Sand Bar, is due in autumn 2011 from Lethe Press. Keehnen is the author of the horror novel Doorway Unto Darkness (Dancing Moon Press, 2010) and recently published the humorous gay novel I May Not Be Much But I’m All I Think About (e-gaymag.com). His upcoming collection We’re Here, We’re Queer features more than 100 of his best interviews from the 1990s with LGBT writers, artists, and activists who helped lay the groundwork for the current LGBTQ world.   He is also co-editor of Nothing Personal: Chronicles of Chicago’s LGBTQ Community 1977–1997 (Firetrap Press, 2009) and contributed 10 of the biographical essays in the groundbreaking coffee-table book Out and Proud in Chicago (Surrey/Agate, 2008). Keehnen is a founding board member of The Legacy Project and currently serves as secretary for the LGBT history-education-arts program focused on pride, acceptance, and bringing proper recognition to the courageous lives and contributions of international LGBTQ historical figures (legacyprojectchicago.org). He is the former programming director for Gerber/Hart Library and has had two queer monologues adapted for the stage.