A Secret Love: A Conversation with Yvonne Zipter and Tracy Baim

"A Secret Love" is a heartfelt documentary exploring the long-lasting romance between two women who remained in the closet for over 60 years. These two women lived in Chicago for several decades and we're lucky to have located two individuals who came to know them during that that time.

On Thursday, May 7th, Tamara Allen of The Be! Agency and B.BLYSS! will lead a discussion with Tracy Baim, Publisher of Chicago Reader and Yvonne Zipter, Author of Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend: Reflections, Reminiscences, and Reports from the Field on the Lesbian National Pastime.

Virtual attendees will have an opportunity to ask questions live as well as engage in a conversation via chat. Questions may also be sent in advance to Tamara.Allen@thebeagency.com.

About our guests:

Tracy Baim is publisher of the Chicago Reader newspaper. She is owner and co-founder of Windy City Times, a 34-year-old LGBTQ newspaper. She is the author or co-author of 12 books on LGBTQ history (including Out and Proud in Chicago, Obama and the Gays, and Gay Press, Gay Power), producer of four films, creator of the That’s So Gay! LGBTQ trivia game, and a longtime journalist and organizer. Major events she has helped lead include Gay Games VII in Chicago in 2006, and the March on Springfield for Marriage Equality. She founded the LGBT Chamber of Commerce of Illinois in 1996, and has won numerous awards for her journalism and activism, including the Studs Terkel Award.

Baim has been inducted into the National LGBT Journalists Association Hall of Fame, Association of Women Journalists-Chicago Hall of Fame, and the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Professional Journalists-Chicago.

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Yvonne Zipter is the author of the full-length poetry collections Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound (Terrapin Books, 2020) and The Patience of Metal (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist) and the chapbook Like Some Bookie God. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals over the years, including Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Calyx, Crab Orchard Review, Metronome of Aptekarsky Ostrov (Russia), Bellingham Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, as well as in several anthologies. Her poem “Osteosarcoma: A Love Poem,” originally published in Poetry, was reprinted inWriting and Understanding Poetry for Teachers and Students: A Heart’s Craft, edited by Suzanne Keyworth and Cassandra Robison.

She is also the author of two nonfiction books: Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet. She is one of the founders of Hot Wire: A Journal of Women’s Music and Culture and a 1995 inductee into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. She received a fellowship to the Summer Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2004, an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award in 2001, and the Sprague/Todes Literary Award in 1997. Her published poems are currently being sold in two poetry-vending machines in Chicago, the proceeds from which are donated to a nonprofit arts organization called Arts Alive Chicago.

She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College and has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at the Graham School of the University of Chicago. She recently retired from being a manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press.