Vernita Gray lived through some of the country's most riveting civil-rights dramas, as an African American girl from the South Side of Chicago. She came out as a lesbian soon after attending the 1969 Woodstock concert, where she heard about the uprising at the Stonewall gay bar in New York City. Her fight for lesbian equality, and the rights of the entire LGBTQ community, would be her passion for the remaining decades of her life. She was also a poet and a writer, a key player in Chicago's gay liberation movement, and a lesbian separatist during the 1970s. In the 1980s, she opened her own restaurant, Sol Sands, and in the early 1990s, she began an 18-year career with the Cook County state's attorney's office. Along the way, she also managed to have a lot of fun. Her visits to the White House brought tears to her eyes. She never thought she would see an African-American president, especially from her hometown of Chicago. A few months after attending the Obama selection at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, she attended his inauguration and related parties in D.C. She first went to the White House for a June 2009 Pride reception. Vernita's struggle with cancer would soon take a turn for the worse, and in her final years, her passion was used to fight for both at-risk LGBTQ youth as well as marriage equality in Illinois. In this new book by Tracy Baim and Owen Keehnen, friends, partners and family share their memories of Vernita. Primarily written before Vernita's death in March 2014, the book also includes extensive interviews with Vernita, and her own poetry. Vernita loved long and deeply, she worked against racism, sexism and homophobia, and she did it all with a smile, dancing her way to victory on her last lap. Available in color on Kindle and CreateSpace.
About the Author: 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 has won numerous gay community and journalism honors, including the Community Media Workshop's Studs Terkel Award in 2005 and several Peter Lisagor journalism awards. Baim received the 2013 Chicago Headline Club Lifetime Achievement Award. Baim is the editor and co-author of Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America (2012), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Top 10 selection from the American Library Association GLBT Round Table. She is the author of Obama and the Gays: A Political Marriage. She is also the co-author and editor of Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City's Gay Community (the companion website is ChicagoGayHistory.org); and author of Where the World Meets, a book about Gay Games VII in Chicago, Her books include a novel, The Half Life of Sgt. Jen Hunter, about lesbians in the military prior to Don't Ask, Don't Tell (it was the stage play Half Life in 2005), and the biographies Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow, and Jim Flint: The Boy From Peoria. She is also creator of That's So Gay!, a 2,400-question LGBT history trivia game. Owen Keehnen is the author of the novels Young Digby Swank, The Sand Bar, Doorway Unto Darkness, and the upcoming The Dog Trainer. Along with Tracy Baim he has co-authored Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow and Jim Flint: The Boy From Peoria. Keehnen also authored The LGBT Book of Days, a fun comprehensive guide to the most important dates in LGBT history. More than 100 of his interviews with various LGBT authors and activists from the 1990s have been collected in the book We're Here, We're Queer. He co-edited Nothing Personal: Chronicles of Chicago's LGBTQ Community 1977-1997, was a contributor to Gay Press, Gay Power, wrote the foreword for the Mark Abramson memoir For My Brothers, and contributed several biographical essays to the coffee-table history book Out and Proud in Chicago. Keehnen was on the founding committee and executive board of The Legacy Project and is currently a contributing biographer for the LGBT history education arts program focused on pride, acceptance, and bringing proper recognition to courageous lives and their contributions in LGBT history.