Iconic acclaimed author, poet, columnist and massage therapist Yvonne Zipter died Feb. 10 due to complications from ovarian cancer. She was 71.
Zipter was born Jan. 6, 1954, in Milwaukee and later moved to West Allis, Wisconsin with her family where she graduated from West Allis Central High School in 1972. In a 2007 Chicago Gay History interview, Zipter said she started to realize she was a lesbian while she was in high school and more fully accepted her identity in college, but still did not come out at that time. She received her bachelor of science degree in psychology in 1976 from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
In 1978, Zipter moved just outside of San Francisco, where she officially came out as a lesbian. She attended rallies where then San Francisco Board Supervisor Harvey Milk and actor and activist Jane Fonda were featured speakers, and went to her first Pride Parade. Zipter also recalled her devastated reaction to the assassinations of Milk and then-San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and how it spurred on her political awareness as a feminist and LGBTQ+ activist in that same Chicago Gay History interview.
Zipter moved to New York City for a short time, then to Naperville, where she worked as a technical writer for Bell Labs. In 1981, Zipter got a job in the marketing department and later as both a senior copywriter and senior manuscript editor for the University of Chicago Press, which prompted her move to Chicago. She worked for University of Chicago Press until 2006, then became a freelance editor for them until 2008; she returned to her role as a senior manuscript editor from 2011 to 2018.
Shortly after her move to Chicago, Zipter became a volunteer for Women and Children First Bookstore, where she met many people also in literature and writing. By that time, she had already written some of her own poems. Women and Children First founders and now former co-owners Linda Bubon and Ann Christopherson became her primary mentors during her earliest years in Chicago.
Zipter was a co-founder, alongside Toni Armstrong Jr., Ann Morris and Michele Gautreaux (Etas Carria) of the magazine, HOT WIRE: A Journal of Women’s Music and Culture (which for its first 10 years was the only publication exclusively covering the lesbian music and cultural scene). She was also a member of the Black Maria Collective, which issued a women’s literary periodical); a board member for Metis Press, which was an early Chicago lesbian printing and publishing entity; and a National Women’s Music Festival Writers Conference co-founder. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in writing from Vermont College in July 1995.
Additionally, Zipter wrote a nationally syndicated column called Inside Out from 1983 to 1993. Her column was featured in Outlines, In Step, Philadelphia Gay News, The Weekly News and The Washington Blade. Zipter was also a freelance writer for Windy City Times from 1982 to 2007 and an editor at The Skinny, a greyhound-focused magazine, from 2000 to 2010 (she also served as a board member for the publication from 2002-2005).
Zipter’s prolific career as a writer includes the poetry collections The Patience of Metal (1990; a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, Chicago Book Clinic Honor Book and Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award runner-up), Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound (2020) and The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets (2023); the poetry chapbook Like Some Bookie God (2006); the nonfiction book about lesbian softball Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend (1988); essay collection Ransacking the Closet (1995; sections of which won an Illinois Arts Council finalist award) and the novel Infraction (2021). She also wrote a number of short fiction pieces and her poems were published widely in various periodicals.
Among the sites of her numerous readings at various Chicago-area venues were Women and Children First Bookstore, Mountain Moving Coffeehouse, People Like Us Books, Diversity Fine Arts, Artemisia Gallery, the Chicago Cultural Center, DIAL-A-POEM Chicago!, Printers Row Book Fair and Blue Rider Theater.
Additionally, Zipter appeared in and provided some narration for the documentary A Secret Love, about All-American Girls Professional Baseball player Terry Donahue and her long-time partner Pat Henschel.
In 2011, Zipter teamed up with the original murals organization Arts Alive Chicago to make her poetry available in gumball-like dispensers at various locations around Chicago. They have been at Women and Children First bookstore since the project’s inception and also at ERIS Brewery and Cider House.
In the midst of Zipter’s literary and journalism career, she met Kathy Forde. On Dec. 5, 1987, Zipter and Forde attended the book launch party for the guidebook Sweet Home Chicago, for which Zipter had written the lesbian chapter. Although they attended the party as friends, they often marked this as the start of their relationship. They moved in with each other in mid-1988 and became active in their Portage Park neighborhood. In 1999, the couple got their first greyhound dog named Nacho and joined the Greyhounds Only rescue group as volunteers.
On July 5, 2014, the couple got married at the University of Chicago’s Logan Arts Center surrounded by family and friends. Their nephew Miles Lah walked Zipter down the aisle and their niece Kate Lah was the flower girl with author Sara Paretsky, a longtime friend, as officiant. Zipter always loved pie more than other desserts, so Zipter and Forde had various flavors of pie instead of a traditional wedding cake.
Zipter was also interested in massage therapy, so she attended the Cortiva Institute from 2006 to 2007. After she got her license in massage therapy and wellness education, she worked at Continuum Studio and then Fitness Formula Club. Zipter was also a private massage therapist.
To honor her various achievements, Zipter was inducted into Chicago’s LGBT Hall of Fame in 1995.
Zipter was preceded in death by her mother Elaine Schrubbe Zipter. She is survived by her sister Lori (John) King; Forde’s sister Carrie (Kris) Lah and their children Miles and Kate Lah; Forde’s brother John Forde (Carrie Ernhout); and many cousins and countless chosen family members and friends.
Forde said, “Yvonne truly was one-of-kind: she saw the world (and all the people and animals in it!) in such a beautiful way. She was able to share that joy with us all through her interactions with each of us, her writing and her wicked sense of humor. Cancer dealt her a rough hand smack-dab in the middle of a global pandemic, but even when she was knocked down, she got back up and moved forward. She never stopped loving life and appreciating all she had.
“Yvonne and I are blessed with such loving and supportive family and friends, so many of them were there this past week to sit with and love Yvonne. They also brought me food and coffee. So much coffee. They laughed with us and cried with us, and I can think of nothing more beautiful than that. Yvonne knew she was loved. Like our friend Poonam Thaker wrote in her post, Yvonne’s last words, when I told her who all had been to visit her that day (she was mostly sleeping by then), and when she looked around and saw friend Dena van der Wal, Poonam, my sister and our dear niece, said, ‘Wow! Wow, wow, wow.’ Fitting that my poet recognized the beauty and wonder of it all.
“I can’t say enough about the care she received at Masonic and the Cancer Center. It became our home away from home, and her doctors, nurses, staff and techs went from being not just kick-ass health care providers to us but also friends and now family. They cried with us, and Yvonne got to tell them she loved them. Masonic has always been important to us: it’s a top-notch facility brimming with excellence, compassion and diversity. It has an important place in LGBTQ+ Chicago history, and Yvonne was honored to receive her care there. When Yvonne was in the ICU, before she moved to hospice, the ICU nurses told us they have never seen so many nurses and doctors in and out of a patient’s room simply to visit. We were so fortunate that Yvonne’s dear primary care doctor, Dr. Elise Halajian, and her dear medical oncologist, Dr. Denise Levitan, were rounding during the time Yvonne was in the hospital. They each spent heroic amounts of time with us and endured me showing them endless pictures of us over the years.
“This weekend before Yvonne died, I met people I hadn’t met before, like so many staff and volunteers from Lincoln Park Zoo, where Yvonne had volunteered as a zoo monitor. It was so nice to hear from them about Yvonne—things I didn’t know (but wasn’t surprised to learn). Like how she always made new staff members and volunteers feel welcome, that in the three years she was with the zoo, she volunteered 300 hours—all while going through surgeries and cancer treatments. She always said Lincoln Park Zoo was her happy place, a place she could go and not think about cancer. She loved the animals she monitored and talked about them with such pride.
“Because losing Yvonne wasn’t enough, I also had to let go of our dear dog Gracie. Gracie got to visit Yvonne in hospice, and after that, Gracie’s health declined quickly. Saturday night after spending the day with Yvonne, I had to have Gracie euthanized. Gracie was comfortable and surrounded by family. She just turned 12 and had been sick, and I know she wanted to be with Yvonne. She was Yvonne’s protector through all of this, and being away from Yvonne was always hard on Gracie. I wouldn’t have gotten through that if I wasn’t surrounded by family who also loved Gracie and were with her at the end. So I’ve lost my two best girls in the span of 48 hours. But I am comforted in knowing they are together now.”
Longtime friend Paretsky said, “Losing Yvonne is hard. She was creative, inventive and brought people together in ways we wouldn’t have tried on our own. I loved the poem gumball machine she created at Women and Children First, where a poem came out when you put coins in the machine.
“About twenty years ago or so, Yvonne put together a salon for writers and artists. It was a wonderful idea, a way to get us to learn from each other, and to get to know each other better. I was there, Ann Christophersen, Nicole Hollander, Rosellyn Brown, Carol Anshaw and Lauren Berlant—there were others but I don’t remember who at this distance. We never would have done this on our own. Sadly we couldn’t keep it going for more than a year or so, but it was a typical Yvonne initiative—‘Let’s do this thing,’ was always her attitude, not, “Here are ten reasons not to do this thing.
“I was privileged to be an early reader of her novel, Infraction, based on the true-life events of a Russian woman in the 1870’s who longed for mathematics and a woman lover, but whose passions all had to be subsumed within the strict protocols for women in Czarist Russia. Yvonne worked on that novel for a decade. She never gave up, she never lowered her standards for what she wanted that novel to say, and its publication was a triumph. That novel would be a great one for all of us to read in these challenging times.
“I was also privileged to officiate at Yvonne and Kathy’s wedding—another beautiful event, bringing together all the people she and Kathy loved. Last year, for their 10th anniversary, they gave me a cherry pie.”
Longtime friend Armstrong said, “Everyone’s heard the parable of several blind people, each asked to touch an elephant and describe what it’s like. ‘A tree trunk,’ says the one touching the leg. ‘It’s a fan,’ says the one touching the ear. Yvonne moving through the world was much like that — people generally knew one side of her. She was such a complex and delightful person. Poet, creator, columnist, author, arts supporter, co-worker, sports fan, wife, beloved friend.
“I first met Yvonne in the early 1980s in Chicago, and we collaborated on a number of lesbian-feminist cultural projects. She was one of the original Lesbian Capricorns, along with Tracy Baim and me, to launch what would become legendary annual parties. With Michele Gautreaux (Etas Carria) and Ann Morris, Yvonne and I started an organization called Not Just a Stage. The group’s two biggest projects were HOT WIRE magazine and the Women Writers Conferences at the National Women’s Music Festival. And, fun fact, the HOT WIRE name comes directly from her erotic poem ‘Finding the Hot Wire.’
“After the film A League of Their Own came out in 1992, there was a lot of attention paid to the women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. But it was Yvonne who first stoked interest in 1987 with her well-researched article about them in HOT WIRE. She was often ahead of the curve in terms of what she knew and how she could stoke enthusiasm in others for the accomplishments of women.
“In my opinion, Yvonne’s book The Patience of Metal is the best poetry I’ve ever, even counting the revered masters who are taught in schools. Her ‘Osteosarcoma: A Love Poem,’ about the sickness and death of a beloved Greyhound due to cancer, makes me choke up and tear up every single time I read it. I like to think RIP for Yvonne means Rest In Poetry.
“If I could say one final thing to her, it would be — You were integral in making some of my biggest dreams come true. Thank you, and I will keep your memory alive as long as I am here. See ya again soon, Zippy. Miss you already.”
Windy City Times co-founder Tracy Baim said, “”I have been a fan of Yvonne’s writing since 1984, when I first started at GayLife newspaper, and I had the honor of publishing her prose and poetry for many years at Windy City Times and Outlines. Her Inside/Out column about everyday lesbian issues was groundbreaking in many ways—because it humanized lesbians as having the same problems, and joys, as everyone else. Yvonne was such a committed writer, and we are so lucky to have her work to still enjoy. Her poet’s-eye-view will be so missed.”
Bubon said, “Yvonne and I were friends for 45 years, meeting in a poetry workshop that we started at the bookstore soon after opening. We shared a love of poetry, working class backgounds, emerging lesbian feminism and sports. We played on a volleyball team together, and she and her wife, Kathy Forde, helped care for my son Max when he was a baby and toddler.
“More recently, I was privileged to be in a group that read her first drafts, and she was so prolific in her final, difficult four years. She never lost hope or her original sense of humor. Her poetry got deeper, funnier and more tender. Her way of seeing, which she expanded with wonderful photos on Facebook, was unique and delightful. I will miss her so much, but she left us with books we can read over and over.”
Longtime friend Maureen Sweeney said, “Yvonne was my friend for more than 37 years. First I was her fan, then her friend and then her cancer buddy. She was there for me first and then I was there for her. We talked chemo’s, ports being put in and taken out, radiation, biopsies, multiple relapses and miracles. She handled her health with such grace and humor. She dealt with fatigue and pain from radiation and surgeries, with a leg wrapped in five layers of dressing to reduce swelling, with medication-induced diabetes, with a heart and hemoglobin that wanted her to slow down but had a hell of a time convincing her to do it and of course the cancer. As Yvonne would say to me, ‘But I’m alive!’ I prayed for miracles and Yvonne had so many. How I wish she’d had one more. I will miss this beautiful woman forever. I know I will see her again one day.”
Longtime friend Corinne Kawecki said, “Yvonne was always thinking about other people, other beings. Her poetry reflects that. No matter what obstacles were put in front of her, she wrote. She showed me the secret to writing … just write. She had many more poems to write. I’ll have to read those later.”
Greyhound friend Barbara Karant said, “It is hard to believe Yvonne is gone. The impact she made on so many lives will keep her in our memories. She was beautiful, brilliant, funny, collaborative, thoughtful and so generous. Generous with her time, her intellect, her words, her humor, her love and more. I will always cherish the experiences we shared in the past and I am heartbroken for those we will not share in the future.”
Greyhound friend Jill Anderson said, “Yvonne was special in so many ways, but I’ve been thinking a lot about her genuine openness and humility—qualities that were striking in someone of her immense talent and accomplishments. I think these qualities helped fuel one of her superpowers, which was to find beauty and experience wonder in unexpected and often surprising places. Although it’s particularly poignant to lose Yvonne in this moment, when we’re battling so much darkness and cruelty, we can still draw strength and joy from all of the amazing work she left behind. That’s a huge blessing. But, wow, I’m going to miss my friend terribly.”
Arts Alive Chicago Director Cyd Smillie said, “Yvonne took care of the world. With her poet’s eye, she saw the details that made each dried pod, each animal’s routine and each person’s need part of the beautiful symphony of life. She didn’t shy away from the cancer fight she waged, she wrote about it, but she didn’t let it limit her. She continued to leave snacks and water for delivery people. She continued to post photos of the noteworthy moments most of us miss. She continued to live her love.
“I worked with Yvonne the poet. I read and shared her poems, her books and her photos. I found a quiet place in her words that created space for my wonder to grow. Quietly, gently, she opened doors to the secret hopes we all savor, the kindnesses we need. Her memory will warmly remind us to see what we have before us.”
Gerber/Hart Library and Archives Community Outreach and Strategic Partnerships Manager and good friend Jen Dentel said, “I first met Yvonne in 2019, when she graciously spoke at an exhibit opening about SportsDykes and GirlJocks that I curated, but I had known of her incredible poetry and her book Diamonds are a Dyke’s Best Friend for several years prior to this by looking through her archival collection, which we have at Gerber/Hart. Over the years, I was able to work with Yvonne on several events, and I was always struck by her incredible kindness and the zany joy that she brought to everything she did, whether it was sharing her walks with her greyhound Gracie, talking about small moments of domestic bliss with her wife Kathy, or sharing her beautiful poetry. I always thought of her as a Chicago literary great—she has contributed so much to our literary scene and yet remained incredibly humble and sweet. Her kindness, gentle spirit, and consistent positivity truly touched my life, and I am going to miss her so much.”
Forde has asked that, in lieu of flowers, people should donate in Zipter’s memory to Creticos Cancer Center at Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital (please use the drop-down to indicate “Creticos Cancer Patient Assistance Program” to help those with cancer who have financial hardships) and/or to Lincoln Park Zoo and specify Zipter’s name under the tribute section.
A celebration of life will take place March 8 at Smith-Corcoran Chicago Funeral Home,
6150 N. Cicero Ave., from noon-4 p.m.
