For decades, Michael Bauer was a behind-the-scenes fixture on Chicago’s political landscape, where candidates relied on him to drum up support, raise vast amounts of cash and counsel them through the gauntlet of the city and state’s rough-and-tumble campaigns.
Bauer, an attorney, activist and advocate, was a veteran of scores of such political campaigns, where his experiences as a gay, Jewish man whose parents were Holocaust survivors shaped both his gregarious style and his policy priorities. A native of the East Rogers Park neighborhood, Bauer’s perspective, deft fundraising skills and connections throughout the city helped boost the candidacies of judges and aldermen, senators and governors.
The capstone to Bauer’s career came this spring, when Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor of Chicago. Bauer was Lightfoot’s campaign chair, and friends said he beamed with pride at his role in helping her become the city’s first openly gay mayor.
Bauer died Thursday night, family and friends said, after a battle with cancer. He was 66.
Lightfoot said Friday that Bauer was one of the first people she consulted when she first considered running for mayor.
“We’d just become very close over the years, and I knew he would tell me straight if he thought it was a terrible idea. I trusted his judgment, and I trusted he would not sugarcoat because that was not his way at all,” Lightfoot said, laughing. “He’d tell me and tell me straight.”
Bauer also helped launch the successful campaign of Tom Chiola, who was the first openly gay person elected to political office in Illinois when he became a Cook County judge in 1994, and he worked on the campaigns of Sen. Dick Durbin and Ald. Tom Tunney, among others.
“Michael was a force of nature,” said Dave Lundy, a public affairs consultant who was a longtime friend of Bauer. “There are very few people who you would call an original. There just aren’t a lot of people who have the unique characteristics of Michael, the combination of energy and passion. Michael was blunt but in a really charming way so people generally they accepted it, they accepted his bluntness, they knew it came from his heart and his mind.”
In an interview with the Tribune in February, Bauer said the success of Lightfoot’s campaign was a “phenomenal statement” about “the progress Chicago has made. … And I am frankly, absolutely, I was going to say delighted, delighted isn’t the right word, I am ecstatic, I’m also in disbelief.”
Bauer also served as the co-chairman of the Illinois Holocaust and Genocide Commission. Being the son of two Holocaust survivors was a big part of his identity, Bauer wrote in a series of vignettes about his life on the website Unsilence, which aims to highlight stories of those who have suffered hidden injustices and whose voices may have been marginalized.
“You know, it’s strange. The events that have most shaped me and my values and my perspective on the world ended seven years before I was born,” Bauer wrote in a section entitled “Who I Am.” “… But the Holocaust is my history. It goes to the core of who I am.”
Bauer wrote that the assassination of Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician who was assassinated in 1978, propelled him to come out as gay.
“I remember thinking, ‘They’re killing people like me,'” Bauer wrote. He added that the AIDS crisis of the 1980s motivated him to get involved in politics.
“There’s an overlap between being the son of Holocaust survivors and being gay and living through the AIDS crisis,” Bauer wrote. “Our friends were dying, at a relatively young age. I’d become like my parents. Most of my friends are just memories. There’s a conclusion I’ve drawn: This is what happens to people when they lack political power. I was aware of the Reagan Administration’s lack of response to AIDS. If we weren’t going to fight for our rights, who would?”
Bauer was born in 1952. His older brother Jerry said that as a young boy Bauer devoured information about U.S. presidents and first ladies, and for many years his goal was to become the first Jewish president. Bauer graduated from Senn High School at the age of 16, then went on to Northwestern University, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1973 and a law degree in 1976. He later earned an MBA from Northwestern in 1991.
Bauer wrote that he came out to his parents in 1984 and received a mixed reaction. He met his husband, Roger Simon, in 1982, at a bar on Oak Street in Chicago. The two had their first date about a month after that meeting.
“We always sat next to each other. We loved to hold hands,” Simon said. “From that first date, we were for the most part inseparable ever since. The love of my life.”
Simon said Bauer enjoyed movies and plays, but most of all he relished being involved in politics.
“He was just a warm, loving person, he was my protector and I was his protector,” Simon said. “I afforded him the time to do what he and I felt were important things in life to make the world a better place.”
The two married in Toronto in 2003 because they could not legally get married in the United States at that time.
Chiola said Bauer’s passion and loyalty shone through most brightly through his relationship with Simon. It also came through on the campaign trail, where Bauer wasn’t shy about working a room, shaking hands or slapping backs to cultivate a new connection.
“But he was also a very emotional, very passionate guy. He really believed in things,” Chiola said. “He was deep down a softy as much as he might’ve had a gruff exterior, he was a real softy. He was just bawling the night that my campaign was successful in that primary in March of 1994. We were all standing there, and he was probably crying as much as me.”
Bauer, in the February interview, said he had been friends with Lightfoot for about 20 years. Years later, when Lightfoot asked him to chair her campaign, he said, “Before you change your mind and sensibility comes to you, let me say yes.”
U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley, another Bauer friend, said in a statement that Bauer “understood that the future of humanity — of the LGBTQ, Jewish, pro-Israel, and civil rights communities, in particular — was dependent on protecting against oppression. He took the directive of ‘Never again’ literally and devoted his life to that end.”
Durbin, in a series of posts on Twitter, said Bauer and Simon were early, important allies in his first Senate campaign 25 years ago.
“If Michael was your political ally, his support was powerful and his views were clear,” Durbin wrote. “I learned a lot about politics and, more importantly, about the realities of life for a gay man and his committed partner in life from Michael and Roger. I will miss my pal.”
In addition to his husband and brother, Bauer is survived by his mother, Tema, who is 103. A funeral service for Bauer is scheduled for 10 a.m. Tuesday at Anshe Emet Synagogue, 3751 N. Broadway. Contributions to the Michael Bauer Fund, set up to support Holocaust education, LGBT issues and cancer research, can be made to the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.
