With a BA and MA in English, Tracy’s career began as high school teacher, with sidelines as tax preparer and painting contractor. After earning an MBA (1990, USC), she became a nonprofit management and fundraising professional, working at NYU Law School, UCLA, Lambda Legal, and 89.3 KPCC.

Now retired, she plies her fundraising trade on a volunteer basis for ONE Archives and for the queer Jewish synagogue, Beth Chayim Chadashim, where her wife, Lisa Edwards, is rabbi.

“In the life” since college in the early 1960s, Tracy’s earliest movement work was in Women’s Liberation and radical lesbian activism in Iowa City, Iowa. Her passion for grass-roots periodicals began while a member of the collective that published Ain’t I a Woman? from 1970-74. In 1981, she co-founded Common Lives/Lesbian Lives, a quarterly journal with a mission to record and preserve the culture and life experiences of ordinary lesbians, which ran until 1996.

While living in Jerusalem for a year when Lisa was in rabbinic school, Tracy recorded 27 oral histories of Israeli lesbians, which were published as Lesbiot: Israeli Lesbians Talk About Sexuality, Feminism, Judaism, and Their Lives (Cassell 1995). Tracy’s video oral history by Steven F. Dansky which chronicles her activism in lesbian publishing can be seen in OUTSPOKEN, under M in Archives https://www.outspoken-lgbtq.org/about.