Turkey Day 2019

This requires no comment. The image comes from the website of 90.1 WECS.

I thought it was hysterical. 

The History of LGBT Radio (Part 4)

I've written a prior post about 107.7 KRAB here, and the story of the infamous Lorenzo W. Milam. Suffice it to say that Lorenzo had a vision but his legacy today is mixed. One of the stations he founded was KRAB, which lasted 21 years on a volunteerism, grants, donations and spare change found in the parking lot. It was one of the most eclectic radio stations that has ever been. Writing for History Link, John Caldbick once wrote of them:

"Throughout its 21-year history, KRAB aired a mix of programming that the word eclectic does not adequately encompass. Regular fare included esoteric music played on unfamiliar instruments; readings of poetry and literature, occasionally in Sanskrit and other tongues no longer widely spoken; free-wheeling panel discussions on practically any topic; often-brilliant commentaries on just about everything..."

It is no surprise then that one of the earliest weekly LGBT radio programs would find a home on KRAB. On a map of Gay and Lesbian geography of Seattle KRAB's former studios are the only radio station listed. The station was founded in 1962 and the first LGBT program aired no later than 1971 with a  show bearing the colorful name "Make No Mistake About It, It's a Faggot and a Dyke."  The hosts were Seattle LGBT radio pioneers Shan Ottey and Paul Barwick. There are some archived recordings at the University of Washington.

They were fired in 1973... but first some background. Shan Ottey was born in Philadelphia in 1946. Her family were proud union members and she and her brother Bob were pirate radio enthusiasts. Shan for her part actually participated in the Stonewall riots in 1969 and moved to Seattle in 1970. Shan held hands on technical training seminars at KBCS  and KRAB instructing women on audio engineering. Later she worked as an engineer at the University of Washington. She started at KRAB with a late night jazz show. Paul Barwick was a Washington native and Vietnam vet. In 1971, he had already made history by filing a lawsuit against King County after he and John Singer (later Faygele BenMiriam) were denied a marriage license. Historical note: They didn't actually want to get married, they were activists making a point. Nonetheless, it was one of the first such lawsuits in the US.

Lavender Country was an American country music band formed in 1972.  They released a self-titled album in 1973 produced in part by John Singer. Reputedly the first known gay-themed album in country music history, it also gets a historical footnote for the FCC obscenity fine. Shan Ottey played the band’s song “Cryin' These Cocksucking Tears” on the air. Unfortunately KRAB already had a history with the FCC. Commissioner Nicholas Johnson visited the station in October of 1967 and was interviewed by Lorenzo, they didn't see eye to eye on some topics. They were investigated in 1967 and 1969 for airing obscenity and profanity. This resulted in a punishment in January of 1970. Their license was renewed for only one year instead of the normal three year period. More here. So management had to react. The duo were fired... supposedly. Sources disagree. Ottey seems to have remained on board at last in a technical capacity. **update at bottom**

Ottey continued her work with KRAB for years. She went on to produce broadcasts for the Lesbian Feminist Radio Collective, which included the show WE: Women Everywhere. The show originates with a feminist bookstore named Woman to Woman which opened in 1974. It was owned by three young lesbian-feminists from Seattle, Janine Carpenter, Peg Rapp (AKA Peg Hickox), Vicki Piotter, and Kay Young.  Rapp and Piotter joined with Janine Carpenter to launch the program. Jan Denali joined later on.

In June of 1975 Peg and Vicki took Women Everywhere to 1390 KFML-AM in Denver, CO.  There the program aired at 4:00 PM on Sundays first as a 15 minute segment then 30 minutes. By July the Big Mama Rag newsletter noted that the show was being harassed by male staff. The program tape was often aired late. The board operator claimed he couldn’t find it, on another occasion it was not aired at all because it had “inadvertently” been used as a doorstop. The show was cut off early sometimes and tapes even erased. Despite addressing it with Station Manager Don Zucker the problem continued. The rift continued through at least September of 1976.

The show featured a women's music, news, and interviews. In 1975 Political disagreements and the volatile issue of lesbian separatism [LINK] divided the feminist collective into two groups. WE continued on and the new program Amazon Media produced the show "Women's Survival Kit" which offered a more political and lesbian-focused format including topics like animal rights and non-monogamy. More here, here and here. The Northwest Digital Archives [LINK] has some recordings of WE: Women Everywhere from as early as 1971 and as late as 1981. Topics include: Women in theater, matriarchies, ageism, socialism, Judaism, feminism, racism and live music performances. All of these programs ended abruptly when KRAB was closed in 1984.

It's fitting then that a woman did the final sign-off.  After station staff discussed some of the high points of the station's history, host Kathryn Taylor closed the broadcast at 1:33 AM on April 16th. She had hosted the show "Kathy's Music Box" which aired at 9:00 PM. She went on to do fill-in at KUOW into the mid-1980s. She had been with the station since 1979 and remained on the board into 1986 as they fruitlessly pursued a time-share agreement with KNHC.

*****Update*****

Chuck Reinsch, KRAB archivist extraordinaire responded to me and filled in some details. He should be considered the canonically correct source on these matters. I quote him verbatim below, I just added a little formatting, the underline is mine.

     I just saw your most recent post about KRAB, and wanted to add a couple of things. First, while in the course of the Nick Johnson interview he and Lorenzo seemed to disagree about some topics, this was mostly due to Lorenzo being adversarial and not wanting to appear too cozy.  Nicholas Johnson was incredibly supportive of KRAB and its encounter with the over zealous local FCC representatives.
     Second, when the local FCC office got all bent out of shape, FCC commissioners attempted to punish KRAB with a one year license renewal not because of obscenity or profanity, but instead because they believed KRAB staff did not follow a procedure that required review of programs' content before airing it.
In fact, in 22 years KRAB was never cited by the FCC for airing obscenity or profanity. And there was never an "FCC obscenity fine".
     About all that can be confirmed of the 1972 Shan Ottey and Lavender Country album incident is that Shan played the record (she admitted to it).  But there was never any official action by the FCC regarding that record or it being aired.  According to Shan someone purporting to be in an official capacity confiscated her Third Class Permit.  I was never able to find someone willing to take responsibility for that.  I believe Shan, but I think the "official" was an impostor.
     Thinking that Shan's collection of radical feminist recordings made and aired on KRAB exceeded my capacity to process, I encouraged archivists at the University of Washington to take them on.  They have now digitized the lot, and are now working to identify and describe the content.  Soon the programs will be online and publicly available for listening. 

The History of LGBT Radio(Part 3)

In the book Lavender Culture, in a chapter by Allen Young, John Zeh is quoted and paraphrased in a section addressing LGBT radio:

"...listeners to gay radio are often those "still struggling with their sexual identities," people who find a gay radio program... a convenient and discreet way to make contact with the gay community. Just the names of some of the regularly scheduled show express the lively spirit of this new movement among gay broadcasters: Fruit Punch, and Radio Free Lesbian in Berkeley, CA; IM RU in Los Angeles,CA; Come Out Tonight in New Haven, CT; Gay Space in Sarasota, FL; Gaybreak in Amherst, MA; Closet Space in Columbia, MO; Stonewall Nation and Sappho in Buffalo, NY; Lambda in Pittsburgh, PA; Closets Are For Clothes in Ann Arbor, MI; Amazon Country and Sunshine Gaydream in Philadelphia, PA."

The radio program Sunshine Gaydream debuted in 1974 in the city of brotherly love, on the University of Pennsylvania's public radio station 88.5 WXPN. It's founder and original host was John Zeh. Some of the post-Zeh programs between 1986 and 1999, are archived at the University of Pennsylvania University Archives. [LINK] The show title is a pun based on the song title “Sunshine Daydream” by the Grateful Dead. But the pun does not belong to John Zeh. Some writers (ahem) have claimed the name may also refer to a book by Allen Ginsberg. I believe this is an error. There is a book Gay Sunshine Interviews by Winston Leyland and Genet Ginsberg but it was first published in 1978; 4 years after Zeh got started. However it collects interviews from a newspaper, Gay Sunshine which does predate the program by at least 4 years.

It's worth noting now that something else big happened in on WXPN in 1974. I already wrote a post about the infamous "Vegetable Report" incident. [LINK] But the stations shut down and subsequent FCC fine started with a report from a 1949 Penn graduate who complained that the program presented “porno stories about homosexuality and other sexual abuses.” We can all note the bigotry in that statement, but it is that very shutdown which steered the course of WXPN to it's milquetoast format today. Source: John Zeh himself. [LINK] Inexplicably, Zeh survived the purge.

Zeh survived the FCC-driven changes at WXPN and remained there through at least 1976 and also added a few shifts as a radio reporter for WMMR. It's important to know that Zeh came into WXPN as a young journalist. Zeh had been writing for years before he landed at XPN. As a teenager he covered sports for The Kentucky Post, and wrote news articles for The Kentucky Kernel, the student newspaper of the U. Kentucky. In 1966 he even wrote an article printed in a special Billboard Music on Campus publication. [LINK]  His writing later appeared in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and The Advocate. He even reported for  All Things Considered on NPR. Zeh left WXPN in about 1979 and was succeeded by host Dan Daniels. So here we have a fork in the trail and must tell two stories.

There are some early tapes and advertisements in the Tommi Avicolli collection HERE. Zeh landed on 88.3 WAIF in Cincinnati, OH.  Things got serious in 1981 for Zeh with an incident that precipitated the case of State v. Zeh. Hamilton County prosecutor Simon Leis charged Zeh with four counts of fourth degree felonies: disseminating materials harmful to juveniles. On January 3rd 1981,  he read selections from a magazine article on the topic of sexual lubricants on-air. It was titled "A Guide for Greasy Fingers" from First Hand magazine.  So it came to pass that on February 17, 1981, defendants-appellees, John Zeh and Stepchild Radio of Cincinnati, Inc., were indicted in violation of R.C. 2907.31. Zeh being Zeh, he sent tapes of the show to local news stations including WEBN. Zeh and WAIF won when the charges were dismissed. Zeh returned to his program. More here.

Uncowed, Zeh produced a program for Gay/Lesbian day at KPFK in 1983. [LINK] But it was not the end of Zeh'slegal entanglements.  He later sued the University of Cincinnati (UC) for canceling his six-week course, "Being Gay in Cincinnati." Zeh won that case too. A federal judge ruled U.C. had violated Zeh's First Amendment rights. Then in 1985 Zeh was convicted of sexual battery for having sex with a mentally impaired 17-year-old. Zeh did not win. He was sentenced to two years in prison. After his release he moved to Washington D.C. where he stayed for a decade. Tired of that scene, he returned to Cincinnati in about 1998.  More here.

Back in Philadelphia, Gaydreams had prospered on WXPN, continuing under host Dan Daniels. (No connection to the other Dan Daniels on WMCA) But Daniels got into trouble with station management in July of 1984. There had been some kind of incident regarding the closing of the GCCP community center and the sale of a pedophile pamphlet at a book store called Giovanni's room. This also somehow included criticism of Roberta Hacker, then host of Amazon Country also on WXPN. Hacker had co-hosting that lesbian radio program, since 1975. More on Roberts here. Station manager Peter Cuozzo censored Daniel's  commentary suspended him for a month. Displeased with the penalty he refused to sign a letter confirming the station didn't censor him. Daniel went on a one-man strike and sent out a written press-release of his comments on WXPN letterhead. (I want to read it so bad) More here.

Cuozzo and Daniels could not reconcile and Alan Ross became the new host of Gaydreams. Alan Ross was a very different host than Daniels. But he also enjoyed crank calling Rush Limbaugh, which culminated on a beautiful live-radio moment in which he was able to broadcast “We had a meeting of Gay Fathers last night, and we decided that we would declare you an ‘Honorary Gay Man.’”

Alan Ross continued to host until 1990 when Bert Wylen took over. Wylen too had some legal entanglements. In 1994 he filed a discrimination complaint against WXPN when he discovered that the WXPN simulcast on WKHS in Maryland excluded his program. Wylen alleged, the University radio station discriminated against him because he is gay. "WXPN is morally and ethically required to make a statement in support of my programs." The Kent County School Board, which controls WKHS's programming, decided not to air Gaydreams because they were bigots. They also refused to air the lesbian-issues program, Amazon Country. WXPN essentially argued that under their deal memo they had no right to remonstrate the bigots. More here and here.

The incident precipitated the end of Bert Wylen's involvement in the program and in 1995 Robert Drake took over.  Drake had been a volunteer at WXPN since 1981 and producing since January of 1988. He started out with Kids Corner, a kids program hosted by Kathy O'Connell. He and Keith Brandt renamed the program Q'zine and transitioned the show into a more produced news magazine format. Alan Ross and others mourn the loss of the programs political activism. Drake remains popular, in he was voted  Best Radio Personality in the Philly A-List’s annual poll.

Back on Gaydreams on 88.3 WAIF continued without Zef.  The show was moved to Mondays at 5:00 PM and being hosted by Mike Lloyd and Mike Chanak. Chanak was well aware of the longevity of the program in the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper he was quoted as saying that it's "the second-longest-running gay/lesbian radio show in the U.S., possibly the world,"In about 1984 they changed the name from Gaydreams to Alternating Currents. There were problems. In the May 1991 issue of Cross-Port InnerView Belinda made an open posting for help producing Alternating Currents. [SOURCE]

"Alternating Currents is in crisis because Mike LLoyd is resigning as the producing force behind it. If you have spare Saturday hours and want to support one of the oldest radio programs of its kind in the country, Mike Lloyd and Mike Chanak will arrange to get you the training you need to help out with the details of radio production. Talk to me at the meeting if you are interested."

But things stabilized. In 2000 show staff included Cheryl Eagleson, Henry Michaels, news coordinator Carl Eichelman, and producer Ken Colegrove. Staff rotated, things changed. By 2003 the show was just co-produced by Cheryl Eagleson and Don Wetterer. Bruce Preston and Sam Clemons joined the show in 2004. In this period 2000 - 2005 the program was airing on Saturdays from 3:00 to 5:00 PM.   But in the Fall of 2004 their website alternatingcurrents.org was taken down. In 2010 the program, feeling less welcome at WAIF, moved to 95.7 WVQC-LP. More here and here. Hosts rotate weekly and as of 2019 include Bruce Preston, Tracy Walker, Ron Clemons, Christopher and Paul Spencer, and Cheryl Eagleson.

I am sorry to report that John Zeh died in 2006 at the age of 59 More here. He is outlived by both of the radio programs he founded. One would hope that he was very proud indeed.

The History of LGBT Radio (Part 2)

Out-FM on WBAI in New York city is one of the longest running LGBT radio programs in America. But like everything else long-running in community radio it has some even deeper roots. 99.5 WBAI has a long history in identity politics and cutting edge social issues, in particular LGBT programming.

According to R. Paul Martin in July 1962, WBAI aired an interview with homosexual activist Randy Wicker. This 90-minute show is widely believed to have been the first such program in the United States.  It was well received by most news outlets, but the Journal-American was condemned the segment and others called for WBAI's FCC license to be revoked. A complaint was filed, but rejected by the FCC. WBAI was particularly typically contrarian about it and withing months Mr. Randy Wicker began to produce gay programming on WBAI. In some regard, he was succeeded by Charles Pitts who was a tad more controversial. In a 1972 programming folio his show was described "Free form stuff with a homosexual cast to it; from the sintered brain of Charles Pitts."

In 1968 Pitts was airing discussions on S&M, bondage, cruisy locations, and more. More here. Pitts did not play well with others and was fired somewhat contentiously and then later re-hired. Pitts developed  a two-hour, Saturday afternoon program called Out Of The Slough starting in 1970. He moved the program to the Saturday Midnight time slot in 1972 and after 3 months lost the slot. After an outcry in local press, notably the Village Voice, Pitts was back. But in May 1973 he was fired again. It was a theme that continued for years. There is a 1978 WBAI tape of Pitts recounting a beating he took on a Greenwich Village street in the NY Public Library [SOURCE] For more on the very colorful Mr. Pitts I do recommend reading the book Playing in the FM Band by Steve Post.

Rudy Grillo and R. Paul Martin were two of the several producers of Gay Rap, which aired on WBAI from the mid 1970s  until in 1985. The successor that program was Gay New York which was produced by Mr. Martin. In that same era, WBAI began holding full day "Gay Day" Specials and held a WBAI AIDS Special in 1985. AIDs is just another part of the background noise of daily news today. But in the early 1980s this was very progressive. More here.

Gay New York aired weekly from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM on Thursday afternoons. Later  it moved to 7:30 Thursday nights and eventually alternating Sunday nights. Concurrently another program The Gay Show began airing on Wednesday nights. In the mid 1990s. In 1991 This Way Out was on air alternating weeks at 1:30 PM it was a more international news format for and about the lesbian and gay community. An Afternoon Outing, started at 2:00 on Thursdays a news magazine for and about the gay and lesbian community hosted by Gonzalo Aburto. Another LGBT program, Outlooks began airing shortly thereafter. Contributors included Nicholas Cimorelli, Larry Gutenberg, Marie Becker, Lidell Jackson, Allen Ross, Bob Storm, Rick X, Tony Glover, Nancy Kirton and others. WBAI management decided to merge Outlooks and The Gay Show which created a new program OutFM in 1992. At different times it aired on Mondays from 11:00 AM to Noon, which was about 2009 thru 2012. [SOURCE] and in 2015 it moved to Tuesday nights 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM [SOURCE]

From the very beginning OutFM was a pastiche of a program. Marle Becker said the following about it's dynamic "OutFM is a collective of about seven to eight people and obviously when you get that many different people with different agendas in a collective, there's always a problem."  The differences between the two programs were sharp. The Gay Show was very news oriented. Outlooks was more focused on grassroots political organizing. The union of the two grew into a more well-rounded but progressive LGBTQ public affairs and culture talk radio show that remains on  air today.

But it's also important to mention that many of the radio hosts, and producers named above are now deceased, many of AIDS. Bob Storm died in November of 1997, Larry Gutenberg died in June of 1995. Marle Becker died in 2015 of cancer.

The History of LGBT Radio (Part 1)

The program The Gay '90s aired on 1420 WHK-AM in Cleveland, OH starting in 1993 and lasting over 6 years. Clevelandhistorical.org goes as far as to call it "The nation’s first gay and lesbian talk radio show."  It was certainly one of the earliest, but probably not the very first. But some of the nuance here may be ontological.

One of the most famous homosexual authors of all time is William Burroughs, who famously said “I have never been gay a day in my life." But host Buck Harris opened the program with the following words “Good evening Cleveland… Welcome to The Gay 90s, the voice of Northeast Ohio’s gay and lesbian community. It is the intent of this show to provide programming that represents the diversity of our gay and lesbian community..." This was a LGBT focused radio program. There was no ambiguity.

The name was a pun. The Gay Nineties is an nostalgic term which refers to the decade of the 1890s, though popularized only retroactively in the 1920s. (The modern usage of the word gay shows up around the same time in a work by Gertrude Stein.) The book Queer Airwaves: The Story of Gay and Lesbian Broadcasting by Phylis W. Johnson and Michael C. Keith had only a little to say about the The Gay '90s.

"In March 1993 another commercial outlet began to experiment with gay talk. Cleveland's talk radio WHK-FM initially aired The Gay '90s on Friday nights, 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM, but soon moved it to Monday nights to reach more young people. Despite the shows success with listeners and advertisers, Program Director Paul Cox believed that syndication was not in it's near future. Cox didn't think America was ready for a gay talk show, adding that "it would take a lot of GMs and PDs with a hell of a lot of courage" to syndicate a gay talk show in the United States."

Mr. Keith also mentioned the program in his book Radio Cultures: The Sound Medium in American Life but sadly the call sign is typoed in the one line reference of my 2008 printing as WHF. The program aired on Friday nights, starting at 9:00 PM. The two-hour show later moved to Mondays. Buck Harris had a background in public health policy, not broadcasting. In 1984 he was appointed by Cleveland Governor Dick Celeste as a Gay Health Consultant to the Department of Health. As he set up AIDS programs in the state, he did radio and TV interviews which elevated his public profile, and also gave him the experience he would later need for his own show. He certainly had the voice for it. More here and here.

Harris did some fill in at WHK-AM and liked it so much that he offered to buy airtime and get his own advertisers. When the show debuted on March 26th, 1993 the radio station was greeted with a bomb threat. The threat was taken seriously, after the broadcast, police escorted Harris and station staff to their vehicles. There was no bomb, though Harris continued to get death threats. The radio program continued uninterrupted for another 6 years. Except for in 1995, when the show was pre-empted twice when the Cleveland Indians made the World Series. Subsequently Harris moved the show to 1300 WERE-AM. More here.

The final program was on July 11th, 1999. The program had hosted Congressmen, Grammy Award winners, singers, songwriters, artists, civil rights activists, and radio call in talk like no program ever before. I think what distinguishes the show the most is what a commercial success it was. Buck said in a 1996 interview that he didn't make money on the program. But The Gay 90s proved that the potential was there. The show was one bold syndication away from national success. Buck Harris died in September of 2018 from complications of lung cancer. He was 70 years old.