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It's all in here, I think. Yep. Wow. So walk me through what we've got. Well, this is my main microphone. This was the main recording device, a Sony TCM 1 21 mono extra cassettes. These are extension cords. These are mainly connectors and cables to connect to any conceivable [00:00:30] because I was often plugging into house systems or not, you know, or just a small mixing board and stuff. So I eventually had I could connect virtually everything and some of the people working, I sort of became known when I showed up at an audio event of if somebody else was missing a connection, I probably had it. So yeah, this one, This came real close to appearing in the, uh, movie milk, but so I this this went around to a lot of those events [00:01:00] just and since I never officially stopped doing it, it never got it never ended my background. Well, I grew up in Boston. I went to school at Yale University in New Haven and the University of California in Berkeley for graduate school. And although I started out as a premed as an undergraduate, I started heading towards a career in so [00:01:30] sociological research and teaching sociology. And while I was at the University of California, I finally got in touch enough with my feelings that I came out of the closet. I was not one of the double life in the closet people. I was one of the repressed from himself and not allowing myself to acknowledge who I was. Um, and at about the same time as that when I in order to do that, I realised I had [00:02:00] to leave school because school was just not the proper place to get in touch with your feelings. If your main defence mechanism is in is neurotic intellectual, because all of all of the rewards in school are for neurotic intellectual. So, uh, I came out, and I was also I had been since I was a child. I'd been interested in journalism and, uh, newspapering and radio and TV and all of it, but had never really [00:02:30] received much encouragement to do that. Um, and I never actually properly trained in it, But journalism is sort of high shutter speed, sociology or else Sociology is simply journalism with a thyroid problem. It takes too long to find everything out um, so it was a It was for me, a very natural transition. Um, and I started freelancing for, uh, various publications and for KP FA radio [00:03:00] and then for radio, although the case freelancing came a little bit later along the line, and there's a more specific. So I was the news editor of the San Francisco Sentinel, which was at the time one of two fortnightly publications that came out in San Francisco treating what was then called the gay community slightly before it was called the lesbian and gay community. Before it was called the [00:03:30] LGBT community. And while I was working on the Sentinel, the Sentinel was a free distribution newspaper that came out every couple of weeks. There were also some other publications that got into the competition on and off, but the two main ones were the Sentinel and the Bay Area reporter, uh, one of my jobs working in the office because the the reason they managed to pay me Oops, sorry, because I could work because I put some time in in the [00:04:00] office as well as going out reporting, uh, was taking care of their, um, their mail subscriptions, which went out to basically the news media outlets, politicians and a few 100 if that paid subscribers around the country. Uh, but mainly it was just a list to sort of increase the influence of the newspaper. Um, and however, we knew that the list was out of date and the way we decided [00:04:30] to call it was by sending a postcard, sending postcards each to everybody on the list and saying we'd love to continue sending it to them. But we needed to know that their address was up to date. Please let us know because we're gonna recreate the the thing. And one of the calls came from Larry Lee at San Radio and at the time was the successor to the old, uh, at one point a competitor. But then eventually the successor to the old K MP [00:05:00] X. It was the number one rock, rock and roll station in the country and arguably in the United States. It was it was a big deal. It it made. And I don't know that it ever unmade any stars. But it made a few stars. Um, and they had a great news pro news department that put on news That was essentially from a leftist countercultural standpoint, but very factually based. It wasn't just screed or dialectics [00:05:30] or whatever, and it was my favourite news show in the world. So I started talking to Larry Lee, and, uh, we became friends and some more or less like phone friends. We had a drink together or something, or actually, it was later that. But, um, the way I actually started working then at K was this way. In June of 1977 immediately after [00:06:00] the Anita Bryant victory in Florida, which was one of the the very big and first, possibly the first, the first voter, a referendum on a gay rights law and the gay rights law was repealed. And Anita Bryant I don't know how much his back history of it she was. She had been a, uh, Miss America runner up, and she was the spokesperson for Florida [00:06:30] orange juice, and she was a big deal in Christian evangelism when she led this campaign. And, uh, there was a huge reaction in San Francisco after the after the repeal of the law in Miami, and there was a huge amount of activism going on, and there was also a lot of tension between the LGBT community and the Latino community. Not that there was not a big [00:07:00] overlap there, but it was not very much of a perceived overlap at the time. And the week before the parade, the Pride parade in 1977 a, uh, white gay man was murdered by, uh, four Latino youths, actually, three and one of their friends. But, um, and a a very brutal stabbing in the Mission Neighbourhood. And, [00:07:30] um, which inflamed the the the Latino versus gay situation in San Francisco. Uh, pretty, pretty badly at the time in the fall when the trial started in 19. Yeah, it was the fall of 77 in the fall when the trial started. I had left the Sentinel, but I was looking for some place. [00:08:00] I wanted to cover the trials, and I was looking for some place to cover them. So I called up Larry Lee at, and I said, You know, the Hillsborough murder trials start tomorrow or start next week. I've forgotten when I called, um, who's covering it for you? And he said, Well, we didn't know that it was starting next week and we do want them covered. Would you like to cover them for us? Which is exactly what I wanted him to say. And so I started working [00:08:30] at KN for doing reports for their four daily news shows. I mean, not that I was on every day, but the reports that I gave could have been on on any one of those days. Um, and for a weekly half hour show they had at 10 o'clock on Tuesday nights called the Gay Life, which was produced by Larry Lee and, uh, Nancy Newhouse. And I was never quite sure if Nancy Newhouse was a lesbian by or straight. [00:09:00] But she was friendly, in any case. So And she was one of the co produced producers. Um, and that show was on through most of late, 1977 all the way through the spring of 1978. 1978. Uh, was the year of the Briggs Initiative, which [00:09:30] brought anti gay electioneering to California. The Briggs initiative would have prohibited any school district in the state from hiring anyone who was gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender. It wasn't even in the mix at the time or who talked about those things or belong to any organisation. It was this very a broad, sweeping, uh, totalitarian [00:10:00] prohibition. McCarthy, McCarthyite, um and so the whole or the the all of pride 1970 that came up for vote in November of 1978. All of the Pride festivities in the spring of 1978 were heavily focused on defeating the Briggs initiative. And that year San covered the parade and [00:10:30] the, uh, speeches from the stage afterwards live on on the Sunday of which was sort of a high point in a way. And then Larry Lee left case to go to, um I don't know if he went to KPIX TV right away and then to KTAKTEH TV, which was, uh, a public broadcasting or the other way around. But he left radio to go into TV, [00:11:00] and the show really lost its producer. And I was calling every month from July, August, September October, asking when it was going to start again, and who is the producer and, um, in November or possibly December. Actually, it was December because it was after the assassination of Harvey Milk. When I called, they said, it's starting again in January and [00:11:30] you're the producer, so and where it's not gonna be a weekly half hour show. It's gonna be a monthly hour long show. And so I took over the show and I'd actually never done show production before. And when I started, I needed someone to show me some of the the more physical aspects of it. We were still editing with Blade and Block, and the show was on monthly for [00:12:00] the first five months, I believe. Then it was every two weeks for the next six months, and then in December, it became a weekly show. So what age were you when you when you joined KN. I started working for them, I think I said in 77 for the Hillsborough trial, which took place in the fall, I would have just been either just about to or just turned 32. [00:12:30] So less than half my current age can you paint a picture for me of what San Francisco was like for, um, yourself as a gay man in in in the late seventies? Disneyland. Um, in the late seventies, it was pre AIDS. It actually wasn't pre AIDS, but we didn't know about AIDS um, and almost. And [00:13:00] there were people flocking from here from all over the country to come to live. There are people coming here to come to visit. Uh, there were more than 100 gay and lesbian bars around town. There were a dozen or more, maybe a dozen. And there are probably about a dozen bathhouses and another six, sex clubs that weren't fully bathhouses. Um, there was cruising on the streets at all hours. There were three [00:13:30] big gay neighbourhoods. Four really Be well. There was a Castro which had taken over from the historic Polk neighbourhood. Uh, and then there was also still the the old tenderloin, which had been what sociologists call an area first settlement where people first land because there are a lot of there are a lot of one room occupancy, hotels and places for people to stay. Um, that scene was a little bit more hustler I and also [00:14:00] a little bit more drag queen I Polk Street had an active street scene. It also had a lot of really nice apartments within around, uh, say six or seven blocks in either direction in which, uh, the more established and and older gay male clientele lived. Lesbian scene was very much, uh, to to the knowledge [00:14:30] of an outsider essentially like me. But there was stuff outside of of, um there were this bar in Coal Valley. I think that one was that was mods. There was another one out on Gey pegs, Uh, and the Valencia Street scene had just started. Um, there there was plenty of physical loving to be had by anyone who who wanted to to indulge. [00:15:00] But it was also, politically, the time of an E fluorescence. Because I worked on the Pride parade in 75 76 77 78. Maybe in 79. Or maybe not. But I know that in the 1970 in 1978 the job that Roland Gambari, who [00:15:30] was one of the people on the Fruit Punch Collective which did the radio show on KP FA in 1978 he and I, we were both working on a new newspaper called the San Francisco Bay Times, Um, which didn't really make it past three issues. But then a couple of the pe a couple of people in it started a newspaper later called coming up, which, after many, many more years changed its name to the Bay Times [00:16:00] again and which is still being published. So there's a it's not quite the same newspaper, except it really has the organisational DNA of the original newspaper in it. Um, Roland and I took over the job of doing the directory of LGBT organisations. Actually, I think it was the direction directory of lesbian and gay organisations. So, um there were over Uh huh. [00:16:30] No, I think it may have been over 200 because we did a I did a, uh, a programme Uh a, uh San Francis at the history of the GL BT History Society, Hank Wilson and Paul Lichtenberg and I did an exhibit in 2002 called Butterflies and Oranges. That was about the political E fluorescence and the community. The the huge number of community groups that were founded in that first [00:17:00] year, starting with Anita Bryant. Uh, there was already plenty happening, but starting in 77 with the Briggs initiative in 78 and then just continuing to build everything from new newspapers, uh, new social groups, lots of new political groups. Uh, there were at that. At one point there were four different, uh, LGBT Democratic clubs in the city. Uh, and the and the Republican Club, Uh, [00:17:30] the musical groups, the the the marching band, the choruses. Uh, and what was really interesting is, for the first time in almost a decade, there were a large number of organisations in which lesbians and gay men were working together. There were some gay men who couldn't deal with lesbians. And there were some lesbians who couldn't deal with gay men for a variety of reasons and even those of us who wanted to work together, we sometimes found that there were difficulties [00:18:00] to be overcome. But there was a, uh, a vision of seeing that there needed to be politically, at least a united front, uh, to deal with some of the political issues where we were categorised the same way. Um and in fact, I actually wrote an essay or an editorial in the First Bay Times called one people, two genders, three cultures in which I meant that we really were for political reasons and seen from the outside as one [00:18:30] group. The two genders I now recognise is probably too man and categorical to match. The real diversity that we've discovered is out there because there are a lot of people who don't identify with either one or do identify with both. But, um, with both of those two, or but saying that what we needed was to have a unified political front to understand that we were different, especially at, um, certain [00:19:00] parts of our social life that merged into our sexual lives and to leave each other space for that but that we could have but that therefore we could have a a lesbian culture, a gay men's culture and a co sexual culture operating together in the same city, uh, and that this newspaper was about that third, that third one, the sexual culture, um, that that came up because the lesbians who were on the collective putting the paper together said we'd like to have a women's [00:19:30] page and they thought there was gonna be opposition from from the men. And our attitude was, that's a great idea. Maybe we should have a men's page, too. And then the women said, Oh, no, no, no. Why would you want that? And we said, Well, why do you want a women's page? We said, Well, this is why we want it there, you know? Then then there'll be a place on the page where the women who don't like to think about what gay men do after 11 o'clock at night or whatever. Um, they just could not look at that page if they don't want to. So [00:20:00] let's just have separate anyway. So that was probably too long an answer for that question, which was what it was like in the seventies. So I mean, there was a rich sexual culture, um, there and politically and culturally it was it was a most of the or a lot of organisations that were founded then are still around, and one of the interesting things is it's because of that strength of of organisation and community building and what [00:20:30] sociologists call institutional ramification that we had all of these organisations available when AIDS struck in the early eighties because first of all, there was a pattern to build on and new organisations got created. But during the eighties, the organisations that existed before some of them couldn't survive, some did survive, but the [00:21:00] only new organisations that survived were ones that were dealing with the health crisis and the political fallout from the health crisis. So But, I mean, it was It was a wonderful time. It it had its ups and downs We had. We lost Miami. We lost three Midwest three Midwestern, uh, referendum in 1978. Minnesota Saint No. Saint Paul. Eugene. Actually, that's Western. Not Midwestern Wichita, Saint Paul and Eugene [00:21:30] or three. But we won the Briggs initiative. Uh, in at the end of 1977 we elected Harvey Milk 1978. We had three losses in the spring. November of 1978. We defeated the Briggs Initiative. Three weeks later, Harvey Milk was assassinated. I was living here then. I had moved in to this place in the spring of 1978. So the the gay life on case N when did that first start? Its origins are shrouded [00:22:00] in mystery. Uh, I'm not sure Whatever. The oldest tape that's on that's been digitised 19. I mean, there was a gay liberation show in 1973. There was a one off. The gay life could have started as early as 1975 but more likely It's 1976 by the way, in that half hour format, when it was a half an hour a week and it had [00:22:30] a bigger budget, I mean, I basically I didn't have a budget I had. You know, we'll pay you this much to do it. You can come into the studio and use our equipment and our tape and all that. Uh, and at the beginning, they they had some people there to to show, to teach me editing and and so forth. But, um, But in the half hour version, one of the other freelancers on the show was Randy Schultz. And I'm trying to think who else and the and also it also had reports from [00:23:00] some of the straight but not narrow reporters at Case who were covering City Hall or covering gay events and so forth. So it wasn't exclusively only LGBT voices on it. You know it. It was it was a it was a day of, you know, it was an era of I still have some buttons from that era. There was AAA parade button that said straight but not narrow that people wore so anyway in the show was it aimed at a gay [00:23:30] audience? Or was it more a straight away when I took it over? Actually, no. This I borrowed from from Larry Lee. So in 1977 when I joined the show, it had an opening that I kept all the way through 1984. And, uh, I added, I added some country western music when the when the station went from rock and roll to country. Um, the opening was This is the gay life KSANS public Affairs [00:24:00] show for gentlemen who prefer gentlemen for women who prefer women and for people who prefer people, you don't have to be gay to listen. And we kept that. And it's really interesting because I found out that, for instance, my straight dentist listened to it because he he was it. Eventually, we should talk about time slots if you want the inside radio stuff. But it it would come on at six o'clock on Sunday morning, which is called sort of the public affairs ghetto. When the [00:24:30] radio stations had to do public affairs programming so they would put it into whatever hours, they they had the smallest audience so that they would lose the least amount of advertising revenue. So although eventually one of the guys in the advertising department actually sold an ad on my radio show. But, um, so that was the opening and and the idea was explicitly to give people permission to stay tuned. [00:25:00] So the audience it was assumed, and the other thing that I always felt was important about that was, What about the person who's right at the edge of the closet? What about the person living in Modesto who doesn't have the big social support of places to go Gay Community centre? We didn't have a gay community centre. Well, yeah, we did have gay community centres. Then there were unofficial gay community centres, but, um, gay social services and so forth. [00:25:30] He needed permission. He or she needed permission to listen and or an alibi if a disapproving parent walked in, you know, so I always felt it was very important to do that, and I've said Modesto specifically, it's in the Central Valley. It's within the the sound, right within the the signal range of case. But it's very rural, very fundamentalist on the one hand, or [00:26:00] or um, Mexican American Catholic on the other fundamentalist white Protestants or Mexican American Catholics on the other and neither community very approving of of, uh, gay people in any way. And but there was a, um there were some organisations out there that would regularly send me their announcements of meetings. And I always read those on the air. Uh, because one of the things you do in public service programming is you read the public [00:26:30] service announcements and and I got feedback from them that it was really important. It was one of the few places that people could hear about it because the local newspaper was ignoring their organisation. But they were hearing people were hearing about it on the radio. So So I was aware that the audience wasn't just San Francisco. It was at least not and not only the inner bay area of, say, Oakland, Richmond, Marin, the Peninsula, Palo Alto and so forth. And at [00:27:00] the time, actually one of the very earliest gay techie groups formed in the South Bay that was forgotten. The name of it, it had some cute name, but, um, and but also even farther away, Sacramento, Modesto, for we didn't quite reach as far as Stockton? Yes, Stockton. So that that so I was aware of of people being out there. So when you were pitching the programme to a wide [00:27:30] audience, did that change the kind of a language that you would use or the types of programming that you would you do, like in types of interview? Well, first of all, language is to some extent, always regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, which and one of the things that everybody in radio learned at the time. I mean, there are these seven forbidden words of things that you couldn't say, and I'm not sure I could reel them off now or not. But do you Do you want me to try? What? What? What could you say? You couldn't [00:28:00] say Piss. Shit, cunt. Fuck. So was it cock or cock sucker? Um, can't remember. That's only six or so anyway. But you just couldn't say those words. They shut the radio, you know, they do huge fines and threatened to pull the station licence and all that. Um, occasionally, early on, I wasn't doing much going out and taping events, so I always had people in [00:28:30] in the studio and and the show was essentially taped, uh, anywhere from two days to sometimes two weeks if I was going away or going on vacation. But usually, you know, I'd be in there on Tuesday or Wednesday, taping the show for the weekend. Um, so I could either bleep it or I could stop right then and ask them to to say it some other way and then edit. Edit that out. Just cut it out. Um, And as it was taping, I used the I would. Any time I knew there was gonna be an edit, [00:29:00] I'd have these little slips of paper that I just put in the open real tape. Tuck it just as the at the at the intake point on the tape and then as I, I know where, where, where all of my compulsory edits were, Um, when AIDS came along. And actually even a little bit before, because I I had I had done some shows on health issues and there were STD S were an issue. They're all treatable, but we needed to tell people that they were treatable. [00:29:30] Uh, I don't think I ever hesitated to use clinical language in describing things and I usually had, I would say, at the beginning of the show and at the beginning of the segment, if if it wasn't the first segment in the show that because this is discussion of health matters, that there was gonna be clinical language explicitly describing sexual acts performed by some gay men. And that was the language as [00:30:00] or something close to that as I remember it, Um, and the first time it would come up, I would also then repeat that just so that people knew that that wasn't a fluke. They're gonna hear more words like receptive anal intercourse or active oral intercourse or, uh, whatever. I think there was one discussion, and actually, it was taped outside. No, no, no. He came to the studio who was a straight doctor in [00:30:30] Vallejo who published a paper on what he called Brach Protic sex. Which meant basically it was about he was using the Greek for arm, arm and asshole, except it was in Greek. And he published this paper about Brach Protic sex. Uh, and he was on the show and we were discussing it, but he didn't use we all. We didn't use any any of the words that you weren't allowed to use, so you so it was OK to use those. But again, [00:31:00] I always felt it's good to put those there because someone's listening with a kid or somebody who supports our community but doesn't want to know the details of what goes on behind closed doors. So I just felt that rather than censorship, the best thing to do was to let people know that there was gonna be explicit language. Can you talk a wee bit about, Um, I guess the value of radio in that time I'm thinking, because this is pre Internet [00:31:30] pre cellphone. The ways that people communicated was quite different. It was It was pre Internet and pre cell phone, and it was also it was even pre, um, telephone classified ads where the newspaper would print a classified ad, Uh, and then you could call and listen to the person's message and or leave a message. And so for that, hadn't even that that, I think was much [00:32:00] later in the eighties, that that happened. Um, we had as means of communication, the the ancient ones of, you know, the there was telephone and it was tele faggot there was, You know, there was. There was there was a very extensive grapevine of of stuff. And, um, there were newspapers of there were, you know, we had the LGBT newspapers. [00:32:30] I mentioned Bay Area reporter um, the Sentinel. There was one called the Voice. For a while, there was one called the Crusader, which was put out by a crazy, uh, minister named Reverend Ray Bro, who was kind of an agent provocateur who most people figured was probably in the pay of the CIA or some other thing just because he always caused more trouble than than he ever [00:33:00] did any good. Um, and in terms of electronic media, there were no, I mean, it was pre cable, at least in terms of cable networks and so forth. I mean, to the extent that there was cable, it was just a way of pulling in stations from a from afar. For people who lived on the periphery, there was cable television, actually, um, radio was the only place where we [00:33:30] had, uh, electronically where we had our own shows. We had our own newspapers. There was fruit punch in, uh, which at KP FA in Berkeley. KP FA is, uh, the flagship station of the Pacifica Foundation. It's a nonprofit, um, largely a volunteer effort. I don't think anybody ever got paid there for producing the show. Um, and Case san was proud of the fact that the gay life, [00:34:00] which never changed its name even though we changed the opening wordage about we included lesbians and so forth. Uh, because we felt there was a history and there was a brand that we had was proud of the fact it was the first, apparently the first regular programming in the United States on a commercial station for lesbians and gay men. WBA I in New York, which is also a Pacifica station, had something, but that was again a nonprofit [00:34:30] station. So this was commercially, um, and KPFK in Los Angeles. Another Pacifica station may also have had, uh, a a radio show. I'm not sure they did have a radio show. I just can't remember its name. Um, so if if you wanted I mean, the point is there are the newspapers. The [00:35:00] newspapers were coming out nearly as basically, as you know, there there was one newspaper coming out. They alternated. So they were coming out one every week. Even when they were, each one was a fortnightly. And then eventually they both became weeklies, too. So, uh, so they were as timely as the radio show was. It wasn't as if we were doing live stuff. We did one live show, but, um I mean, I think the important part was it [00:35:30] was electronic. You could listen to it. You could hear voices, Uh, you could hear interviews in depth of with with book authors. You could get questions back and forth. Um, and what am I trying to think of? There's some. There's another advantage going on here that I just tried to pull out of the air and I got lost. Um, musicians, if if I got, [00:36:00] uh, an LGBT musician sent me a record, we'd play it, and I interviewed them, and I'd also it was good for me, too, because sometimes you finish your show and you've got 52 minutes and 33 seconds, and you know you've got to go to at least 56 or they're gonna be angry that the studio personnel had to do the filling in, you know, so apart from precisely labelling this week's show last 58 30 or whatever was to get above [00:36:30] and in into the right range. Um, and musical fillers are helpful for that. They're also helpful for breaking up the talk talk, talk of the show. And we were on a rock and roll station so I could play. I couldn't. I didn't do the disco artists. And I didn't do the country artists either. But I did do rock and folk so I could get the LGBT rock and folk people on. Um, [00:37:00] so, yeah, Holly Nero was a favourite on the show, for instance. Um and what am I trying to think of about the music? Wait a minute. I should be here taking notes because I'm having three thoughts at once and then forgetting which one I want to come back to. Uh, well, Oh, yeah. So when the When the station changed from rock and roll to country at the end of October or early November of 1980 a lot of people [00:37:30] at the station some were just totally irritated that it was happening and left. Um, some were irritated and stayed. They grumbled, uh, it didn't bother me very much because at the time the music I listened to was rock and roll, country and classical. If the station had gone disco at that point, I might have been equally disaffected. The interesting thing is, in retrospect, disco sounds much [00:38:00] better. And the reason disco sounds much better now than it did then, if you were listening to, it is the only thing that still gets played is the good stuff. The the top 5% of it. And it's the same as true. If you listen to classic rock, you're listening to the top 5% of it. And it's probably to some extent, true of the classical music that you hear most of the time is the bad stuff gets forgotten. And as every once in a while, somebody goes back and says, Oh, here's you know this underperformed [00:38:30] piece blah, blah, blah. And yes, it's an underperformed piece, but it's usually not a masterpiece, as it turns out. So, um, so I'm not saying that I won't ever listen to disco. Now, Uh, my partner is a big Donna summer fan, so but the point is, it's the good, so but the point is that we switch to country, OK? And I thought, I wanna keep I wanna keep the show on. And there was this perception at the time that gay equals disco [00:39:00] because LGBT well, especially gay discos, are sort of like leaders in playing the stuff defining what was hits. And in San Francisco, in New York and in L A. It was an important influence and an important audience, and and the people who were producing those records, you know, knew what was going on. But so I what I did was, but I knew that there was an extensive LGBT country and Western [00:39:30] scene in San Francisco. So I wrote a memo that covered all of the LGBT country bars, all of the bars that even had a country and western night, all of the bars. That and then all of the bands that played all of the LGBT country Western bands that I knew about all of the bands that played [00:40:00] in LGBT clubs on occasion, in addition to what other other gigs they have, plus, all of the country and Western apparel and outfitters were that were explicitly that were part of the gay community or in gay neighbourhoods, um, and, um, and covered everything from Sonoma County in the north to Morgan Hill in the South. So it's like the full bay area turn in the memo and this is supposed to be my my opening shot in the campaign [00:40:30] to keep the show. So I got the memo. I sent one copy to, uh, the programme director one copy to the advertising director who, because these are all essentially advertising leads and a blind copy to the one guy in out sales straight who had, who had once sold my show oops, accidentally sold my show. I felt he deserved a blind copy of Of the Thing. So I turned it in, put it in, put it in the boss, my boss. I answered [00:41:00] to the programming director put put the memo in the boss's mailbox and the other guy's mailbox, and I'm in the studio getting set up to create the next the next week's show. It's like a small studio with about half the size of this part of this room. Yeah, and, um, get a phone call from the station manager secretary who would now be called an administrative assistant in those days, she was still a secretary and said, Uh, are [00:41:30] you free? Werner would like to see you in his office, and it didn't sound bad or whatever, but it was just 10 minutes since I turned the thing in. So I said, Sure, I'll come right in and walked in and my boss So this is like my boss had taken it and gone to his boss with the memo, and he's there at the tape at, at his desk looking through it page by page and said, This is This is great. This is magnificent. You saved us. This, like this is this is this [00:42:00] mother lode of leads that we can work with the community and all that. And he said, In case you're wondering about your show, it's on. Don't worry about it. We're keeping your show. So it was just sort of like to me, this was the opening shot. But it was the memo that this was like Boom, it was just what they wanted. I think partly also, they didn't know where they were going to get opposition from staff, you know, And this was like I wasn't leaving. I wasn't grumble I wasn't even grumbling. I was saying, [00:42:30] you know, I got with the programme real quickly and that's how I survived in radio while I was at, I went through. There was a change of ownership. A change of there were at least at least six or seven different programme directors, three general managers, a move of the studio to Oakland. And I stayed on through all of that. So surviving [00:43:00] in radio, um and and when as a freelancer, when I, uh I wrote the complaint that the National News Council found that CBS in 1980 had, uh, explicitly lied about events in San Francisco to make a political point on this alleged documentary called Gay Power. Gay Politics and for which CBS apologised, [00:43:30] uh, on air eventually. But I was very proud of it. And the person who was doing publicity there, in fact, you know, sent out news releases about how the producer of a show and that and that I was gonna cover it and and and also I I had while I was there, I had completely taped the complete deliberations of the National News Council, which ran across 2.5 hours of shows, I think because it was a long A long thing. So So how did the gay community respond to the programme? [00:44:00] Beats me. I mean, I never knew how many people might be listening, whether or not we had 2000, 10,000 or 20,000 or 200,000. It was just like, um, people. I mean, I know people mentioned to me that they heard it, and I also was able to take stuff from the programme. Highlights from the programme and use them in my [00:44:30] column in the newspaper, which even after, even when I wasn't on staff at the Sentinel, um, between and after my two gigs as being the news editor or editor in chief, I had the column a lot. Um, and I could I use the radio. I used the radio show highlights from the radio show as material for the column, and I also used the column to promote the radio show. [00:45:00] And I don't know, it was usually in, as I referred before to the public affairs ghetto of like, early morning hours, or we we hours that, um, those usually weren't even measured by the the rating services by Nielsen and Arbitron. And that's why they were in those time slots because they're not gonna, because not only are they not caring to bother, to try to sell the stuff anyway, [00:45:30] but they're not worried about it, bringing down the station's 24 hour average. So the radio show a lot of my my time slots would be like six o'clock on Sunday morning or the best I had was when it was on at one o'clock on Sunday morning and repeated at 88 o'clock. Sunday morning is actually a pretty good time in most demographics, not necessarily among gay men and lesbians who might [00:46:00] have been out late on Saturday night. But not all of us will have been out late. The other thing was, there was one point at which it was on at two o'clock Saturday morning and then eight o'clock Sunday morning, or something like that. And, um, there were several occasions on which, very annoyingly while in the wee hours of the morning, entertaining a newly met friend, uh, and listening [00:46:30] to rock and roll on case and suddenly being interrupted by my own voice. And I don't know what he may have thought when you know, like, may have thought I was playing a tape or you know, it just way too much. You know, that type of ego is not helpful in a situation like that. But, uh, and maybe somewhere else somewhere, someone right now is gonna say, You know, the weirdest weirdest trick I ever had [00:47:00] is I was in bed with this guy and we were doing this and all of a sudden he was on the radio while we were, But that probably yeah, if he's not telling it right now. And it happened on two or three occasions over the several years that there was a either a one o'clock or two o'clock in the morning time slot. So quite And I'd forget, you know, because I'd I'd put the show away and hand the tape in and put it on the shelf where it's gonna get played from and send the station my bill and [00:47:30] then forget, and I might or might not actually hear it run on the air. So you were saying earlier that the majority of shows were Pre-recorded? Yes. Um, there was one time when I did a gaze in jail show. Uh oh. And then we were on at We must have been on Saturday morning, like at six o'clock or something like that. And I went down to, uh, the San Francisco County Jail [00:48:00] and interviewed people on, um, who were in the There was a what? What it used to be called the Queen's tank, and that now is called the the Gay Unit or something like that. Um, and the jail holds people at the county jails hold people awaiting trial who can't who don't have haven't posted bail so they can't get out ahead of time or people who are sentenced to terms of one year or less in the US. If it's or in California, [00:48:30] if it's more than a year, you go to state prison, which is more distant and more rigorous and more serious in a whole lot of ways. But and I interviewed the sheriff who was very friendly with the LGBT community and who also was a rock and roll fan. So he loved being on case N and, um, we did The one hour show was taped, but he brought to the studios downtown. We had a three hour call in following [00:49:00] the show, which was on on A Because it was a talk show that followed. And I took over the talk show that morning and it was like 7 to 10 or 6 to 9. I can't remember what the actual hours were. Maybe the show was on at seven, and then we're on from 8 to 11. It was a long call in thing, and so he had his people who are currently inmates. There are three or four of them now. He got to select them, so they were sort of like, likely to be modelled inmates. But they had a microphone, [00:49:30] a live microphone out to the public. Now I suppose they're not going to get too outrageous because they're going back to jail in any case, and not that there's be a question of them be getting beaten or anything. But there are ways in which jailers can be kind and ways in which jailers can follow. But but I still thought it was very, um, very, very brave of the Sheriff Mike Hennessy, um, [00:50:00] to allow inmates to be on live television. He was there, too, with them, but to be on live radio taking phone calls from the public. And that was the that was the one that one live show. Yeah. I mean, I participated in the 1978 broadcast from the parade in June, but that was before I was producing the show. And it wasn't an official. That was a That was a production of the news department, technically not of the public affairs Department, except that they were the same people with different wearing different hats. But [00:50:30] I guess having it pre-recorded means then you've actually got an archive of, of, of, of shows. I. I Is this why these shows have survived it? Because they were prerecorded, they were prerecorded. And because I was never an official employee of the station but an outside contractor and that the technical point of view was that I was, um, running what [00:51:00] do they call it? A syndication of one. That they were just buying an outside producer show and that my compensation for it was whatever I got for cash, plus use of their facilities to to record it and and so forth. Um and I got the princely sum when I started of $50 per show. So if we adjust for inflation, not [00:51:30] exactly sure what that would be today, but probably around $250 per show and after several years of doing it, and when I no longer needed somebody from their engineering staff to do the actual editing at my instruction. But I was doing it with my own two hands, Um, and because the shows were much more polished and they were getting notice. Occasionally, other newspaper columns picked them up but picked up information about [00:52:00] them. So, you know, they knew it was an asset to the station. I thought I deserve more, and I thought I deserve 60. So I went in and asked for 75 and the boss looked and he said, Yeah, and I said, You know, because I don't require these other used to You have to have someone And the boss said, Yeah, sure. At which point I realised I should have asked for 100. I mean, I asked for 75 because I wanted 60 he has 75. And he said, Yeah, so, um [00:52:30] so. But as a result of which I own the show, both the tape and the rights. So because I own the rights I, I took the tapes home, and, um, there were 252 shows of mine as I remember the number in the archive. Now. Now, to some extent, I occasionally some of them there were There were reruns. And when there were full [00:53:00] reruns, uh, there were 252 tapes that I delivered that are big, uh, one hour, one hour tapes that are on 10 inch open reel, uh, big boxes. Some of them don't have full hours in them because every once in a while I would rerun a segment, but not the whole programme. And in those days, the easiest way to do it rather than dubbing it was just take [00:53:30] the piece out and splice it into the other show. So they were in my back porch, which was a cool and almost dry place. I mean, it was not subject to mould, but it didn't really meet archival standards, I think. And then, in 1991 or two, I gave them to the historical society both the tapes and the rights. [00:54:00] And then sometime around 2000, as digital audio really ramped up. I started looking around for a way to to get them to be, um, to be digitised both for purposes of preservation, because although they had, they had all been stored. As I said, Cool place. Definitely a cool place and a nearly dry place. Not not archival dry, but, uh, and they've been stored tails [00:54:30] out, which I don't know. How much are we? This is for the public or for insiders, but basically it means that after the show has been played at its normal recorded speed and its playback speed, instead of rewinding it quickly to get to the beginning again, you leave it at the end because when the tape is loosely packed, there's less print through from one layer of tape to the next, which is one of the things that creates not quite an echo effect, but like, what's that happening in [00:55:00] the background effect that you sometimes hear on on tape where this has happened? So they were as stored as well as I could store them for the time being. But at the archive, they were stored properly, cool and dry. And then, um, I just missed a couple of I got the idea of digitising them like an hour a year too late to get the point at which stations were giving away their 10 inch tape machines because they didn't need them anymore. And they were in the way and would gladly have [00:55:30] not only given it been able to get a write off, but you know, a tax write off by giving it to a charitable organisation. But then, uh, John Raines, who had done radio in San Diego, was a volunteer at the historical society, and he wanted to digitise their entire audio collection. And he started with mine because it was well organised, and the reason it was well organised is because I'm a borderline obsessive compulsive. Um, [00:56:00] and I you know, the spices in my kitchen rack are not all organised alphabetically. I'm not at that level, but they're, uh, because I try to to be a I try to narrow my obsessive compulsive into areas where it's useful. So as for instance, in print, I'm a copy editor, uh, which is called, I think a subeditor in New Zealand. Uh, OK, so just sort of like of cleaning [00:56:30] up people's pros before it gets there or staying organised. Also, what the station got out of giving me an hour a week and using up an hour of their time and paying me the princely $50 or $75 for each show and giving me the studio time as well as the air time is they needed to file an annual report of what they had done in the public service. Because at the time, [00:57:00] US Broadcasting was governed by the Communications Act of 1934 here and after referred to as the act. That's an inside joke in the US, which is that in in the communication in all all memos about this that you would get from like station execs or the even the people you know, the the corporation that owns this, this chain of stations across the country when they would refer to they would always say, the the Federal Communications Act of 1934. And it always [00:57:30] then say, here and after, referred to as the Act capital A. It required that stations broadcast stations operate in the public interest, convenience and necessity. So it meant that once a year they filed this report of what they'd done for the public interest, which is then open to public inspection. And every five years I think it was Was it five or maybe got extended to seven? There'd be this mostly proforma renewal process where their broadcast licence [00:58:00] was subject to renewal. And if people objected that they hadn't done anything in the public interest, then this is one of their defences, like so they want a detailed documentation. So I was required by the station to file a report every week of who was on the show, what the topic, what organisations they represented or were part of and what the topics of the show were. So as a result of which [00:58:30] I had about 260 or more of these broadcast reports which, if you just enter them into a computer, creates an instant index by subject, title and so forth. So John liked that, and also the other thing is, although I did not say and each report the people were listed in order of appearance on the show, it wasn't a complete thing of who's speaking from what minute to what minute, but so he did that one first because it was the best organised archive. [00:59:00] Perhaps we can go through some of those shows and some of the content because you've got such a diverse range of things that you covered over that that period of time and I. I, um prior to, um meeting today, I kind of broke it down into a couple of, um, topic headings. I'm wondering if we could just go through those, Um, the the first one was politics and civil rights. And and maybe starting off with your coverage of things like gay liberation [00:59:30] and and the whole kind of political movement in the late seventies. OK, well, one memorable interview was with David Goodstein, who is the publisher of the Advocate and the publisher, and of of, uh, I think they had already I don't think they'd started out magazine yet. Maybe they didn't start out magazine. Maybe they bought it, But, uh, establishment gay publisher, Um, an ex stockbroker like Harvey Milk Goodstein was into a very [01:00:00] establishmentarian assimilationist mainstreaming political strategy. Um, the extreme left or on the left, uh, at the time, which included myself, there was the Gay Liberation movement which saw gay liberation as part of a wider, uh, if not socialist, at least a humanitarian connected [01:00:30] with the feminist movement. The civil rights struggles of African Americans and Latinos and the farm workers struggle in California. Um, and in the middle, sort of seeing both of being both a radical and an ex stockbroker at the same time is Harvey Milk. And in fact, the the tension between Harvey and David Goodstein is one of the central dramatic turns in the movie [01:01:00] milk. Um, I interviewed David Goodstein, uh, partly because at that point I had once worked for the Advocate and I quit. I was a freelancer. I wasn't on staff, but I quit working for them when he stopped being just a publisher and tried to found this national organisation, which he wanted not simply to be a national organisation, but to be the national organisation, which I found I [01:01:30] found politically the idea of the national organisation offensive and journalistically. I found the idea of that level of dabbling by a publisher is bound to affect what the newspaper covers, and the newspaper is therefore no longer anyway, um, but after a couple of years, a couple more years because that was happening around 76 77 and by 81 or 82 when I think I interviewed Goodstein, [01:02:00] uh, or maybe maybe 80. I don't know, 81 or 82. Whatever. Uh, I decided that in order for me to be journalistically correct, I was sort of looking around and thinking who whom I could get on the show. And I decided that he was the most important gay person in America who I hadn't interviewed, Uh, which is the is the reason I decided to do it. Uh, but it's also made for a great pitch. When I called, the secretary [01:02:30] called you and you get the secretary or whoever's in charge and say I want to do an hour long interview with him And the reason is this. You know, it's great when you have a pitch. That's the truth. Uh, but because it's flat. Oops, sorry. It's flattering to someone to be, you know? So So we did this hour long interview and, um, talked about different approaches. The assimilationist approach, the the the left wing, but still inside [01:03:00] the system of running for electoral office, sort of Harvey Milk populist approach and then the radical approach. Um, at the time, um and And we talked about our differences and we were very civil, even warm with each other in the tone of the interview. I don't know if you've heard this particular one or not, but but one of the things that really bothered me is at the time he was requiring all of his employees and any potential new employees [01:03:30] to take either EST the Earhardt seminars training or his gay version of it called The Advocate Experience, which was this sort of new age getting in touch with yourself and also using it as a form of communicating with other people who've gotten in touch with themselves sort of thing. It's highly packaged enlightenment. That's my view of it. Anyway, Uh, as a sociologist, I had studied [01:04:00] sociology of religion and and one of the people in my study group, uh, where each of us were looking. We were all looking at different cults. One, in fact, had looked at EST. I had never done it, and every time the person who was doing this would say, you know, you really might like this Randy and then he'd say No No, don't do it because you're my best informed outside person. You're the best informed person that I know who hasn't taken it. So I need that So But David was requiring [01:04:30] all of his employees to take it, And I raised the issue of Isn't this a religious test? Aren't you saying that you only want to work with people who have the same? And he was? And he said that? Well, no, it's about communications. It's like I'm running a business and I want to be able to work with people who know what I mean when I say a particular thing and I said, David isn't [01:05:00] Isn't that what got said 40 50 years ago when our parents, David Goodstein, was Jewish like I am? I said, when our when our parents, who and and uncles who had graduated law school were told that this law, this particular law firm, didn't want them because they didn't feel not that they didn't like Jews, but they didn't communicate well with them. It's when you say it's because, you know, And he said, No, no, no. I think it's different, but I mean his eyes sort of changed on that way. He just [01:05:30] sort of saw the what I was saying. And at the end of the interview, we sort of agreed to disagree. He still felt that it was, uh, basically that this was a management system and I was seeing that to me. It seemed to be religious or at least quasi religious, and that it was dealing with people's deeper values than just what's at work. Uh, we agreed to disagree. Um, where the interview. A lot of people listen to that one. I sent him a cassette of it, too, which [01:06:00] didn't automatically happen with somebody asked. I'd do it, but, like, sent him the cassette of it quietly. A few months later, he dropped that requirement for his employees because I don't think he'd ever seen the religious argument before. And he was sensitive to it. That was one of my one of the kind of interesting ones, because at the end, we didn't you know there was a sort of very civil. You could listen to it. I mean, it's I think it's kind of one of the fun ones, um, politically [01:06:30] Harvey Milk. And so you actually interviewed him and was it 77 or 78? Well, no. The Harvey Milk interview that's in the tape was before the show. I actually I was interviewing Harvey for for the for the newspaper I was working on at the time, The Bay Times. Uh, and I knew him well and also for the Sentinel beforehand, because when I started to work for The Sentinel, the Sentinel at the time, the newspapers were so cliqueish, um, [01:07:00] that I started working for the Sentinel. I also I knew Harvey through because I was involved in Bay Area Gay Liberation, one of the leftist groups I was talking about, Um, and when I was working for the newspaper Harvey, who had once been a column columnist for The Sentinel, there was nobody at the newspaper who still talked to him after Harvey took his column out of The Sentinel and went to the Bay Area reporter with it. So there was just like, no. So [01:07:30] when I started, it was interesting because my boss, the Bill Beard, the publisher of the Sentinel, was saying, It's good that we have someone on staff who's talking to Harvey because I don't agree with him. But he's important, and we need to be talking with him. So it's good that you've reestablished that communication. Um, I I'd say probably I. Wayne Friday wrote a political [01:08:00] column for the Bay Area reporter and Wayne Friday was inside Harvey's inner circle. And so he was sort of the journalist. He was the insider who wrote a political column on the outside. I was a little bit too much the journalist to be on the inner circle, but I knew so many of the people in it. I was probably the journalist who was closest to the inner circle. So I was the journalist on the [01:08:30] outside who had the the ties in as so that I mean, because you could say, Well, Wayne Friday was both an insider and a journalist, but he wrote that that one column and it was basically it was an opinion and items and column, and I was doing, uh, a more, uh, conventional, you know, trying to be the, you know, canons of journalism type, type of journalist. But I'd say of of the people who were journalists, I probably was one of the closest to Harvey, although [01:09:00] not as close as the friends, because ultimately I was a journalist. So you politicians only gonna trust a journalist so far, you don't know the secret plans because they got to be kept secret. You don't know some of the insider stuff and and so forth. So, um, you know, lots of lots of, uh, one on one and, you know, like, long car rides. Actually, I remember the last long, long conversation I had with Harvey was in Jan. [01:09:30] In June of 1978. He was supervisor. It was a year after the Hillsborough murder that I referred to before we both attended a nu-. A plaque was unveiled to him. He was a He was a gardener in a city park, and they were unveiling a plaque on the first anniversary of his death out there. And Harvey was there. I was there, covering it. Um, the Bay Times was between. It was in its between [01:10:00] issues number one and two, or between two and three. And, um, Harvey had some feedback on what he thought was good in the paper and what was bad. And, um, he said, Oh, I'm going to a concerned Republicans for individual rights, which became the Log Cabin Republican Club. I'm going to AC RCRIR meeting downtown. Uh, I can drive you back to Castro as we were driving. He said, you know, you wanna come to this meeting with me. It wasn't anything I was likely to [01:10:30] cover. He said you should You should know these people. Even if you don't agree with them, You should, you know, find out what they're all about and everything. But we had a long It was a half an hour car ride and talked about the newspaper politics. This that the other thing, just he and I completely off the record, by definition or by specific agreement. And that's, you know. So, um yeah, but But in terms of the audio, the audio, the long audio recording with Harvey Milk, that's [01:11:00] there is, um, by Paul Avery, I think who was a straight journalist from Sacramento who worked for for at the time. And then there are some other bits and pieces that came from Larry Bens. Uh, but other than his appearances, I would go out and tape events rather than just do studio interviews. [01:11:30] I would go out and tape events a little bit before the studio moved to Oakland once it moved to Oakland. I did a lot more because with a six o'clock in the morning time slot and the studio across the bay, it was sometimes hard to get people to go to the studio for studio interviews. So I started doing many more field interviews and event taping. Uh, also, as the show developed an audience book, publicists heard about it. So it became [01:12:00] a regular stop for queer novelists to do a long interview. And, uh, I surprised a lot of them by having read the books instead of just having read the Read the material, although actually one of the things I used to do. I always used to hate it when I listened to interviews and even unintentionally, where the interviewer would tip off some secret from late in the book. Uh, [01:12:30] not by saying what happens, but just from tone of it. So I if if we were a novel like that and and often they were, I would sometimes deliberately stop one or two chapters from the end so that I wasn't hyper informed relative to the listener of the show, and I would let the author? No, that this is based. I haven't completed the book because [01:13:00] I don't want to ruin anything for so also in your answer, II. I tell him this ahead of time. You know, off air that I've read all of the last two chapters. We don't want to blow it for any of the people who are listening. So, um, other highlights. Let's see. II. I actually I got a one on one interview with John Anderson when he was an independent, running for president in 1980. Uh, and he was one of the first national first presidential candidates [01:13:30] to actively solicit the LGBT vote and deal with not just with radio, but deal with with our newspapers and so forth. And I had a 15 minute one on one with him. He didn't come to the studio. It was in a a hotel hotel room, you know, but sitting at a at a table with a tape recorder on and one on one and and even his advanced people were like off at the edge of the room. I would I would have expected more hovering these days. Of course, you'd get [01:14:00] lots of it and hand signals and people holding up cards and whatever. Um, during the 1979 mayor's race in San Francisco, this was the mayor's race came in November of 1979 6 months after the white Knight riots. The OK Harvey Mook was assassinated in November of 78 when the killer, Dan White, got off on a very lenient manslaughter charge that led to only five years in jail. There was [01:14:30] a riot in San Francisco. Six months after that was the mayoral election where we were going to elect a mayor for the next four years. There were already two main candidates emerging Quentin Copp and Dianne Feinstein, who was the acting mayor who got elected by the board to fill out Mayor Mosconi. Remaining term Mayor Mosconi being the mayor who got shot the same day as Harvey Mill. Like 10 minutes before or something, and it looked like it was going [01:15:00] to be. And neither one of them, Dianne Feinstein, had had some friendliness towards the LGBT community but was distancing herself for I don't know, to widen her base or I don't know exactly what and, uh, David Scott, who was in city politics, gay Realtor. Uh, he was on the He was chair of the Board of Permanent Appeals, deliberately decided [01:15:30] to run in that election. And there are There are a few other candidates besides the two I mentioned in order to force a, um, a runoff. That is, if no candidate gets an absolute majority, there's a runoff between the top two candidates and that he wound up with about 10% of the vote. It forced the runoff. There were the only two candidates left. There's this huge chunk of votes that they both needed. [01:16:00] So they both needed to campaign in the LGBT community, and I did half hour interviews with both of them. Quentin Cop came to the studio. Dianne Feinstein was a little bit busy, so I went to her office and did it in the mayor's office. The mayor's office is this gorgeous oak panelled 1910 Civic. Uh, it's It's very with the with Franklin D. Roosevelt's [01:16:30] desk is the mayor's desk, and it's really impressive. And she, you know, the mayor. Mayors of San Francisco have learned how to use physical office as a anyway, so I remember doing the interview there, Uh, and so those two interviews were half hour ones, which we actively promoted in my newspaper column got actively promoted on case. And, uh, political columnists wrote about the [01:17:00] fact that either that it was about to happen or took clips from it after the fact that it had happened. Um, because it was a It was a key event of, like, each half hour, one on one interviews with both of them. So, yeah, I'd say those are the political memorable ones, at least this far out. And that whole sequence I'm just thinking, going back to To Harvey Milk that whole sequence of his assassination, the case, the riots. You've caught [01:17:30] some amazing actuality. Some location of the riots, for instance. Um, yeah, I was at City Hall and I was I was at City Hall on the day of the assassinations. About a half an hour later. I did not know that they had happened. Uh, and I was doing something else, and I wasn't even carrying audio equipment. Um, because why was I not carrying audio equipment? Oh, because I've been pitching [01:18:00] an article at New West magazine that morning, and then I made another stop and then I went to City Hall and there was a all of these hub hub outside which I thought was just a demonstration either in favour of Dan White or against Dan White. I got after I heard I actually heard the news from a TV reporter who was at the back of his van doing a stand up of what had just happened that Mayor, Mayor Mosconi and Harvey Milk had both been shot [01:18:30] and killed. And I rushed into City Hall. Uh, I got there. Wait a minute. I did have my audio equipment because I remember interviewing people unless I went home and got it. No, I was I did have my audio equipment because it was gonna be a Board of Supervisors meeting that afternoon, and I usually plugged in. But anyway, by the time I got there, I ran into City Hall. I phoned the radio station. I said him at City [01:19:00] Hall. They said, Larry Bens is on his way. Uh, get what you can get. And I was taping stuff during the afternoon and everybody put their tape in and, you know, brought the tape in. It wasn't one of those, like, I mean, you could set up phone lines and stuff, but it was really the days of you brought your tape to the station and stuff got edited together. Um, Ben Sky's Bens covered the riot [01:19:30] much better than I did, because when the riot occurred, I was again dealing with print. That afternoon I was over in Berkeley. I had just turned in an article to the Berkeley barb, explaining why if there were a lenient verdict, there was a likelihood of a riot because the verdict hadn't happened yet. And while I was in the office, the news came that the verdict had come through and that it was for manslaughter. [01:20:00] And so the barb staff also rushed into the city to cover it. But I So I was. I was there without any audio. Uh, Sky was there with audio, and it was his audio that I cut into. Now, Now you've got to remember that the fall of 78 is the period during which the gay life was not on. [01:20:30] It went off, and it was a June 78 was the end was often It started again in January. So by the time January started by by the time the assassination was old news. But when the riots happened in May, uh, I did a half an hour special show called Black Night, White Knight, Black Dish or the ultimate last fag joke. And the reason for that is one of the people [01:21:00] who worked at Case and a wonderful journalist called Skop used to do a show called The Ultimate Last News Show, which involved lot of lot of actualities, natural sound, wild sound, um, music and rock and roll music all mixed in in this sort of very idiosyncratic documentary style called the Ultimate Last New Show. So mine was the ultimate last fag joke. And using using [01:21:30] scooper's style of mixing in actualities and narration, rock and roll music, uh, multiple tracking all sorts of much more produced than we ordinarily would do. Um, and White Knight was the name of the riot because of Dan White, uh, black dish, as in black as in a black humour, you know, really not black as an African American but black, as in [01:22:00] noir, um, and put together what was about a 25 minute piece on that that pretty much we ran, we ran it every year on the anniversary of the riot. And, uh, the interesting thing about that here's a little back story. A friend of mine who is the Terence O'Flaherty, who is the TV critic at The San Francisco Chronicle At the time, Terrence thought it was good enough that it should be submitted [01:22:30] for a DuPont Award, which is the National Broadcast Awards, Um, which was significant because he was on the DuPont jury. He probably would have had to recuse himself, but he had a reading of. This is the sort of thing that they might like, or you should at least submit it. The station director. I did all of the work to get the nomination, and the station director didn't want to send it on to nominate it. Supposedly, it never got done [01:23:00] by just getting lost in the shuffle. But I think it was a political inaction on his part. Who was a station director who was not very comfortable with LGBT people or issues at the time, not the programme director, but the the station director and the same one who actually once over recorded one of my shows before it got on the air. So, anyways, I don't know if that [01:23:30] Yeah, in terms of wild sound and the riots, That's one of the things that you you've mentioned a number of times is is the recording equipment you you took out and, um, earlier you showed me literally. It's a suitcase of of material. Did you have to carry that suitcase with you when you went into recordings? Um, if I would carry it, for instance, if I were going to tape, uh, a banquet programme or an awards programme or, uh, [01:24:00] hearings at City Hall or the SB to clubs, Uh, meeting and having interesting speakers because I never knew because they'd be in different halls and all that, and it would give me a A big variety of of, uh, things to connect of wires and cables that I could connect with no matter what their setup was. If I were going to City Hall, uh, I eventually I would only [01:24:30] carry the microphone, the recorder and two cables, one for the preferred plug-in part ports and and one just in case. Those are all full, a way I could piggyback off of one of the other ones. So if I knew the situation. If I knew the electronics where I was going and was gonna go into a moult board I I only had to take what I needed. But if I didn't know, I'd take everything so [01:25:00] But I didn't. It wasn't as if I was like walking around the city looking for ordinary audio with something that big, because, you know, it weighs a few pounds and and all that, But yeah, that that that case went quite a few places. It's, uh Well, it was a small suitcase. One of the other areas that that we haven't touched on is the whole, um, AIDS epidemic. And I was really kind of blown away and also touched [01:25:30] by, um, the audio interviews you did with with Bobby and and some of the physicians at the time. Can you describe what it was like actually, at the time, discovering, you know, with the rest, obviously with the rest of the community. But actually, you know, paint a picture for me of of kind of discovering what this thing was and and and and what it was doing to the community. Well, at the point of the Bobby Campbell interview It hadn't. [01:26:00] It hadn't done its worst yet. Um, Bobby Campbell was a friend from the Butterfly Brigade, which was a an anti violent street patrol. And, um, he called me in the November of 81. I had just resumed editorship of the Sentinel, and, uh, and he told me that he had Capac sarcoma. AIDS wasn't named for a whole another year yet. Um, and after, you know, [01:26:30] expressing my regret and support and commiserating for him. And we went on for a long time, and he told me the whole story of how he had come to discover this. I said, would you be interested in writing anything for the newspaper? And he said, I thought you weren't gonna ask. It took you so long. That's why he had called me. I just felt it was so personal. But anyway, so he started a column in the newspaper, which was initially called Gay Cancer Journal, because there was no name for it yet. And, uh, that was in the fall [01:27:00] of 1981 and I decided, uh, in late November that I wanted to do a whole lot to to cover it and also cover other gay health issues. And so in December, I taped a show that appeared in January of 1982 half of which was Bobby Campbell telling his personal story, and the other half of which were [01:27:30] two physicians, uh, Marcus Conant, who was Bobby's immediate personal physician and who could not appear with him in an audio interview or any interview at the time because of patient physician confidentiality where they were going to be discussing this. I mean, they could have gone and discussed politics in the same interview, but they couldn't be. Bobby was gonna be discussing his case. He was going to be discussing a disease that Bobby had. So and [01:28:00] and also Paul Volberding, uh, who was doing some of the the initial research. Conant was, uh, an epidemiologist. And since the first presenting symptoms were skin lesions, he was one of the early experts Uh, Volberding, Uh, field was, uh did I say he was an epidemiologist? I meant to say he was a dermatologist. Conan Volberding was an epidemiologist and virologist. Um and, [01:28:30] um, the interesting thing is they had phoned me because they were having trouble getting word out. The gay media was a little bit reluctant because the owners were pub were the publishers. And they thought, This is not gonna be good for the community. So there's a little bit of the plot of IBS, the an enemy of the people where the doctor who knows that the well is contaminated [01:29:00] is shushed up by the people in the town who don't want to lose the resort business. That's a very bad gloss of an enemy of the people, but it sort of works. Um, and they they both approached me. And so that those two who eventually was hard to get interviews with by two years later, let alone exclusive interviews where they came to the studio and talked for half an hour. Um, it was during that interview [01:29:30] that Conant said, We don't know. It's behaving like a virus, which is very bad news, because up until then everyone was hoping maybe it was a bad batch of poppers. Maybe it was a bad batch of something else. They were hoping that it was a toxin rather than a poison, or rather, that it was a toxin or poison rather than a contagion. Because if we're a contagion We didn't even know that it was gonna be a contagion that had an extremely [01:30:00] long latency period and just how bad it was gonna be. But it also meant that a lot of people were already infected. Um, but during that interview, he said that we don't it it the the pattern of transmission looks like a virus, and we don't know what virus it is. And at the time, the main suspect was still CMV, which turned out just to be an opportunistic infection, he said. But [01:30:30] we do know that if it's a virus, that a condom will stop it because a condom will hold water. And a water molecule is much smaller than the smallest known viruses. So even if it's not CMV, which is a big mother of a virus, why it's called mega virus cytomegalovirus, it will hold it. So we're saying that it would be a really good thing for [01:31:00] people to start using condoms, and that appeared on Case San in January of 82 and I ran it in my newspaper column, um and is as near as I know, one of the first in the media things of people saying start using condom guys. Um, but it was It was I mean, the middle of the eighties, 82 through 82 [01:31:30] all the way through 92 in fact, were just dreary because it just got worse and worse and worse. And people were going to two or three memorials in a week of people who had died. And you were still hearing about people who were coming down with the disease, who'd been infected way before, um, or before anybody knew anything about it. And also, as we learned later, people were not as compliant with the safe sex guidelines, sometimes because [01:32:00] they were too vague. Sometimes even if they weren't too vague. People just under the influence of lust couldn't completely comply all the time. And also, um, condoms do sometimes break. I mean, so there are all sorts of there can be all sorts of, uh, treatment failures in in prevention, prevention failures. But it was it was a very dreary time. Um, I once, [01:32:30] once, they said it looked like a virus, and they thought that the transmission period was six months was bad enough. But then when they started, I sort of had I had studied, uh, population as a sociologist had studied, uh, done work on populations and knew a little bit about epidemiology. Not professionally, but, um, I had a pretty good sense of how terrible it was gonna be statistically, [01:33:00] not how terrible it was gonna be emotionally, though. Um, in the early eighties, I was chided by friends who thought I was being alarmist when some of them were sick and nearing death. One of them told me that he thought that, uh, I had raised the alarm too loudly, which struck me as slightly unusual. Excuse me, sir. There's gonna be there's a fire. You should leave, You know, I mean, without panicking people, an alarm should be an alarm. [01:33:30] Um, so, yeah, I don't know. It's like it was bad. And in 92 my partner died in 92. He had no symptoms. Well, actually, the first he had been infected by a boyfriend from the summer before. He met me and then had some vague symptoms the next year that disappeared. And then there were no virus tests yet the virus hadn't been isolated [01:34:00] and then 10 years later, got sick and died in five months, Uh, so that and I was negative. And when the test came and I discovered I was negative, I thought that's really unusual because I'd certainly taken enough risks even in the pre safe sex days, even though I became one of the early safe sex advocates and and the and the radio show pushed on that. In fact, when it even when it wasn't the subject, it was often [01:34:30] the subject of public service announcements at the end of the show reminding people and telling people where they could get the information. What impact did it have on Bobby being so public, uh, and and kind of coming out on air like that? Well, Bobby was completely out in everyday life, and, um, just slightly flamboyant [01:35:00] enough that most people who knew him would know it. And he was out on the job. He was a nurse, Um, and, um, he had the newspaper column, which he was writing regularly, which I edited, but pretty much let him write what he wanted to write about. We had discussions. I made suggestions of topics, but he got to decide what he was going to say about them. Um, the radio show made his voice well known. Then he [01:35:30] was on the cover of Newsweek with, uh, the I have gay cancer. Uh, he called himself the AIDS poster boy. Um, the part of him that was a nurse, it sort of combined his nurse and his gay politics into. He knew from the beginning that this potentially could kill him. And he lasted longer than he thought he was going to. Um, But it combined [01:36:00] the gay politics and the nursing in this big public education campaign in which, Yeah, I think to some extent, being the AIDS poster boy gave him some secondary compensation. Like, you know, if you're a kid and that's the term that psychologists learn, if you're a kid and you're sick, you're sick. But you get all this extra attention from Mom and you maybe even get to stay home from school. So there's some secondary compensation there. Um, which, [01:36:30] you know, I don't think he minded having that attention. He he liked it a lot, but, um, it was deserved because he was, you know, he was He was out there and taken some risks with being that public about it. Uh, but it. It served a valid public health communications political standpoint because he was not only getting out the information to people and also trying to remove the [01:37:00] the stigma and the shame. But it was also politically important in getting the political support for there to be, uh, programmes and social support and research and non stigmatisation, including non stigmatisation by insurance companies. So So it was. He essentially worked politically at what became literally the fight of his life for the last, uh, almost four years, I think. [01:37:30] And then one of the things I covered there was a big public memorial in Castro Street. And we covered that, too, because I thought that was important. And so now, all these years later, when decades, in fact. Decades later. Yes, Um, what are your reflections on on those radio days? Radio days and those voices? Um, I don't listen to them that often, but I did a bunch last year when? [01:38:00] When the when it went on onto the onto, uh when it got digitised and is on the historical society thing. Um, I'm I I'm mostly amazed by how much explaining was necessary, and I probably delved it I probably not delved into it. I probably indulged in that in a little just because in thinking about it gotten back into that mindset because, [01:38:30] um, San Francisco wasn't rejecting, but it still needed a lot of education about how we were all part of the same community together and so forth. So that so There was a lot of explaining and trying to create equivalences and, um, an underlying subtext of like, not advocacy, [01:39:00] except for the principle of no double standards that this is just the same as it would be, Um, and, um, and in fact, actually, some of the very early shows we did were on domestic partner rights and domestic partner ordinances, which is another thing that that I'm also amazed by how far we've come in that, you know, a couple of years ago when I got laid off [01:39:30] from a job and I was 58 or 59 I've forgotten something like that and, uh, had a talk with a career counsellor because it was just the whole company was shutting down. So we all got to talk to career counsellors. And I said, You know, in this town, I'm more concerned about age discrimination than anti gay discrimination. You know, I said, besides, if I If I put my resume in the closet, half my experience goes away. If I, you know, it [01:40:00] just looks like all of that's not gonna be there. And I want it to be there. Um, but on the other hand, I'm worried about age discrimination, and I think, uh so that things have moved along much. In a way, it's both much further than I thought they might have so fast, although the 30 years seems incredibly short in retrospect. But on the other hand, there's still, you know, you get outside of San Francisco or get outside San Francisco County, [01:40:30] the the centre of the Bay Area, you know, San Francisco Marin, uh, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Silicon Valley, the East Bay. You get outside of that and cross the hills. And, uh, there's still a lot of the old, uh, homophobia. And even if it's hidden, even if there's legal protections, kids are still bullied in schools. Uh, people still getting beaten up, probably [01:41:00] people are denied promotions. Uh, LGBT couple relationships not being given full the full honour or credit that they that they would to a marriage in the workplace. Um, so you know, the work's not done, but, you know, it was there, and I was you know, it it was sort of fun to be a media pioneer. I mean, I was also a media pioneer because when I was working [01:41:30] in the mainstream media, um, well, starting at case N, Actually, it's interesting because a case N even though in 1978 or nine. Somewhere long around there. So probably in 79. There was a Valentine's Party. And even though there were out people there were, there were there was gay DJ S that people didn't know were gay. There were gay DJ. [01:42:00] The people sort of knew it was gay. The people Larry Lee didn't hide it at work but had never actually come out on air or anything like that. But the station had a show called The Gay Life. So there was not, you know, and and it was a real rock and roll. It was real hip to have gay friends and all that, but I took a date to the company's Valentine's Day party and discovered that I was the [01:42:30] first of all, of the gay employees there to take a same sex date to a company party, even a Valentine's Day party, although that was sort of the perfect one to integrate it. That fall, I took the same guy to the Christmas dinner, which is very formal, and that was the one that made waves not negative waves. But, like people, five or six other gay employees said, [01:43:00] I just never done that before. But now you know. And so the next year everybody who was out at the station had a date at the Christmas party instead of coming alone or inviting, you know, the beard to to cover things up or whatever. So, um, so I was a pioneer there, and then at KRON, I was explicitly hired because of my knowledge of gay politics [01:43:30] and news, and I had done some consulting work for them. Uh, RN STV station. Um, and they were trying to They they wanted to have roots in all of the communities, Uh, even so, and even though there was so even though they were doing outreach to make sure that they were covering this because they wanted to be a better news station. Not for, you know, not political correctness for journalistic. Excellent. Um, no one there had yet [01:44:00] taken, Even though they're out gay employees. No one there had yet started taking same sex dates to company parties. And I started that there, too. And it's just sort of like I mean, to me, It's one of the the measures of how we integrated a workplace is, is what's the most formal social event of the year at your company. And can you take a date of the same sex? If not, [01:44:30] then the place is not integrated yet. I mean, because it's one thing like, Oh, yeah, well, we hang out or, you know, they know I'm gay. They know my partner. He comes and picks me up at the office so they know who he is. Um, I never although it KON because when I started it, I never actually replaced it. I had a picture of my partner, but it was because it it was a group picture of a bunch of us, including him, which I decided I'd start with that and I I wound up keeping [01:45:00] it there. So, uh, that's another thing is like, Can you have the picture on the The picture on the desk is another. The picture on the desk, the company party. Um, but I had already worked at a at a radio news service before I went to, and I worked at a radio news service where the boss was getting married and he invited us as a couple to the thing. So that's a that one. That was a much smaller companies you know, much easier [01:45:30] to deal with. So yeah, I mean, in integrating and And also when I started at and some one of the, uh, a graphics production designer came over and he introduced himself and he said, You know, I thought I was out at this station until, like, send out the welcoming letter that welcoming to the staff, which was based on my resume, and they said, That's you know, because it was just all you know, I had worked in this this, uh, the radio, the gay life radio show and [01:46:00] the editor of the Sentinel And this that the other thing. And he said you just made it a lot easier for much of the rest of us, but so um So there's the workplace issues as well as the fair coverage issues, and I was also hasn't even come up. But, uh, NLGJ a the coffee cups National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. I was a founding member, meaning I joined in the first year, uh, back. [01:46:30] You know, back when we had the meetings were held around the kitchen table and it was national by phone in terms of Yeah. So, um yeah, it's been I've enjoyed doing it. And, um, I mean, to some extent, was there a price for pioneering? If I'd been in the closet, could I have gotten if I'd been in the closet at that point? Could I have gotten other jobs and moved along farther? And would I have more money in my retirement [01:47:00] accounts? Probably, yes. Would I have been as happy doing it along the way? Probably not. I would definitely would have been unhappy. I mean, there was a point at which I was 27 when I came out of the closet, and it was a question of coming out of the closet to myself, and then I decided I'm not gonna no energy in hiding this anymore. it is not worth it. You know, I've There's been eight years that I should have been out at least that I should [01:47:30] have been out of the closet, you know? And I'm not gonna be in the closet. In my social life, I'm not gonna be in the closet at work. So, uh, it was a personal choice, and I'm glad I made it.
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