Introduction

The intersection of media and GLBTQ history has been a fruitful topic of exploration by scholars, and has found its way into many classrooms. Scholars have explored queer aspects of film, broadcasting, comic books and popular music, and many colleges and universities in the US and around the world offer courses that engage with gender and sexuality in popular culture. By and large, the academic study of queer media history has been about the unearthing and exploration of queer images in media, focusing on issues of visibility, queer readings, and queer cultural production. Missing from many of these accounts is any sustained consideration of queer voices in radio, including the role of radio in the GLBTQ social movements and community building. Radio remains one of the most understudied media, both in terms of its content, but especially in the time after TV, its social role. While there have been some limited studies of radio and the GLBTQ voices (Johnson and Keith, 2001; Johnson, Hoy, and Ziegler 1995; DeShazor, 2018; Matthew Murray, 2002), including most recently a symposium on LGBTQ+ radio and audio media in the Journal of Radio and Audio Media (2018), that have begun to uncover the significant and highly localized role of radio in negotiating queer identities and politics in the 20^thand 21^stcenturies, the fragmented and localized nature of radio and only relatively recent sustained scholarly attention to the medium means that there is still a great deal of work to be done.

We argue that locating, archiving, cataloging, and studying GLBTQ radio is a vital project for scholars in their roles as researchers and instructors. First, attention to radio has the power to upend traditional narratives of media and GLBTQ social movements, enhancing our understanding of both. Second, bringing the sounds of the past into our classrooms allows for students to experience the voices of everyday historical actors making sense of their lived experience – connecting survival, activism, joy, and pain to contemporary struggles for political, social, and cultural recognition of existing and emerging identities. Thus, researching and teaching the history of queer community radio production offers the chance to more fully feature the voices and everyday experiences of being queer across time and space, while also creating a pedagogical opportunity for students to understand the complexities of broadcast institutional structures and their position in local communities. Doing so, however, presents numerous challenges. This paper looks at the specific case of the Pacifica Radio program The New Symposium. We present you with both the history of this show to demonstrate the significance of Pacifica’s history in facilitating a space for queer community radio productions, as well as several assignment ideas for incorporating queer broadcast history into a variety of courses including queer popular culture, introduction to media studies, media industries, or the cultural history of broadcasting in the United States.

The Queer Radio Research Project & the History of New Symposium

The Queer Radio Research Project (QRRP) was initiated by Brian DeShazor in 2017 to research the print and audio holdings of Pacifica Radio, create a Pacifica GLBTQ timeline, identify holdings in existing collections, merge records, assess descriptions and access, seek independent/private collections, and publish a user guide and aggregate database. The story of Pacifica radio starts in 1946 with the Pacifica Foundation’s flagship station KPFA 94.1 FM in Berkeley, CA. Founded by Lewis Hill and a small group of like-minded friends and radio professionals, KPFA was first listener-sponsored non-commercial radio station in the United States. Hill’s innovation was to create a new communications model, supported by its audience rather than traditional sponsors, providing space for creativity and self-expression, a platform for unpopular perspectives, and a refuge for artistic experimentation with radio. KPFA began broadcasting on April 15, 1949. By 1977 Pacifica had grown into a network of five stations, including WBAI in New York City, home of the New Symposium.

The QRRP began the painstaking efforts of researching Pacifica’s station folio program guides (1949-2000) to identify GLBTQ program listings followed by searching Pacifica Radio Archives public access database records for evidence of existing tapes in analog reel to reel tape or cassette formats (DeShazor, 2019). The QRRP also looks for evidence in other repositories and private collections in an effort to assess the condition and accessibility of Pacifica’s GLBTQ broadcast history. A highlight is The New Symposium, one of the most important GLBTQ series in radio history that is only partially available to scholars and historians. From July 17, 1968 to July 21,1969, WBAI-FM Drama & Literature Department head Baird Searles and Charles Pitts hosted a weekly half hour series they titled The New Symposium (Pacifica Foundation, 1968a), devoted to issues affecting the (mostly gay male) homosexual community in New York City. It was promoted with the following description:

The last episode of the 26 part series was broadcast in July 21, 1969, just eight days before the flashpoint Stonewall uprising. An additional seven episodes were produced under the title, The New Symposium II, presumably to address the new wave of media interest in GLBTQ culture and emerging activist organizations.

Several of these episodes have been digitized and are available for public listening at the Internet Archive (archive.org). Episodes discuss in a frank, open, and thoughtful manner a number of topics pertinent to negotiating primarily gay male life in the late 1960s. Here we include a list of episode titles. Fuller descriptions can be found on the website.

Current available episodes of New Symposium:

• Homosexual Meeting Places” (Original Broadcast August 28, 1968). https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3827.07
• Interview with a Hustler,” (Original Broadcast 30 September, 1968): https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3827.11
• Religion and the Homosexual,” (Original Broadcast July 22, 1969): https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3827.31
• New Symposium II: The Young Lesbian,” (Original Broadcast August 21, 1969): https://archive.org/details/pra-BB3827.30

2019 marked the the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, and several media outlets have sought out historical GLBTQ radio recordings for retrospectives on queer history in the United States. However, beyond short sound bites, recordings of The New Symposium and other Pacifica GLBTQ programs, such as The Fruit Punch Collective and IMRU, reveal the role of community media in self-representation and the ways in which queer local radio functioned as a cultural forum for members of the queer community before and after the Stonewall uprising. The Radio Preservation Task Force and the the QRRP are working to secure funding to digitize, catalogue, transcribed and make recordings of The New Symposium for scholars to research and incorporate into their media studies curriculum.

Incorporating New Symposium in Your Curriculum

The New Symposium is ideal for incorporation into courses on queer media and popular culture. Pairing the program with a documentary, such as The Celluloid Closet, or texts on GLBTQ media history (Benshoff and Griffin, Streitmatter, Gross). The program can also be paired with Chapter 2 and 5 of Sexual Identities and the Media: An Introduction (Hilton-Morrow and Battles, 2015), which discuss the role of media in GLBTQ history and offer frameworks for thinking about GLBTQ cultural production. In all cases, the program allows for both complicating the history of gay media in the 1960s, by demonstrating how activists used media to form community, but also allows students to hear the queer voices speak for themselves, rather than being spoken for by mainstream media. Indeed, many of the issues discussed, including negotiating daily life and tensions over the definitions of identity, remain salient. However, it is our position our position that queer radio history is a part of the complexity of our media environment, and should be taught throughout cinema and media studies curriculum, beyond the confines of courses explicitly marked as “queer” or “gender” studies. Here we also offer suggestions for incorporating the program into media studies intro courses, industry courses, and history courses.

In both introductory and industry courses, the New Symposium recordings is paired with David K. Dunaway’s 2005 article “Pacifica Radio and Community Broadcasting” from The Radio Journal and taught in a unit on non-commercial media. We have used it as a case study, usually following a week or day on public broadcasting, to consider how community media like public access television or community radio is distinct from public media. In a course on Media Industries, we have used the second edition of the textbook Understanding Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2016) by Amanda Lotz and Timothy Havens, and incorporate a section on non-commercial media after teaching chapter three of this textbook, which provides an overview of commercial and non-commercial mandates and how these mandates shape industrial structures. We have found these materials can create a productive discussion of the ways in which non-commercial and local community radio can serve marginalized communities, and also, how content is produced differently from commercial network radio and television.

We have also taught this material in a US media history courses that use the fourth edition of Michele Hilmes’ textbook Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting of the United States. This is again used as a case study, this time situated within the context of radio and television histories of the 1960s and ‘70s. It pairs nicely with the ninth chapter of Only Connect, as this provides a macro overview of broadcasting from 1965 through 1975, and covers the Public Broadcasting Act and radio and television in the midst of shifting social movements. We have again assigned either the Dunaway article or Victor Pickard’s “A Social Democratic Vision of Media: Toward a Radical Pre-History of Public Broadcasting” with one recording to consider the role of community radio more specifically, a social democratic framework for media more generally and how each relates to and allows space for queer activism and production. Finally, as Hilmes’ begins her textbook with a chapter on the nature of historiography and the politics of narrating stories of the past, we also recommend doing group projects that curate a specific episode and present both its production history and content, and argue why this should be preserved in archival collection, demonstrating what each group’s specific episode tells us about the history of radio.

Bibliography

• Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2004.
• DeShazor, Brian. “Queer Radio: Pacifica Radio History.” Journal of Radio and Audio Media,25, no. 2 (2018), 253-265.
• Dunaway, David K.. “Pacifica Radio and Community Broadcasting,” Journal of Radio Studies, 12 no. 2 (2005), 240 - 255.
• Hilton-Morrow, Wendy and Kathleen Battles. Sexual Identities and the Media: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2015.
• Johnson, Phyllis, Chuck Hoy and Dhyana Ziegler. “A Case Study of KGAY: The Rise and Fall of the First Gay and Lesbian Radio Network.” Journal of Radio Studies, 3, no. 1 (1995), 162-81.
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• Lotz, Amanda and Timothy Havens. Understanding Media Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Murray, Matthew. “The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt Morals: Regulation and Irregular Sexuality in Golden Age Radio Comedy.” In The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, edited by Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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