Saving Houston’s LGBTQ history through thousands of hours of radio archives
For years, hundreds of fragile cassette tapes sat quietly aging in a storage locker in Houston, Texas. Each plastic case contained hours of radio shows, made for and by LGBTQ people.
The first shows aired in the mid-1970s. They continued, off and on, for more than 30 years -- a period that included the AIDS crisis, the women’s liberation movement and the rise of LGBT civil rights. A pair of archivists, Emily Vinson and Bethany Scott, have been working on preserving the programs, thousands of hours of them, online.
“Houston is not maybe the first place you think when you think LGBTQ history,” Vinson says during a meeting in the main library at the University of Houston. In her black outfit and chic glasses, she looks like an archivist from central casting. “You think maybe New York or San Francisco,” she continues. “But a lot was happening here. I mean, you can imagine what it meant to be on the radio in 1977, identifying as a gay person.”
The shows aired on KPFT (90.1), Houston’s Pacifica station. One of them, Wilde ‘n’ Stein (named for Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein) started in 1975 and ran through the early 1990s. A late night show, After Hours, ran from 1987 until the early 2000s.
In one June 1979 episode of Wilde ‘n’ Stein, you can hear prominent activists Larry Bagneris and Charles Law reflecting on their experiences as Black gay men in Houston. Then, an interview with Houston resident Tony Lazada, the former manager of the Stonewall Inn. Lazada was on the scene when the famous Stonewall riots broke out in New York’s Greenwich Village. Ten years later, he was running a Houston gay bar called Dirty Sally’s.
“I run a clean club,” Lazada informed his interviewer. “I don’t allow any dope. I don’t allow any sexual things happening in our place. And I don’t allow drag queens to come in. I’m friendly with everyone. It’s just I’m trying to run a legit club where I don’t have any problems like I had in New York. I don’t want another Stonewall.”
A Houston city ordinance at that time banned “a person from appearing in public dressed with the intent to disguise his or her sex as that of the opposite sex.” Police used the ordinance to harass and arrest LGBTQ people, especially drag queens, butch lesbians and transgender people.
Over the years, the producers and hosts of these radio shows brought their listeners live street coverage of Pride parades, music that celebrated LGBTQ experiences and interviews with city council members, activists, local arts luminaries, and public health officials. Because it was on the radio, often late at night, closeted people could listen quietly and discreetly, without the fear of discovery that printed material might bring.
Carl Han, a young Vietnamese-American, listened to the station’s LGBT programming at the lowest possible volume, as he told the radio show After Hours in 1992.
“That’s how I discovered the Montrose [LGBT] community,” he said. “At the age of 15, I hit upon KPFT one night and turned it down real low so no one can hear.” He would go on to be a leading local activist, who at the time of the broadcast was the secretary of Asians and Friends, a community group serving Houston’s LGBTQ Asian Americans.
Such content came as a revelation to 20-year-old Andrea Hoang. As an undergraduate at the University of Houston, one of her campus jobs was to help digitize and transcribe the shows. Hoang, who identifies as queer, was thrilled to discover the voices of Asian-American activists, including Han and After Hours host Vivian Lee, in broadcasts from before she was born.
“They had so many people of color coming onto this show and spearheading these local movements,” she marvels, adding that she also loved learning about the vibrant LGBT music played on the programs so much, she made this Spotify playlist honoring it.
The digitization of this audio history, says Vinson, would not be possible without three Houstonians who safeguarded the cassettes for so many years. Judy Reeves cofounded the Gulf Coast Archive and Museum of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender History. JD Doyle maintains an extensive website documenting local LGBT history. Jimmy Carper was a longtime host and producer of After Hours. (He died of complications from HIV in 2014, at the age of 66.)
“They understood how important it was and they saved it,” Vinson says. “Radio is not the kind of thing that just gets saved by itself. Nothing disintegrated on us, thankfully. We’re very lucky, especially in Houston, because the environment is against us here. Humidity is like the enemy of audiotape.”
“That was part of the motivation for the project,” adds her co-archivist Bethany Scott. “If we aren't getting it off this these old carriers now, we might not have a chance to do it in the future. And we really focus on this as a part of Houston history. Listening to the recordings, hearing the themes that they talked about, it's not like some distant past.”
Transcript
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
For years, hundreds of old cassette tapes sat in a storage locker in Houston, Texas. What they held was, frankly, fabulous.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: We're now crossing over at Dunlevy (ph), and who's that cute man?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Laughter).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: That one and that one. I'll take either one of them, Charles (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Laughter).
MARTÍNEZ: That live coverage of a Pride parade was broadcast in the 1980s on a radio show for LGBTQ people. It started airing in Houston in the 1970s. The programming lasted more than three decades. This unique audio history is now online. NPR's Neda Ulaby has more.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Even archivist Emily Vinson at the University of Houston says this project, for some people, may come as a surprise.
EMILY VINSON: Houston is not maybe the first place you think when you think LGBTQ history. You think maybe New York or San Francisco. But a lot was happening here. I mean, you can imagine what it meant to be on the radio in 1977, identifying as a gay person.
(LAUGHTER)
ULABY: Here is a Black activist on the air in 1979. Larry Bagneris grew up in the Jim Crow South. He reflected on the evolution of the gay rights movement.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LARRY BAGNERIS: And what you see now is a cross-section of Chicanos and Blacks and even Vietnamese in the bars, in the political organizations...
ULABY: On that same broadcast, you'll hear an interview with the former manager of the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Ten years after the famous Stonewall riots, Tony Lazada was running a gay bar in Houston.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TONY LAZADA: I run a clean club.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah.
LAZADA: I don't allow any dope.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah.
LAZADA: I don't allow any sexual things happening in our place, and I don't allow drag queens to come in, which - I'm friendly with everyone. It's just that I'm trying to run a legit club where I don't have any problems like I had in New York. I don't want another Stonewall.
BETHANY SCOTT: How much? These are two boxes, but there's probably...
ULABY: In the university library, Vinson and her co-archivist, Bethany Scott, have digitized over 3,000 fragile cassette tapes...
VINSON: OK, so there's 30 years...
ULABY: ...Of several LGBTQ shows that aired on and off on the Pacifica station KPFT. They believe around 8,000 people listened to the shows in the 1990s, long before the internet was widespread.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Telephone number for the gay Hispanic caucus is 868...
ULABY: So a guy would read the contact information for local groups, sometimes for nearly 10 minutes of air time.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Gay Fathers, which meets at 3217 Fanon...
ULABY: These tapes were lent by some of the surviving people who made these radio programs and a local community archivist, who saved them in boxes.
SCOTT: This one that I grabbed out of the box is, like, live coverage of a Pride parade...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BUDDY JOHNSTON: Look at this, Jimmy - isn't this fabulous?
ULABY: ...From 1989.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Hi, baby.
(SOUNDBITE OF KISS)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Mmm - that was a nice kiss...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Thank you, thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: ...On parade day.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: Happy Gay Pride Day.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: How are you?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: I'm wonderful.
ULABY: The hosts, Jimmy Carper and Buddy Johnston, clearly relished giving a vicarious Pride experience to people who were too afraid or just unable to attend - so why deprive them of the fun of flirting outrageously with other people at the parade?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHNSTON: Hey, are you marching or are you just watching?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: I'm just strutting.
JOHNSTON: Whoo (ph).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: (Laughter).
JOHNSTON: Kids, I wish you could see what just walked away.
JIMMY CARPER: Whoa.
JOHNSTON: (Laughter).
CARPER: I mean, I don't think he can march. I - oh - (laughter) that's a big daddy.
JOHNSTON: He's one of the LoneStar nudists.
CARPER: Oh, I didn't know that. I don't know the man.
JOHNSTON: I'd like to - nevermind.
CARPER: Yes, I'll bet.
(LAUGHTER)
ULABY: Over decades, the radio shows took listeners from protests to parties to politics, through the AIDS crisis and the rise of LGBTQ civil rights.
VINSON: In the '90s, still, in Texas, there were antisodomy laws. And in Houston, there was an anti-cross-dressing ordinance...
ULABY: That was repealed, says Emily Vinson, in 1980. Back then, you could get fired for being openly gay. You could lose your housing, your children. The threat of violence was real.
VINSON: It was a very brave act to appear on the show, I think, especially in the early years.
ULABY: It was also brave to go on these Houston gay radio shows in the early 1990s, when this passed for a supportive, trans-friendly interview.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CARPER: You do not look like a man in a dress.
SARAH DEPALMA: I'm not.
ULABY: Sarah DePalma was a Houston transgender activist who started off schooling her own community.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DEPALMA: I used to pray for lightning to come down and correct me. I knew - oh, I guess I was 8 or 9 years old. I knew I should have been a girl. There was never much question that I should have been a girl. It was a - somebody upstairs thought it was a cosmic joke, I guess.
ANDREA HOANG: This is a part of the city and of my community that I just never knew.
ULABY: Andrea Hoang is 20 years old. As a student at the University of Houston, her job was to help digitize these old cassette tapes. She was thrilled to learn about Houston's Asian American LGBTQ activists out and behind the mics a decade before she was born...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CARL HAN: Hi. I'm Carl Han. I'm the secretary for Asians and Friends.
ULABY: ...And to hear their voices on an LGBTQ radio show when that was one of the few ways queer people could learn about their own communities.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HAN: Hopefully there are young Asian teenagers right now listening to this show at the very lowest volume possible, for fear of their parents finding out, 'cause that's how I discovered Montrose community at the age of 15. I hit upon KPFT one night, and I turned it down real low so no one can hear it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED RADIO HOST: And this is 90.1 FM, KPFT in Houston.
ULABY: It was not just closeted teenagers whose lives were changed by KPFT, says archivist Emily Vinson. When I asked about episodes she found especially memorable, she said this one.
VINSON: Buddy is reading a letter written by a man from San Francisco who had just, like, happened to catch the show when he was in Houston.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHNSTON: And it said...
(Reading) Dear friends - last week, I was visiting Houston. I turned on the radio at 3 a.m...
ULABY: The letter's from 1989.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHNSTON: (Reading)...And to my amazement, I heard your program recalling the history of gay liberation.
ULABY: We'll let KPFT host Buddy Johnston read the rest of it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHNSTON: (Reading) That voice of enlightenment in a city famous for its homophobia was very thrilling for me. You have my highest praise for your courage. I've now reached the age of 60. My early years were grim, hopeless and suicidal. If people like you had dared to speak out as role models, my life would have been positive and creative. Please do not give way to despair or burnout. It's so very important for those who are out there and haven't found their voices yet. My thanks and my love, signed, Alan Blackman (ph).
So Alan Blackman in San Francisco, my dear - this program is just for you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GLORY, GLORY")
LEAH ZICARI: (Singing) Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming out of queers. Homophobes have trampled on our rights. They've done so out of fear.
VINSON: You just get a sense for what it meant to the listeners to have someone there to share an experience that was oftentimes very difficult.
ULABY: Emily Vinson, archivist.
VINSON: The most amazing thing is that they understood how important it was, and they saved it, because radio is not the kind of thing that just gets saved by itself.
ULABY: No, it sure isn't - and neither are the hard-fought accomplishments of these people in Houston, Texas. They endure, not only in the civil rights and social acceptance of the LGBTQ people who follow them, but in their lively, funny, determined voices, preserved now online.
(SOUNDBITE OF LEAH ZICARI'S "GLORY, GLORY")
ULABY: Neda Ulaby, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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