University of Houston archivists rescue decades of local LGBTQ radio show episodes: NPR

An image from the 1984 Houston Pride parade. University of Houston archivists are working to archive 30 years of local LGBTQ radio programming.

JD Doyle

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JD Doyle

For years, hundreds of fragile cassette tapes have aged quietly in a storage locker in Houston, Texas. Each plastic box contained hours of radio shows, made for and by LGBTQ people.

The first shows aired in the mid-1970s. They continued on and off for more than 30 years – a period that included the AIDS crisis, the women’s liberation movement and the rise of LGBT civil rights. Two archivists, Emily Vinson and Bethany Scott, worked to preserve the programs, including thousands of hours, online.

“Houston may not be the first place you think of when you think of LGBTQ history,” Vinson said during a meeting at the University of Houston Main Library. In her black outfit and chic glasses, she looks like a central casting archivist. “You might be thinking of New York or San Francisco,” she continues. “But there was a lot going on here. I mean, you can imagine what it meant to be on the radio in 1977, identifying as gay.

The broadcasts were broadcast on KPFT (90.1), Houston’s Pacifica station. One of them, Wilde and Stein (named after Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein) began in 1975 and continued until the early 1990s. A late-night show, After hoursran from 1987 until the early 2000s.

In a June 1979 episode of Wilde and Stein, you can hear prominent activists Larry Bagneris and Charles Law reflect on their experiences as black gay men in Houston. Next, an interview with Houston resident Tony Lazada, former manager of the Stonewall Inn. Lazada was on site when the famous Stonewall Riots broke out in New York’s Greenwich Village. Ten years later, he ran a gay bar in Houston called Dirty Sally’s.

“I run a clean club,” Lazada told his interviewer. “I don’t allow any drugs. I do not allow any sexual activity in our home. And I don’t allow drag queens in. I am friendly with everyone. It’s just me trying to run a legitimate club where I don’t have problems like I had in New York. I don’t want another Stonewall.

At the time, a Houston city ordinance prohibited “any person from appearing in public dressed with the intent to disguise his or her sex as that of the opposite sex.” Police have used this ordinance to harass and arrest LGBTQ people, particularly drag queens, butch lesbians, and transgender people.

Over the years, the producers and hosts of these radio shows have brought their listeners live coverage of Pride parades, music celebrating 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, shut-ins could listen to it quietly and discreetly, without fear of being discovered by printed materials.

Carl Han, a young Vietnamese American, listened to the station’s LGBT programs 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. “When I was 15, I contacted KPFT one night and turned the volume down really low so no one could hear it.” He would go on to become a prominent local activist who, at the time of the show, was secretary of Asians and Friends, a community group serving LGBTQ Asian Americans in Houston.

Such content was a revelation for 20-year-old Andrea Hoang. As an undergraduate at the University of Houston, one of her on-campus duties was to help digitize and transcribe broadcasts. Hoang, who identifies as queer, was excited to discover the voices of Asian-American activists, including Han and After hours host Vivian Lee, in shows before her birth.

“There were so many people of color who came to this show and spearheaded these grassroots movements,” she marvels, adding that she also loved learning about LGBT music so much. vibrantly played in the programs she created this Spotify playlist in her honor.

Digitizing this audio story, Vinson says, would not be possible without three Houstonians who saved the tapes for so many years. Judy Reeves co-founded the Gulf Coast Archives and Museum of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender History. JD Doyle runs an extensive website documenting local LGBT history. Jimmy Carper was a longtime host and producer of After Hours. (He died of HIV complications in 2014, aged 66.)

“They understood how important it was and they saved it,” Vinson says. “Radio is not the kind of thing that saves itself. Nothing disintegrated on us, fortunately. We’re very lucky, especially in Houston, because the environment here is against us. Moisture is like the enemy of audio tape.

“That was part of the motivation for the project,” adds co-archivist Bethany Scott. “If we can’t do it with these legacy carriers now, we may not have the chance to do it in the future. And we’re really focusing on that as part of Houston’s story. Listening to the recordings, hearing the themes they talk about, it’s not like the distant past.