A Button With Some History
This is our annual Christopher Street Liberation Day program. It's occurring a day before the annual march because this date is a lot closer to the date of the Stonewall riots than the date of our next program will be. We will, of course, talk about gay stuff a lot on this program. R. Paul will have a lot to say about the early days of the gay liberation movement from his perspective. There will be some traditional stuff that we always do for these annual programs, and we may get into some other topics as well. Check back to see what we update here.
Did you know that I've got a brief synopsis of some of the WBAI LSB meetings?
I have also posted a whole lot of the minutes of the Pacifica National Finance Committee. I'm a member of that committee because I'm the WBAI LSB Treasurer.
The next WBAI LSB meeting is scheduled to be held on July 10, 2019, at the First Unitarian Church chapel 119 Pierrepont St, corner of Monroe Place, in Brooklyn, NY 11201, Brooklyn, NY 11201. These meetings are usually supposed to start at 7:00 PM.
The WBAI LSB met on Wednesday, June 12, 2019, at 7:10 PM at the First Unitarian Church, 119 Pierrepont St, corner of Monroe Place, in Brooklyn, NY 11201, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
The LSB got some small amount of business done. There was a controversy involving standing committees and special committees. Yeah, I was involved in that. The controversy involved a rule of order that prohibits having work assigned to a standing committee performed by some other body. It's a technical detail, but it can be quite important. That which is created by the Local Station Board (LSB) by previous notice and a super majority vote shouldn't be undone by a mere majority. The issue was that most of the LSB's standing committees were destroyed by the so-called Justice & Unity Campaign years ago.
At this meeting the LSB actually got to a Treasurer's Report. It didn't get disrupted this time. I put out a written Treasurer's Report for all to read.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, which gives us the following schedule:
All of these meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, but I've found that after this program I was finally able to do so, but only for this morning's program. I still can't go back and plug in any archive blurbs for the programs that are missing from the archive. We'll see how this works out.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says “Display,” and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click “GO” and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. I expect that after next Saturday they'll have the pre-recorded program that's alternating with us now showing up there too.
For programs before January 26, 2019, you'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says “Display,” and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click “GO” and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For instance, the previous program will be under January 12, 2019. You'll just need to scroll to the 5 AM to 6 AM slot to get to us. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Yeah, it looks like they'll have the alternating program's name prominently there, but if you have the right date it'll be our program. Good luck.
Since the General Manager has banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. At this time there's a regular, pre-recorded, program in the alternate week's time slot.
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Our friend, fellow WBAI producer and Saddle Pal Uncle Sidney Smith has been banned from WBAI by General Manager Berthold Reimers. The General Manager will not say why. He won't even tell Sidney why he's banned! This is grossly unfair to Sidney and constitutes abuse of Staff. Why did Berthold ban Sidney?
There's a posting here about it. More to come.
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This will be our annual Christopher Street liberation Day program. We usually do this program after the march, but the actual event will have turned 50 before the program. So we'll do the main program tonight and we'll follow up with a program about the march and all on the next program, which should be on July 13.
One of the problems with talking about the early gay liberation movement is that there are not that many images from then that are not under copyright protection. Luckily, photographer Diana Davies put a lot of her images into the public domain, and I've used some of them here on a page about a 1971, March on Albany. There are a number of old activists in those photographs.
We plan to talk about any number of things from back in the day.
I'll talk about why I wasn't at the Stonewall that fateful night. Hint: I was about 8,880 miles away when the riots began.
It's also possible that some things may pop into my head as we do the program, too.
By the way, that button that I have to the left was the official button with the official theme of the 1982, Christopher Street Liberation Day march. I was the one who came up with the theme that year. We never imagined that I'd be naming the successor organization of the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee (CSLDC).
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Meanwhile there are terrible things happening with the government imprisoning children in conditions that would actually result in very serious lawsuits were they applied to adult penal institutions in this country. We may get to talk about that tonight as well.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list is the WBAI specific “Goodlight” Web based message board. It is sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as “the bleepin' blue board,” owing to the blue background used on its Web pages. This one has many people posting anonymously and there's also an ancillary “WBAI people” board that's just totally out of hand. The bleepin' blue board had to add a step for folks to get onto it because it was under attack by spambots. When you click on the above link you may be asked for a username and password. Type in Username: poster Password: enternow
UPDATE: In of June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I'm the moderator on it now.
When the computer in Master Control is working we sometimes have live interaction with people posting on the “Goodlight Board” during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
One formerly popular mailing list is the “NewPacifica” mailing list. Founded October 31, 2000, this list has been moribund for a couple of years due to de facto censorship by the group owner. As of February 2019, it had 696 subscribers coast to coast, but postings on it are very infrequent now.
Back in the day it sometimes also got a bit nasty. All sorts of things used to happen on this list and official announcements were frequently posted there.
You can look at the NewPacifica list here, and you can join the list from that Web page too. If you subscribe to the “NewPacifica” mailing list you will receive, via E-mail, all of the messages which are sent to that list.
There is the option to receive a “digest” version of the list, which means that a bunch of messages are bundled into one E-mail and sent to you at regular intervals, this cuts down on the number of E-mails you get from the list. You will also be able to send messages to the list.
This list also has a Web based interface where you can read messages and from which you can post your own messages.
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The contents of this Web page are copyright © 2019, R. Paul Martin.
