Back of the Book — January 11, 2025


We got to dealing with the death of bigot Anita Bryant right before the program was set to be recorded. R. Paul told about how things were when she took aim at the gay liberation movement. We talked about the TikTok law that's being argued before the Supreme Court too. R. Paul does not know what to think about that one yet. I hope to update this Web page one day. It might be worth checking back here to see what I do with it.

You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.

The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday February 12, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.

We had the second meeting of the 14th WBAI LSB this past Wednesday, January 8, 2025. I've termed out, so I couldn't fully participate in the meeting, but I've been reelected Treasurer so i'm still a part of the LSB. I got to give an oral Treasurer's Report at this meeting. Things are not looking so good in WBAI's financial sector. At this meeting we began to figure out who would be the WBAI representatives to the Pacifica national Board (PNB) which actually holds the power in the Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI. The usual disruptors didn't disrupt the start of the meeting this time; I guess that was something they'd planned. Notice was given to vote on a badly worded motion to make a special rule of order at the next meeting. It makes a proposal that has raised questions which the maker of the motion can't answer and it adds a nonsensical order that lets the disruptors rub their egos all over the meeting..

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, so we have the following schedule:

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.

Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.

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, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.

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. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.

For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. 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 those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.

Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.

Anita Bryant a face of hate

Anti-gay bigot Anita Bryant is dead. She was the 1958 Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant winner. She was also the face of Tropicana Orange Juice. In 1977, she decided to start a campaign to repeal the gay rights law that Miami-Dade County had passed. Note, back then the word gay was considered inclusive by most of us, the LGBT+∞ term came decades later. That Miami-Dade County law was modeled on the New York City gay right bills that had been authored by the Gay Activists Alliance's Richie Amato and which had not passed in the New York City Council. Bryant would give speeches, a lot of the time to churches, about Christian biases and about saving children. She used the old trope of accusing gay men of being child molesters, much as the Trump followers do today. And despite her high profile anti-gay campaign the Florida Citrus Commission voted to keep her as their visible representative. In June 1977, she was able to get the Miami-Dade County gay civil rights law repealed in a referendum.

That galvanized the gay liberation movement and at the June 26, 1977, Christopher Street Liberation Day march in New York City, aka the Pride march, we took 5th Ave. We had a permit to march on 6th Ave. But we were all quite angry. There were too many of us for the police to stop.

Anita Bryant then took her hate campaign, which would eventually inspire the current Christian Nationalist movement, to other cities where they had gay rights laws. She went on a winning streak getting gay rights laws repealed in St. Paul, Minnesota, Wichita, Kansas and Eugene, Oregon. There was opposition. We almost all stopped drinking orange juice. Gay bars did not serve screwdrivers anymore, and people voiced their opposition to Anita Bryant's bigotry.

And then she inspired the Briggs Initiative in California. The Briggs initiative was California Proposition 6 on the ballot in California in the election of November 7, 1978. The proposed law, which would have made pro-gay statements regarding homosexual people or homosexuality by any public school employee cause for dismissal, was defeated. A lot of people opposed that one. Many celebrities voiced their opposition to the Briggs Initiative. California Governor Ronald Reagan opposed it, and so did President Jimmy Carter. I recall comedian Joan Rivers being On The Late Show with Johnny Carson one night and she castigated Anita Bryant and the Briggs Initiative. Rivers at one point stood up called Anita Bryant a pig and spat on the floor.

Bryant eventually divorced her husband, which got her in hot water with other Christian fundamentalists, and she was not in demand as a spokesperson. The Florida Citrus Commission did not renew her contract in 1980, and she faded from the national scene. She had done her damage though.

In 1998, Dade County brought back the gay rights law. And now there is one fewer anti-gay bigots in the world.

On the program we talked about the Gay Activists Alliance staging a lot of zaps in 1977, and afterward. One target was Geordie's Bar which had an ax on a plaque which declared it to be the fairy swatter which they was supposed to be there to keep gay men out of the bar. The Gay Activists Alliance pulled a first. Instead of the papers reporting that a gay bar had been raided by the police the Gay Activists Alliance raided the straight, and anti-gay, bar. They took down their fairy swatter during the demonstration, and within months the bar was shut down.

TikTok logo
National Security or Free Speech?

On this program we talked a bit about the TikTok case that's before the Supreme Court. Quite Frankly I am conflicted about this case. I do not like the idea of the United States of American joining other countries such as Russia and the so-called People's Republic of China, among others, in banning Web sites. Besides the fact that most of those restrictions can be gotten around I do not want the government saying what speech I am allowed to see or where I can speak as I please on the Internet. On the other hand I do realize that it's bad enough that the Chinese Communist Party is hacking a lot of government and business servers in America, and to also give them so much information on Americans for free does seem foolhardy. So I am not sure what side to come down on here. I guess that the best outcome would be to have the site cold off so that the United States Government wouldn't get into the major censorship of the Web thing that so many other countries have gotten into. I'll be very interested in seeing what SCOTUS rules on this.

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 that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board, owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people board that was just totally out of hand.

In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.

Sometimes we used to 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.

There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.

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