My GAA Membership Card from 1970
Well, here I am sleep deprived again. I do plan to work on this page a little bit more. So it once again might be worth it to check back on this Web page for updates.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday July 9, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night 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.
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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, 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.
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This was our annual Christopher Street Liberation Day program.
I sometimes talk about things that happened in my life 50 years ago. This was one of those times. Fifty years ago I was already one of the longest term members of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA): In February 1975, GAA had voted to have a pamphlet written on The Fight for a Gay Civil Rights Law in New York City.
There was an election held for who would be the writer on it. I was elected. Another guy had wanted to write it but he tended to write dry, unrelatable leftist polemics.
How it worked was this: I would write the history as I remembered it and with information I got from publications and other people who'd been involved ith the struggle up to the middle of 1975. And then I'd go to a meeting with the editors. The editors were anyone in the world. Some people showed up for most of the meetings, some GAA members would show up once during the editing process and anyone who happened to walk into GAA headquarters could also be an editor, including people who couldn't put a sentence together and people who had no idea of what we were talking about in terms of the history. There were also some leftoids who wanted to interject their crap into it, but not many of them.
This writing and editing process took quite a while. I had to write it, deal with motions from the editors to make changes, and deal with the amendments to those motions, and then I'd take it home and change it and bring the edited text back for approval by the committee. I wrote and brought to the committee a couple of pages at a time, mostly. The committee discussed the pamphlet's contents one paragraph at a time.
The pamphlet was supposed to be ready for sale during the Christopher Street Liberation Day March that year. Initially it had looked like that was going to be an easy deadline to meet. But things dragged on. By May I had to try to get more and more pages edited and approved at every committee meeting. As we finished the guy who had lost the election for writing the pamphlet to me made a motion that the pamphlet be called The Fight For A Gay Civil Right Law In New York City which was the title it had been given when the project was started! In my opinion his motion was passed because most people attending the meeting had forgotten that detail.
And then people didn't want to be bothered with working on getting the pamphlet printed. This was in the days before computers were generally available. We had to use a process to create what's called an electro-stencil. And that involved someone taking the final typescript I'd prepared and having it copied by a process I never saw, and that produced the stencil that we could put that stencil onto a mimeograph machine and print with it. I think the process also could have involved some typing of on the stencil.
Well, we couldn't get it all done by the end of June and so we couldn't get it on sale by the time of that year's march. And then my male partner and I went on a long planned and paid for vacation to Great Britain for three weeks.
By the time we got back the electro-stencil was not quite ready. That took a couple of more weeks, during which July ended.
We got the raw electro-stencils at the start of August. I then had to use some stuff, which stank of solvent, to plug the many tiny holes in the stencil that would have printed dots on paper if they hadn't been filled in. With the current state of my eyesight I couldn't do that chore today.
Then there was the printing, which took more time. And there was putting the printed pages together. At this point it was nearly done and more people pitched in. The pamphlet was finally officially printed on September 5, 1975. I filled out the copyright form and that was the date I put on it. I was not allowed to name myself on the pamphlet, which I was okay about but then the GAA membership voted that my name couldn't be put in the copyright form as an author either.
As for the 1975, march itself we had opposition from certain people. The Chaplain of the NYPD had decided to hold a Mass at a church on Christopher Street that morning. As a result the police did not allow us to use that entire part of Christopher Street to stage people so the march could feed into Sixth Ave. easily because we had to walk people right by there. We had to wait for him to finish his Mass.
In addition there were other issues for me. I wrote in my notes about the 1975, march that, The march is now a parade complete with floats and people selling scads of stuff and portable rock bands. I couldn't help thinking that anything which people are willing to bleed, fight and die for to achieve will always be found by someone who will come along and sell it. Cynicism is the feeling of the day.
So that was the saga of the 1975, Christopher Street Liberation Day March for me.
And I'm reading that the group that currently runs the march, Heritage of Pride, is again prohibiting members of the Gay Officer Action League from marching while wearing their uniforms, which include a gun. That's not right. I think that these people running the march have no understanding of the issues.
GOAL's president, Detective Brian Downey, said, We respect and acknowledge that that trauma is real,
He continued, But this policy does not create safety. It creates friction and fiction, one where queer officers vanish while the same institution is asked to secure the march. We believe Pride should make room for everyone, especially those who have stood at the intersection of identify and service — and that includes us.
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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 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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