Revisiting The Gay Life

It's 1984. The mysterious illness stalking the gay community has a name and has claimed more than 2000 lives. Sadly, this is just the beginning of the horrors that the LGBTQ+ community will face in the coming decade as Reagan's government does little to combat the disease because of its association with homosexuals and drug users. In the final installment of Revisiting The Gay Life, we listen back...

Practically overnight, everything changed when a mysterious illness popped up in the gay ghettos of San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles in the summer of 1981.  On this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we relive the early and uncertain days of what would later be named AIDS. We'll listen back to a 1981 interview with two pioneering doctors researching and treating what was then called gay c...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life, we're looking at how queer people have been represented — and misrepresented — on the big screen up through the early 1980s. We'll listen back to Randy Alfred's 1981 interview with Vito Russo, author of the seminal book, The Celluloid Closet , about how homosexuality was portrayed in movies.  And we’ll hear a conversation from 1981 with gay filmmaker Art...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we're exploring the history of queer witches and witchcraft.  As it turns out, The Gay Life did not one but two shows on witches. In 1979, host Randy Alfred talked with noted gay witch ARTHUR EVANS, who was the author of Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture and BATYA PODOS, a lesbian witch who taught a class at SF State on Women and Ritual.  Three year...

This special episode of Revisiting The Gay Life features a conversation from 1973 between a young lesbian and her mother, who came out of the closet later in life. CHANA WILSON was in her early twenties in 1973 when she began producing Radio Free Lesbian for KPFA. In one of the show's first episodes, Chana interviewed her mother, who recently came out as a lesbian...in her fifties.  Her mother fil...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we explore the past, present and future of LGBTQ radio with three of its pioneers who have been making radio since the early 1970s. This discussion was recorded live on July 15, 2016 at KALW’s event space in downtown San Francisco.  Featured in this episode: RANDY ALFRED - A pioneering gay journalist who worked in print and radio; he was the longtime ho...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we're gonna focus on an inflection point in queer history: when the gay and lesbian rights movement was gaining strength, but also facing some backlash.  As the '70s gave way to the '80s, the deeply religious and conservative moral majority was founded and it helped catapult former Governor Ronald Reagan into the White House. At the same time, in the af...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we're going to explore two very different versions of the 1970s queer experience through interviews with two gay fiction writers working on opposite coasts at the time.  Featured in this episode: ARMISTEAD MAUPIN —  His Tales of the City is a love letter to San Francisco and a celebration of its quirks. Tales began as a daily fiction serial in the San F...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we're going to focus on bisexuality — as a distinct identity. Bisexuality was nothing new and sexual exploration was a big part of the counterculture movement of the late 60s and early 70s. But it went mainstream in the mid 1970s, when rockers like David Bowie, Elton John and Lou Reed came out as bisexual and both Time and Newsweek ran trend stories abo...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we hear about an LGBTQ organization that has been around for more than 60 years and is still somewhat misunderstood: The Imperial Court is a social and charitable organization that adds a drag twist to the concept of royal courts.  Since it began in San Francisco in 1965, The Imperial Court system has gone global and raised millions of dollars for LGBTQ...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we do a deep dive into lesbian history. We share Randy's 1978 conversation with Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin about the first lesbian organizations in San Francisco and he sits down with Marie Renfro in 1980 to hear about that year’s black lesbian conference. And we hear from Randy about the evolving relationship between lesbians and gay men. Revisiting T...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we intertwine the stories of two men that appeared on the Gay Life. On paper, the men are quite similar. Born a year apart — Bob Basker in 1918 and Stuart Loomis in 1919. Both Veterans. Both spent time in Chicago after the war. And both ended up in San Francisco and were early gay activists. But how their stories diverge sheds some light on the difficul...

In this episode of Revisiting The Gay Life , we consider the life and afterlife of Harvey Milk, who was one of the key figures of what was then called the Gay Liberation Movement, as well as the first openly LGBTQ+ person elected to public office. Revisiting The Gay Life is a new 12-episode series from KALW’s Queer Power Hour . It explores a pivotal moment in SF’s LGBTQ history — from the rise of...

In the premiere episode, we go back to the beginnings of LGBTQ+ radio. And hear how it developed from the 1950s to the 1970s. And we meet the host and producer of The Gay Life , Randy Alfred (pictured above!) Revisiting The Gay Life is a new 12-episode series from KALW’s Queer Power Hour . It explores a pivotal moment in SF’s LGBTQ history — from the rise of Harvey Milk to the early days of what w...

Introducing Revisiting The Gay Life is a new 12-episode series from KALW’s Queer Power Hour . It explores a pivotal moment in SF’s LGBTQ history — from the rise of Harvey Milk to the early days of what would later be called AIDS. We reconsider this time through a perhaps unexpected lens: a radio show called The Gay Life that aired on KSAN, a commercial rock and roll station in the Bay Area in the...