Charles Pitts (radio Engineer)
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Charles Pitts (radio Engineer)
Charles Pitts (1941–2015) was an American gay activist and radio personality. He co-hosted ''The New Symposium'' on New York City's WBAI from 1968 to 1969, the first weekly public radio program to offer an affirming discussion of homosexuality by openly gay hosts. After the Stonewall Riots, he co-founded the Gay Liberation Front in New York City and continued his audio activism through the program ''Homosexual News''. From 1971 to 1973, his weekly WBAI show ''Out of the Slough'' broke barriers as the first freeform radio show centered on gay politics and culture. Early life and family Charles Pitts was born on July 24, 1941, in Jamestown, New York. His childhood home was at 509 Lakeview Avenue in Jamestown. His father, George B. Pitts, Jr. (1905–1997), ran Pitts Home and Garden, a home and hardware store inherited from his father. As a young man, he had been enrolled as a student of philosophy and religion at the University of Chicago, intending to become a minister or so ...
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WBAI
WBAI (99.5 FM) is a non-commercial, listener-supported radio station licensed to New York, New York. Its programming is a mixture of political news, talk and opinion from a left-leaning, liberal or progressive viewpoint, and eclectic music. The station is owned by the Pacifica Foundation with studios located in Brooklyn and transmitter located at 4 Times Square. History Origins The station began as WABF, which first went on the air in 1941 as W75NY, of Metropolitan Television, Inc. (W75NY indicating an eastern station at 47.5 MHz in New York), and moved to the 99.5 frequency in 1947. In 1955, after two years off the air, it was reborn as WBAI (after then-owners Broadcast Associates, Inc.). 1960s WBAI was purchased by philanthropist Louis Schweitzer, who donated it to the Pacifica Foundation in 1960. The station, which had been a commercial enterprise, became non-commercial and listener-supported under Pacifica ownership. The history of WBAI during this period is ...
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Greetings (1968 Film)
''Greetings'' is a 1968 American black comedy film co-written and directed by Brian De Palma. A satirical film about men avoiding the Vietnam War draft, it features a young Robert De Niro in his first major role. It was the first American film to receive an X rating by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), although it was later given an R rating. De Niro reprised the character of Jon Rubin in the 1970 film ''Hi, Mom!'', also directed by De Palma. The film was entered into the 19th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won a Silver Bear award. ''Greetings'' is an episodic film about three friends: Paul, a shy love-seeker, Lloyd, a vibrant conspiracy nut and Jon, a peeping tom and aspiring filmmaker. The film satirizes free love, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War and amateur filmmaking. Cast Reception Howard Thompson of ''The New York Times'' wrote: "Some of it is amusing, as when one of the lads is coached in the technique of draft-dodging. Most o ...
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Smithsonian Folkways
Smithsonian Folkways is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. It is a part of the Smithsonian's Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, located at Capital Gallery in downtown Washington, D.C. The label was founded in 1987 after the family of Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, donated the entire Folkways Records label to the Smithsonian. The donation was made on the condition that the Institution continue Asch's policy that each of the more than 2,000 albums of Folkways Records remain in print forever, regardless of sales. Since then, the label has expanded on Asch's vision of documenting the sounds of the world, adding six other record labels to the collection, as well as releasing over 300 new recordings. Some well-known artists have contributed to the Smithsonian Folkways collection, including Pete Seeger, Ella Jenkins, Woody Guthrie, and Lead Belly. Famous songs include "This Land Is Your Land", "Goodnight, Irene", and " Midnight Speci ...
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Michael Cohen (musician)
Michael Cohen (1951–?) was an American singer-songwriter from New York City. He released three albums in the 1970s which were among the first to deal with explicitly gay themes. Cohen was licensed as a cab driver in New York City in 1972.Liner notes to ''What Did You Expect...? Songs about the Experience of Being Gay'' (New York: Folkways Records FS 8582, LP, 1973), http://media.smithsonianfolkways.org/liner_notes/folkways/FW08582.pdf, accessed January 2014 Work and influences Cohen self-released his first album, eponymously titled ''Mike Cohen'', in 1972. This was followed by two albums on Folkways Records Folkways Records was a record label founded by Moses Asch that documented folk, world, and children's music. It was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1987 and is now part of Smithsonian Folkways. History The Folkways Records & Service ..., '' What Did You Expect?'' (Folkways Records FS 8582, 1973) and ''Some of Us Had to Live'' (Folkways Records FS 8582, 1976 ...
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Freeform Radio
Free-form, or free-form radio, is a radio station programming format in which the disc jockey is given total control over what music to play, regardless of music genre or commercial interests. Freeform radio stands in contrast to most commercial radio stations, in which DJs have little or no influence over programming structure or playlists. In the United States, freeform DJs are still bound by Federal Communications Commission regulations. History in the United States Many shows claim to be the first free-form radio program, but the earliest on record is "Nightsounds" on KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, D.J.'d by John Leonard. Probably the best-remembered in the Midwest is Beaker Street, which ran for almost 10 years on KAAY "The Mighty 1090" in Little Rock, Arkansas, beginning in 1966, making it also probably the best-known such show on an AM station; its signal reached from Canada to Mexico and Cuba, blanketing the Midwest and Midsouth of the U.S. WFMU is currently the lon ...
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Karla Jay
Karla Jay (born February 22, 1947) is a distinguished professor emerita at Pace University, where she taught English and directed the women's and gender studies program between 1974 and 2009. A pioneer in the field of lesbian and gay studies, she is widely published. Early life and education Jay was born Karla Jayne Berlin in Brooklyn, New York, to Rhoda and Abraham Berlin, who worked for a dunnage company on the Red Hook (Brooklyn) docks. Raised in a non-observant, largely secular Jewish home, she attended the Berkeley Institute, a private girls' school in Brooklyn. In 1964 she enrolled at Barnard College, where she majored in French and graduated in 1968 after having taken part in the student demonstrations at Columbia University. Career While she shared many of the goals of the radical left-wing of the late 1960s, Jay was at odds with the male-supremacist behavior of many of the movement's leaders. In 1969, she became a member of Redstockings. Jay, who had been aware of he ...
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Sexual Freedom League
The Sexual Freedom League (SFL) was an organization founded in 1963 in New York City by Jefferson Poland and Leo Koch. It existed under the name New York City League for Sexual Freedom to promote and conduct sexual activity among its members and to agitate for political reform, especially for the repeal of laws against abortion and censorship, and had many female leaders. History West coast formation When Jefferson Poland moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, he started the East Bay Sexual Freedom League there, near the University of California, Berkeley in 1966. Although Poland founded the League, he did not try to establish it as a conventional organization with membership lists, dues and meetings. Instead, he went around establishing various Leagues and allowing others to run them. The League first made national news in August 1965 with the "Nude Wade-in" led by Poland, 23, Ina Saslow, 21, and Shirley Einseidel, 21, at Aquatic Park, a public beach in San Francisco. The SFL wa ...
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Physique Magazines
Physique magazines or beefcake magazines were magazines devoted to physique photography — that is, photographs of muscular "beefcake" men – typically young and attractive – in athletic poses, usually in revealing, minimal clothing. During their heyday in North America in the 1950s to 1960s, they were presented as magazines dedicated to fitness, health, and bodybuilding, with the models often shown demonstrating exercises or the results of their regimens, or as artistic reference material. However, their unstated primary purpose was erotic imagery, primarily created by and for gay men at a time when homosexuality was the subject of cultural taboos and government censorship. Physique magazines were sold by newspaper stands, bookstores, and pharmacies. They were available in cities and even towns across the United States and by subscription, and popular titles such as ''Physique Pictorial'' served as an early nationwide cultural nexus for bisexual and gay men. Scholar Thomas Wa ...
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Baird Searles
William Baird Searles (1934–1993) was a science fiction author and critic. He was best known for his long running review columns for the magazines '' Asimov's'' (reviewing books), '' Amazing'', and ''Fantasy & Science Fiction'' (reviewing films, television and related media). He also did occasional reviews for other publications, including ''The New York Times'', ''Publishers Weekly'', and ''The Village Voice''. He wrote several non-fiction works on the science fiction genre. Searles managed a science fiction and fantasy bookstore in New York City's Greenwich Village, the Science Fiction Shop, which is no longer in business. From about 1963 through 1971, Baird Searles was the Drama and Literature director at WBAI, a listener-sponsored Pacifica Foundation radio station in New York City. He had a beautiful and mellifluous voice for reading and narrating stories, and was an innovative producer and host. On one of his programs, "The New Symposium" broadcast in 1968, he discussed ...
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New Left
The New Left was a broad political movement mainly in the 1960s and 1970s consisting of activists in the Western world who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, gender roles and drug policy reforms. Some see the New Left as an oppositional reaction to earlier Marxist and labor union movements for social justice that focused on dialectical materialism and social class, while others who used the term see the movement as a continuation and revitalization of traditional leftist goals. Some who self-identified as "New Left" rejected involvement with the labor movement and Marxism's historical theory of class struggle, although others gravitated to their own takes on established forms of Marxism and Marxism–Leninism, such as the New Communist movement (which drew from Maoism) in the United States or the K-GruppenThe K-Gruppen, K groups originally referred to the mainly Maoism, Maoist-oriented small par ...
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Steve Post
Steve Post (20 March 1944 – 3 August 2014) was an American freeform radio artist and the author of ''Playing in the FM Band''. Early life Post, born in the Bronx, became fascinated by radio at about the age of 8 or 10, recording 'broadcasts' on his father's Webcor tape recorder, using names such as Paige Turner. Upon his mother's death of cancer, when Post was 10, he was sent for a time to a boarding school in New Jersey. An indifferent student, by his own account, he eventually graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School. Career Post was a pioneer and a trailblazer in freeform radio at WBAI-FM in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bob Fass, drawing his inspiration from Jean Shepherd, initially transformed and redefined the form and its possibilities, and Fass, Post, and Larry Josephson, a sort of informal, free-floating, quasi-magical creative triumvirate, then pushed the possibilities significantly further in the artistic, cultural, and political turmoil of the t ...
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Academy Award For Best Sound
The Academy Award for Best Sound is an Academy Award that recognizes the finest or most euphonic sound mixing, recording, sound design, and sound editing. The award used to go to the studio sound departments until a rule change in 1969 said it should be awarded to the specific technicians. The first were Murray Spivack and Jack Solomon for '' Hello, Dolly!''. It is generally awarded to the production sound mixers, re-recording mixers, and supervising sound editors of the winning film. In the lists below, the winner of the award for each year is shown first, followed by the other nominees. Before the 93rd Academy Awards, Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing were separate categories. For the second and third years of this category (i.e., the 4th Academy Awards and the 5th Academy Awards) only the names of the film companies were listed. Paramount Publix Studio Sound Department won in both years. Winners and nominees 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s ...
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