30/12/2019
Making Gay History, a renowned and must listen to podcast if you are a fan of our shared LGBTQ heritage, has unearthed a previously lost recording of two iconographic early queer rights activists. And their stories still echo today. The legacy of Sylvia Ray Rivera, and Martha P Johnson is still contested, with some conservative voices within the within radical lesbianism trying to sideline the group that they created known as STAR, or Street Tranvestite Action Revolutionaries. What the podcast has found however, working with Liza Cowan who in 1970 was a young radio journalist, was a history much more integrated. As the modern phrasing goes “Let's Keep the T with the LGB”. Cowan, a lesbian who had recently come out in the late sixties, was at the progressive publically supported radio station WBAI in New York – a station that will still be familiar with the city's listeners today. Via a contact at the legendary Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, Cowan was put in touch with Rivera, Johnson and other early luminaries of the gay and trans movement exploding after the Stonewall Riots of the previous summer. She met them and recorded them for transmission over WBAI's airwaves in a small flat in the cold winter of early 1970. The amazing recording has survived at the Lesbian Archive in New York and is now remastered online at the Making Gay History podcast. A fascinating listen and also available as a transcript should you be making a study of our amazing movement. https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/bonus-episode-from-the-vault-sylvia...
