I'm Eric Marcus and we're back with season 8 of Making Gay History.

For this season we're doing something different.

We're reaching beyond my Making Gay History audio archive to bring you interviews with

LGBT-Q people all drawn from the Studs-Chirkel Radio Archive in Chicago.

I'm thrilled to be working with the archive because there's a special place in my heart for Stutz-Tirkle.

Back in 1988 when editor Rick Kott at Harper and Rowe commissioned me to write an oral history book

about what was then called the Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights Movement.

He gave you an example of the kind of book he was looking for.

He said he wanted a book for general readers like Studs Turkles oral history

that explored what people do for work and how they feel about it. It was called

working. Growing up with my lefty parents, I of course knew who Studs-Chirkel was from

his popular radio show, his books, and his outspoken support of liberal causes from unions and

the Black Civil Rights Movement to gay rights and women's rights.

Studs Turkle liked to point out that he was born three weeks after the Titanic went down in 1912.

Studs had a lot more staying power than the Titanic and over the

course of a half century he conducted more than 5,000 interviews with regular

people, famous people, literary legends, and on occasion,

young authors just out of the gate.

Here Stutz Chirkel with one of those young authors

in 1992 in his studio at W. F. M. T. Radio in Chicago.

Making history is the book. My guest is Eric Marcus.

And it's an oral history of the gay movement from 1945 to 1990. It's a pip.

...