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Celebrating the late gay radical Jerry Meyer
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Out-FM is a weekly progressive queer show on listener-sponsored, noncommercial WBAI/Pacifica Radio. It airs at 99.5 and wbai.org, generally on Tuesdays from 8-9 PM. Please support us by donating to WBAI. Become a member for $25 or a BAI Buddy (sustainer) for $5/month or more. Or give to our Tower Fund https://wbai.wedid.it/campaigns/10022-tower-fund/. Or go to wbai.org or call 212-209-2950 and let WBAI management know you listen to Out-FM by supporting the station with a donation. Be sure and mention us when you donate.
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Tune into Out-FM on Tues., March 22, 2022 from 8:00-9:00pm, on 99.5FM WBAI/NY & listen at https://www.wbai.org/listen-live/
Prof Jerry Meyer, Gay Radical
Tune in to Out-FM on WBAI.org, 99.5 FM, on Tuesday from 8-9 PM when we will remember and honor the heroic life of Jerry Meyer, a highly accomplished historian, scholar, communist activist, and, later, an out-gay man, who defined his life around solidarity with oppressed people. He died last November at the age of 80. Jerry devoted much of his life to the fight to preserve and strengthen Hostos Community College, a unit of the City University of New York or CUNY in the South Bronx, where he taught history and organized activists. Hosted by Bob Lederer as part of our Queerly Defiant series about queers who faced consequences for their fight to win peace, justice, and human rights.
On the program, Out-FM's Bob Lederer will interview two of Jerry's dear friends and colleagues, Wally Edgecombe, retired director of the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, and William Casari, Associate Professor and College Archivist at Hostos.
According to an article last year eulogizing Jerry in The Clarion, newspaper of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the union at CUNY that he helped build, "Gerald Meyer..was more than just a scholar of NYC radical activism. He lived the values he researched and taught." And longtime Puerto Rican independentista and former New Yorker Dylcia Pagan, who spent 19 years as a political prisoner, wrote, “A true supporter of our struggle for national liberation. Jerry Vive!” Dylcia’s sentiment has been shared by many Puerto Rican independence activists.
The article in The Clarion describes Jerry’s first political protest at age 15, in 1955, when his Catholic school nun teacher caught him with a book opposing Senator Joe McCarthy's Red Scare and the teacher warned the rest of her class not to speak with Jerry. He threw his books on the floor and walked out of the room, never to return. “That was very liberating,” Jerry said years later.
He went on to speak out against McCarthyism and circulated petitions for racial integration of his all-white school in Hoboken, NJ.
In the 1960s he joined Civil Rights freedom rides and organized demonstrations against the Vietnam War. In 1971 Jerry was one of hundreds who went to jail for 8 days for violating a court injunction by joining a protest supporting the 11-week strike by members of the Newark Teachers Union – even though Jerry was not a member himself.
In 1973, Jerry divorced his wife and came out as a gay man. He also joined the Communist Party USA, which he had been close to for a long time, but left within several months for reasons unknown to his friends. However, it is interesting to note that the Party – from the 1930s until the 1990s - had a firm policy forbidding membership by openly gay and lesbian people and an official view that homosexuality was both a security risk as far as state repression and a form of bourgeois decadence. Interestingly, 11 years before Jerry came out, in 1962, as an undergraduate at Rutgers, the liberal club in which he was active invited as a speaker a member of the Mattachine Society, the primary reform and support organization for gay men and lesbians in the pre-Stonewall era. This was a daring act to do during that homophobic period.
Turning to Jerry Meyer’s academic career, in 1972 he was hired as an assistant professor of Behaviorial and Social Sciences at Hostos Community College and quickly became a leading voice for students and faculty. The school’s first home -- for many years until the successful struggles led by Jerry -- was a shabby refurbished tire factory. Later that year, Jerry became founding chair of the school chapter of the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing faculty and staff.
Sex and Weimar Germany: Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Part 2 of 2
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Out-FM is a weekly progressive queer show on listener-sponsored, noncommercial WBAI/Pacifica Radio. It airs at 99.5 and wbai.org, generally on Tuesdays from 8-9 PM. Please support us by donating to WBAI. Become a member for $25 or a BAI Buddy (sustainer) for $5/month or more. Or give to our Tower Fund https://wbai.wedid.it/campaigns/10022-tower-fund/. Or go to wbai.org or call 212-209-2950 and let WBAI management know you listen to Out-FM by supporting the station with a donation. Be sure and mention us when you donate.
Sign up for Out-FM's Weekly Newsletter with show announcements.
Due to a WBAI Delay,Tune into Out-FM 30 min later on Tues., March 8, 2022 from 8:30-9:30, on 99.5FM WBAI/NY & listen at https://www.wbai.org/listen-live/
Out-FM co-host Naomi Brussel brings us the news and
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Sex & the Weimar Republic - Prof. Laurie Marhoefer
Out-FM co-host John Riley interviews Professor Laurie Marhoefer of the University of Washington, who has written a book called "Sex and the Weimar: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis." The book covers the period from the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1918 up through the rise of the Nazi’s to state power. In part one Marhoefer discussed the infamous paragraph 175, a sodomy law and the fightback of German gay men against it, she examines the state of the Trans community in that time period, and their strategy to end their oppression by the German state. It also recounts key battles and the alliances with reproductive rights movements of the day in the course of that struggle. In this Part 2 Marhoefer discusses the vibrant Lesbian Movement of the 1920s Weimar Germany. Marhoefer also discusses what can be learned from that era and the important similarities and differences our own era has with the Weimar Era in Germany.