JD Doyle
Encyclopedia
JD Doyle is an LGBT music
archivist and radio producer
. He is a staff member of the weekly radio show
Queer Voices and produces of the monthly radio show Queer Music Heritage. He is also producer of OutRadio and co-producer of monthly radio review Audiofile. He now lives in Houston, Texas
.
"Queer Music Heritage is both a radio show and a website, and the goal of both is to preserve and share the music of our culture, because I just don't think gay & lesbian music of the past should be forgotten."
, Ohio
.
He moved to Norfolk
, Virginia
, in 1978, and joined the Unitarian Universalist
Gay Community. As a member of the community, he was involved in many projects including hotline and speeches at college human sexuality classes.
Also, he worked at Our Own Community Press, a monthly all-volunteer newspaper of Unitarian Universalist Gay Community (UUGC) from 1978 to 1980, and was editor during 1979. The newspaper itself was published from 1976 through 1998. In 1981, he moved to Houston, Texas.
He participated in The National March on Washington For Lesbian & Gay Rights
, on October 14, 1979, and reported it on Our Own Community Press.
music in the mid-1990s.
Queer music, according to him, is the music of GLBT
artists, with a special emphasis on lyrics
that deal with queer topics, and the lives as GLBT people. For GLBT artists, queer content is not a prerequisite, and conversely music by straight
artists with queer content qualifies. Its genres include disco
, blues
, hip hop
, country
, punk
, etc., and a number of shows on special areas including Gay Musicals, songs about Gay Marriage
, AIDS
, Bear Music, Drag Queen
, Gay Christian Music
, a number of shows on Transgender
artists, etc.
He likely has the largest private collection in the world; he has more than 6000 items that include album
s, CDs, singles
, MP3
files.
's GLBT radio program After Hours and after Doyle made several requests that more queer music be played, Carper invited him to come on the show and do a couple segments. Jack Valinski, the producer of Queer Voices (then, Lesbian & Gay Voices), offered him a regular segment on that show, which he was glad to accept.
's Houston affiliate KPFT, is dedicated to broadcasting news, concerns and events as related to Houston's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered (GLBT) community. The goal of Queer Voices is to provide up to date information on the community's concerns that is currently not available from other local media outlets. There are usually four or five hosts and four or five guests per show. The show is heard on Pacifica's KPFT 90.1 FM in Houston, Texas on Mondays, 9 to 11 pm, Central Time. Queer Voices includes the segments Queer Music Heritage and This Way Out.
QMH was founded by Doyle in January 2000, and its goal is to preserve and share the music of queer culture. The first six episodes were 30-minutes-long, but it lengthened to be 1-hour-long afterwards. QMH includes interviews with musicians and songs of a certain theme for each episode. While the first hour of the show airs on Queer Voices, the monthly shows are normally more than one hour (and have been as long as eight hours, depending on the amount of material).
The June 2004 show "Queer Music before the Stonewall" won a Special Merit Award in the category of Local Music/Entertainment Program at the National Federation of Community Broadcasting conference. QMH celebrated its 10th anniversary recently in January 2010.
Each "Audiofile" segment was approximately seven minutes long, and showcased three recent CDs by GLBT artists. This Way Out is a weekly 30-minute show and included "Audiofile" monthly during the last week of the month. This Way Out was delivered by Queer Voices.
It was founded by Chris Wilson, Pam Marshall, and the engineer Christopher David Trentham in January 1997. JD Doyle became a co-producer of "Audiofile" when Pam Marshall left the team in the beginning of 2001. The segment was discontinued in December 2010, to allow the co-producers to pursue other projects. All segments of the 14-year show are archived at http://queermusicheritage.us/af.html
While the purpose of QMH was to focus more on the history of the music of GLBT artists, that did not allow enough time to give exposure to new music, so OutRadio allows for that, and like QMH can be composed of nearly any music genre, with a running time not fixed, but shows are usually three hours in length.
LGBT music
LGBT music or stylized by others as GLBT music is music focusing on LGBT issues performed by LGBT artists and performers. The lyrics are largely about empowerment, same-sex relationships, love, acceptance, freedom, gay pride and the courage to "come out" to the general public...
archivist and radio producer
Radio producer
A radio producer oversees the making of a radio show. There are two main types of producer. An audio or creative producer and a content producer. Audio producers create sounds and audio specifically, content producers oversee and orchestrate a radio show or feature...
. He is a staff member of the weekly radio show
Radio programming
Radio programming is the Broadcast programming of a Radio format or content that is organized for Commercial broadcasting and Public broadcasting radio stations....
Queer Voices and produces of the monthly radio show Queer Music Heritage. He is also producer of OutRadio and co-producer of monthly radio review Audiofile. He now lives in Houston, Texas
Texas
Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...
.
"Queer Music Heritage is both a radio show and a website, and the goal of both is to preserve and share the music of our culture, because I just don't think gay & lesbian music of the past should be forgotten."
Early life and career
Doyle was born and raised in SalemSalem, Ohio
Salem is a city in northern Columbiana County and extreme southern Mahoning County, Ohio, United States. At the 2000 census, the city's population was 12,197....
, Ohio
Ohio
Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...
.
He moved to Norfolk
Norfolk
Norfolk is a low-lying county in the East of England. It has borders with Lincolnshire to the west, Cambridgeshire to the west and southwest and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the North Sea coast and to the north-west the county is bordered by The Wash. The county...
, Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
, in 1978, and joined the Unitarian Universalist
Unitarian Universalism
Unitarian Universalism is a religion characterized by support for a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning". Unitarian Universalists do not share a creed; rather, they are unified by their shared search for spiritual growth and by the understanding that an individual's theology is a...
Gay Community. As a member of the community, he was involved in many projects including hotline and speeches at college human sexuality classes.
Also, he worked at Our Own Community Press, a monthly all-volunteer newspaper of Unitarian Universalist Gay Community (UUGC) from 1978 to 1980, and was editor during 1979. The newspaper itself was published from 1976 through 1998. In 1981, he moved to Houston, Texas.
He participated in The National March on Washington For Lesbian & Gay Rights
National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights
The National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was a large political rally that took place in Washington, D.C. on October 14, 1979. The first such march on Washington, it drew between 75,000 and 125,000 gay men, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people and straight allies to demand...
, on October 14, 1979, and reported it on Our Own Community Press.
Queer music collection
Doyle has been an avid record collector since the early 1970s. He collected music from mostly the 1950s and 1960s from many genres. In early 1990s, he lost interest and sold his huge collection. However, he kept the gay artists and began specializing in queerQueer
Queer is an umbrella term for sexual minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary. In the context of Western identity politics the term also acts as a label setting queer-identifying people apart from discourse, ideologies, and lifestyles that typify mainstream LGBT ...
music in the mid-1990s.
Queer music, according to him, is the music of GLBT
LGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...
artists, with a special emphasis on lyrics
Lyrics
Lyrics are a set of words that make up a song. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist or lyrist. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of...
that deal with queer topics, and the lives as GLBT people. For GLBT artists, queer content is not a prerequisite, and conversely music by straight
Heterosexuality
Heterosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction or behavior between members of the opposite sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, heterosexuality refers to "an enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual, affectional, physical or romantic attractions to persons of the opposite sex";...
artists with queer content qualifies. Its genres include disco
Disco
Disco is a genre of dance music. Disco acts charted high during the mid-1970s, and the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1970s. It had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, gay, psychedelic, and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and...
, blues
Blues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
, hip hop
Hip hop
Hip hop is a form of musical expression and artistic culture that originated in African-American and Latino communities during the 1970s in New York City, specifically the Bronx. DJ Afrika Bambaataa outlined the four pillars of hip hop culture: MCing, DJing, breaking and graffiti writing...
, country
Country music
Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...
, punk
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
, etc., and a number of shows on special areas including Gay Musicals, songs about Gay Marriage
Same-sex marriage
Same-sex marriage is marriage between two persons of the same biological sex or social gender. Supporters of legal recognition for same-sex marriage typically refer to such recognition as marriage equality....
, AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
, Bear Music, Drag Queen
Drag queen
A drag queen is a man who dresses, and usually acts, like a caricature woman often for the purpose of entertaining. There are many kinds of drag artists and they vary greatly, from professionals who have starred in films to people who just try it once. Drag queens also vary by class and culture and...
, Gay Christian Music
Christian music
Christian music is music that has been written to express either personal or a communal belief regarding Christian life and faith. Common themes of Christian music include praise, worship, penitence, and lament, and its forms vary widely across the world....
, a number of shows on Transgender
Transgender
Transgender is a general term applied to a variety of individuals, behaviors, and groups involving tendencies to vary from culturally conventional gender roles....
artists, etc.
He likely has the largest private collection in the world; he has more than 6000 items that include album
Album
An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...
s, CDs, singles
Single (music)
In music, a single or record single is a type of release, typically a recording of fewer tracks than an LP or a CD. This can be released for sale to the public in a variety of different formats. In most cases, the single is a song that is released separately from an album, but it can still appear...
, MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
files.
Starting radio broadcast
Doyle's friend Jimmy Carper was, and still is, producer of KPFTKPFT
KPFT is a listener-sponsored community radio station in Houston, Texas, which went on the air on March 1, 1970 as the fourth station in the Pacifica radio family. Larry Lee sold the idea to Pacifica to establish listener-supported radio in Houston as an alternative to main-stream broadcasting. The...
's GLBT radio program After Hours and after Doyle made several requests that more queer music be played, Carper invited him to come on the show and do a couple segments. Jack Valinski, the producer of Queer Voices (then, Lesbian & Gay Voices), offered him a regular segment on that show, which he was glad to accept.
Queer Voices
Doyle co-hosted Queer Voices from 2000 to 2008. Queer Voices, a weekly two-hour-long radio program on Pacifica radioPacifica Radio
Pacifica Radio is the oldest public radio network in the United States. It is a group of five independently operated, non-commercial, listener-supported radio stations that is known for its progressive/liberal political orientation. It is also a program service supplying over 100 affiliated...
's Houston affiliate KPFT, is dedicated to broadcasting news, concerns and events as related to Houston's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered (GLBT) community. The goal of Queer Voices is to provide up to date information on the community's concerns that is currently not available from other local media outlets. There are usually four or five hosts and four or five guests per show. The show is heard on Pacifica's KPFT 90.1 FM in Houston, Texas on Mondays, 9 to 11 pm, Central Time. Queer Voices includes the segments Queer Music Heritage and This Way Out.
Queer Music Heritage
Queer Music Heritage, also called QMH, is a monthly one-hour-long radio show that introduces queer music. The first one hour is presented on 4th Monday of Queer Voices.QMH was founded by Doyle in January 2000, and its goal is to preserve and share the music of queer culture. The first six episodes were 30-minutes-long, but it lengthened to be 1-hour-long afterwards. QMH includes interviews with musicians and songs of a certain theme for each episode. While the first hour of the show airs on Queer Voices, the monthly shows are normally more than one hour (and have been as long as eight hours, depending on the amount of material).
The June 2004 show "Queer Music before the Stonewall" won a Special Merit Award in the category of Local Music/Entertainment Program at the National Federation of Community Broadcasting conference. QMH celebrated its 10th anniversary recently in January 2010.
"Audiofile"
"Audiofile" was a monthly radio queer music review carried by This Way Out, an international gay and lesbian radio magazine, on over 200 stations around the world.Each "Audiofile" segment was approximately seven minutes long, and showcased three recent CDs by GLBT artists. This Way Out is a weekly 30-minute show and included "Audiofile" monthly during the last week of the month. This Way Out was delivered by Queer Voices.
It was founded by Chris Wilson, Pam Marshall, and the engineer Christopher David Trentham in January 1997. JD Doyle became a co-producer of "Audiofile" when Pam Marshall left the team in the beginning of 2001. The segment was discontinued in December 2010, to allow the co-producers to pursue other projects. All segments of the 14-year show are archived at http://queermusicheritage.us/af.html
OutRadio
Doyle began a new monthly internet music show, OutRadio in January 2010.While the purpose of QMH was to focus more on the history of the music of GLBT artists, that did not allow enough time to give exposure to new music, so OutRadio allows for that, and like QMH can be composed of nearly any music genre, with a running time not fixed, but shows are usually three hours in length.
Doyle's work
| Year | Work |
|---|---|
| 2005 | "Play It Loud! Top Queer Rock'n'Roll" was one of the articles in the hardbound book "Our Lives and Times: Celebrating 10 Years of Houston's GLBT Community," published by OutSmart Magazine. |
| 2006 | "Queer Music Radio: Entertainment, Education, and Activism" in the Journal of Popular Music Studies (Boston University) |
| 2011 | “Queer Music History 101.” This is a special project of Queer Music Heritage, developed by JD Doyle, as a lesson plan for use by University courses in LGBT Studies. It is a two-hour audio course spanning 1926 through 1985, explaining this music history, with sound clips, graphics of the artists, and links to study resources. The lesson can be taken in several ways, including a flipbook format, and it completely free for use, both by classes and individuals. It is found at http://www.qmh101.com |
Doyle in media
| Year | Content |
|---|---|
| 2003 | reviewed in “CyberSocket” reviewed in “Gay & Lesbian Online,” a book published by The Advocate The Advocate The Advocate is an American LGBT-interest magazine, printed monthly and available by subscription. The Advocate brand also includes a web site. Both magazine and web site have an editorial focus on news, politics, opinion, and arts and entertainment of interest to LGBT people... |
| 2005 | “OutSmart Magazine” Houston news about Doyle’s entering the GLBT/Queer Hall of Fame |
| 2006 | interview with Palm Springs newsmagazine "Pulp" interview with eGay.com : “JD Doyle - Queer America's Own Music Historian” |
| 2007 | interview with Dixie Treichel, the host of Fresh Fruit located at Minneapolis, the longest running Queer radio show in the country |
| 2008 | interview with “SX,” Australian magazine “Outsmart” article about JD Doyle's 100th show quoted in Time Magazine one of his photos taken at the 1979 March on Washington appears on the cover of a book about the Lesbian and Gay Marches on Washington |
| 2010 | Outsmart article about QMH 10th anniversary and Doyle’s new show, OutRadio |
Awards and achievements
| Year | Award |
|---|---|
| 2002 | Outmusic Award for Outstanding Support |
| 2004 | GLBT/Queer Hall of Fame, organized by the Stonewall Society |
| 2005 | June 2004 QMH show "Queer Music before Stonewall" won a Special Merit Award in the category of Local Music/Entertainment Program at the National Federation of Community Broadcasting conference |
| 2010 | Lifetime Achievement in Music Award 2009 from Pride In The Arts, sponsored by the Stonewall Society |