Art Blake

In the second half of the twentieth century, new sounds began to reverberate across the United States. The voices of African-Americans as well as of women, Latinx, queer, and trans people broke through in social movements, street protests, and in media stories of political and social disruption. Postwar America literally sounded different. This book argues that new technologies and new mobilities sharpened American attention to these audibly coded identities, on the radio, on the streets and highways, in new music, and on television. Covering the Puerto Rican migration to New York in the 1950s, the varying uses of CB radio by white and African American citizens in the 1970s, and the emergence of audible queerness, Art M. Blake attunes us to the sounds of race, mobility, and audible difference. As he argues, marginalized groups disrupted the postwar machine age by using new media technologies to make themselves heard.

Although film, television and mass-market CB radio ephemera represented CB as anti-authoritarian, its use frequently allied it with forces of law and order, certainly with a mostly white, male network of “good buddies” eager to effect control over their individual and community lives. In Los Angeles in particular, the local racial-political context during the years of the CB radio fad—roughly 1975–1978—created an ideal environment for such racialized uses of CB radio. I argue here that working- and lower-middle-class white men in Los Angeles in the 1970s used CB radio to create an audible sense of order. Faced with newspaper articles suggesting high levels of crime committed by black men against white people on L.A. freeways, and feeling a keen sense of isolation and cultural or socioeconomic vulnerability in their daily lives, they derived reassurance from hearing other apparently “white” voices of fellow citizens within the paradoxically vulnerable and impregnable environment of t...

In the spring of 1900, at the dawn of a new century, New York City’s public image was about to begin a major refurbishment. Due in part to the architectural transformation that occurred in the city between the turn of the century and the end of World War I, during that 20-year period Americans saw reasons to question the late nineteenth-century image of New York as the prime example of the undesirability and un-Americanness of urban life and culture. Between the turn of the twentieth century and the end of World War I, boosters East and West promoted what they argued comprised the uniquely American characteristics of, respectively, New York City’s new buildings and the rocky landscapes of states such as Colorado and Arizona. Establishing each place’s status as a definitively American landscape, as judged by their promoters, confirmed a key selling point to their consumers in an era of growing cultural nationalism. The direct visual and metaphorical association made by local pundits,...

The historical significance of African American use of citizens band radio rests in its functioning as a nexus for, and challenge to, various histories: of the politics of black speech and oral culture; of the role of radio programming in the creation of black cultural identity; and of race and technology. Black CB also shows how “community” and “identity” do not necessarily originate through direct contact and communication. As this chapter shows, its users built on an already existing black aural public sphere—rooted in black-interest broadcast radio, jive talk, and jazz and blues lyrics—and adapted CB technology to combine with that aural-oral sphere to connect geographically and socially diverse individuals. Black CB thus indirectly created a technologically mediated community based on perceived audible racial identity.

Listening to the Puerto Rican migration in the late 1940s and the 1950s, I provide in this chapter an example of the larger context in which audible difference operated in the era preceding CB radio’s mass popularity. The first major postwar migration from outside the mainland United States began in 1948, when many thousands of Puerto Ricans left home for New York City in search of economic mobility and better opportunities than their island territory could offer. New York had not experienced a mass migration of this sort since the turn of the twentieth century. So when Puerto Ricans came to New York in large numbers from 1948 to 1958, their presence represented certainly an audible, if not always a visible, sea change in many working-class neighborhoods—places already under increasing pressure in that same decade from urban planning initiatives to rid the city of “blight” by demolishing vital, if poor, tenement neighborhoods.

In contrast to the prevailing public image of New York before World War I, when the burgeoning skyscraper “landscape” seemed its greatest new attraction, by the 1920s observers of New York had lowered their gaze to the streets, as it were, and seemed more interested in assessing New York’s status by means of its population rather than its buildings. “It is not so much the place … as the people,” mused renowned British writer and frequent visitor to New York, Ford Madox Ford, in his 1927 book New York Is Not America, hen considering New York’s appeal. He dismissed the urban landscape as the city’s defining characteristic in favor of its diverse urban population.1

Gay and lesbian voices existed on a small sliver of the American airwaves in the 1970s during the same time CB radio reached its peak popularity among white Americans. In the same Los Angeles area ranked by the Federal Communications Commissions as having the highest numbers of CB radio users, and in the same time period, listeners identifying as gay or lesbian could hear similarly identified presenters speaking to them about their community. Unlike straight, mostly white voices on CB radio, however, queer voices on a small-scale volunteer-run public radio network enjoyed no representation in popular culture or in advertising. If you wanted to hear openly gay or lesbian people on the radio in 1970s America, you would have had a hard time finding them outside a show such as “IMRU.” However, if you knew how to listen and what to listen for, the audibility of queerness and of queer voices had existed for decades. In a manner similar to how black men sought out and heard each other as they tuned their CB radios to listen across long distances, gay men throughout the twentieth century tuned into a communication system “off the spectrum,” a terrestrial embodied “technology” of intonation and shared vocabulary comprising a type of insider language resonant with the connection their heterosexual contemporaries later found through CB radio. The chapter concludes with a discussion of other forms of electronic media that have offered access to public communications to marginalized communities such as public access cable television and, more recently, online social media.

... venue—such as a nightclub—is connected to “the deep hu-man craving for free-spirited joy.” While read-ers of Burton W. Peretti's ... Works that have explored aspects of Hearst's life include Rodney Carlisle's Hearst and the New Deal (1979), Pau-line Kael's The Citizen Kane ...

In Paris in 1975 Eldridge Cleaver, exiled revolutionary African American activist, former Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, appeared in photographs and newspaper articles wearing, and discussing, pants he had designed. The major innovation in Cleaver’s pants was a redesigned crotch: instead of the usual button and zip front opening, his pants featured a soft panel with a protuberant fabric appendage into which Cleaver intended the wearer’s penis to fit. Why did Cleaver channel his intelligence and creativity into menswear at that moment? How did Cleaver’s penis-positive pants design resonate in 1975 with black politics and gender politics? And why am I, a queer transgendered man, writing about these pants? Through this article I hope to contribute to a discussion in fashion studies about the materiality of bodies and the role of self-fashioning, particularly for those living in resistance to dominant codes of gender and race. I situate and analyze Cleaver’s pants ...