Linda Shirley: the dyke behind the mike
I let them know that V m a lesbian and that we're not looking
for small minds at KBOO
BY
A N N D E E
H O C H M A N
V
ou know this voice. Undo Shirley,
M. the ‘dyke behind the mike,' every Friday
night on KBOO, spinning records fo r three
hours, playing women's music from Meg
Christian to Michelle Shocked.
I f you've listened even once, you know the
voice, like I(X) yards o f Boston asphalt, the
A 's and Rs paved flat and wide, dry humor
streaking through it like the big white line in
the center o f the road.
“I ’m terribly honored to be Miss June
Centerfold," she deadpans, then proceeds to
interview the interviewer: How'd you get to be
a writer!Are you a lesbian/Where are you
from ? She does not mince words or pause
much between questions.
Shirley isn't shy on the other side o f the
microphone, either. In the uncommon position
o f interviewee, she delivers the kind o f hyper
monologue that radio demands — one brisk
round on lesbian music and how it's changed,
then switches the subject, easy as flipping a
disc, to her new-found technological
confidence. Click. Portland as cultural
wasteland. Click. Olivia Records' new look.
Click. Life as a lesbian single parent o f a 15-
year-old daughter.
Behind the voice is Linda Shirley,expatriate
from Boston. She began her KBOO career as
a volunteeer who could barely plug in a radio
and worked her way up to hosting a show,
running fo r the board o f directors. For the
last fo u r years she has been KBOO’s
coordinator o f volunteers and special events.
She plans to leave at the end o f June, to run
Girlfriend Productions full-time, bringing
lesbian artists, musicians and writers to town.
Why ? Because she thrills to that kind o f
challenge, pulling disparate pieces together to
make an event. Because she is a self-
described “egomanic Leo." Because, as any
radio host knows, eventually the show ends
and a new one has to begin.
“ I’ve always been into music; music is
something that really influenced me. One of
my dreams was to be a disc jockey in a lesbian
bar. But when I lived in Massachusetts and
Arizona, I'd never heard of community radio
stations. When I moved to Portland, one of
my lovers was doing a jazz show on KBOO. I
started doing Womansoul about seven years
ago. It started out ot be mostly lesbian music,
but through the years it changed to be lesbian
positive and women’s stuff. I can’t possibly
play three hours just of lesbian music. I would
fall asleep.
“ In the old days, if you would party up and
play, say. Gladys Knight and the Pips, people
would call up and say, ‘You know, the Pips
are men.’ People were so intense that those
three hours be really pure. Now our guideline
is that the woman be the featured artist.
“ Radio is accessible. Everybody’s got a
radio. There are 66 community radio stations
across the country. They bring together the
most incredibly diverse groups of people.
Some real sexist pigs, some people who,
politically are just . . . . confused. And they
come together to create this radio station that
really does respond to people versus profit.
You have so much freedom to do
programming that you’re just not going to
hear anyplace else. And I love women calling
me up and loving the sound of my voice on
the radio at 10 o'clock at night.
“ There are more mainstream women artists
now — especially in the last year and a half —
whose music is important and whose lifestyles
reflect a political stance that I like and who, as
Alix Dobkin calls it, are not sexually
accessible to men. Tracy Chapman and
Melissa Etheridge are two that stand out for
me. So I’m playing a little more mainstream.
I’m mostly into rhythm-and-blues and soul.
With the blues, historically, the sound is kind
of ‘beat me, fuck me and I’ll still write you
bad checks.’ These women’s voices are
fantastic, but historically, the lyrics suck.
There are more and more blues singers
coming up who have a little more sense than
that.
“ What have I learned from doing radio? On
a real concrete level, 1 am technologically
really astute When I first came to KBOO. I
could turn my stereo on. If I moved, I
couldn’t get it to work. I never understood
outputs and inputs. So it gave me a lot of
knowledge. That’s what KBOO does. Besides
being a radio station, it’s a real training re
source.
“ I had been on welfare, and I hadn't really
had a straight job. So this threw me into a
straight job. It threw me into the position of
being someone who hadn't had a lot of power
in the structure, and then suddenly having a
lot of power. It gave me a lot of skills and
calmed me down a lot.
“ Also, I had never played with boys. I
would probably have considered myself a
separatist; my choice of who I hung out with
was always women, always lesbians. But
some of my closest connections at KBCX) now
are men. It loosened me up a little bit about
that Plus I made a lot of good connections.
Working at KBOO was a real gift for me, a
luxury, and now part of my motive for leaving
is that it’s time for someone else.
“ I started Girlfriend Productions last fall. I
had produced little concerts here and there. I
decided to really focus in on doing it full-time
because we were missing so much good shit;
it was just not happening. I've got a flair for
it. I like doing it, you know. I love going out
and leafletting. I'm not much into the stars.
But I’m into sharing the music and the
experience.
“ Coming from the east coast. Portland, to
me, has always been kind ot a cultural
wasteland. |My girlfriend| gets Sojourner, the
Boston magazine; every fuckin' night there’s
somebody coming to town — authors, poets,
musicians, speakers. We need these women to
be in our faces, thes** v\omcn whose ideas and
whose music shaped part of our lives and
whose words sometimes more adequately
reflected our experiences than our own words
did. I think we need to see these women. We
need the exchange. I think it’s really impor
tant.
“ There is a lesbian culture. There are
writers, there are musicians, there are poets,
dancers. Women who reflect our lives, who
share the same values, the same experiences.
Without culture, you lose your roots. You’re
kind of wandering through this map of
bland ness.
“ One thing that is really irritating to me is
that this music has never been called ‘lesbian
music.’ It’s always been called ‘women’s
music. Now it’s not even called women’s
music. All the press stuff that Olivia sends out
now is called ‘independent music. ’ Of
course, what they’re trying to do is expand
their audience, trying to cross over. They’re
trying to share their music with more people
and make more money.
“ It's a shame. It’s always been a toss
between selling out and buying in Holly Near
has done it very successfully. Holly Near built
up alliances with all these different groups.
She and her label have been instrumental in
bringing to us the new music from Central
America. She has made alliances with these
people who support her. Still, you go to a
concert, it's 90 percent lesbians.
“ I see the last five or six years as being a
lot of circles of twos. The community was
very couple-oriented Now you read Just Out
and there’s 40 fuckin' groups — women who
like fish, lesbians who like science. And
women are going out to those. Women are
starting to come out of their little circles and
really want to connect and network and be
with other lesbians. That’s kind of how it was
back in the 1970s.
“ In small communities like Portland, it’s
really hard to be an out lesbian and to feel
good about it sometimes. You read the papers,
and you see the lies they tell about us. You see
women in the Marine Corps getting sentenced
for having ‘affection’ towards another
woman. >ou see all these things, and you
think, God, I’m a piece of shit.’ We need
women to say. No, you’re not a piece of shit.
You're great. You’re wonderful. You're
beautiful. You’ve made an incredibly good
choice in your life, and let’s celebrate it.’
“ I think it’s exciting on radio to have a
woman on the air saying ‘dyke behind the
mike. ’ When I was growing up. or even
when I was in my 20s, if I had had a radio
station with a lesbian saying she was a lesbian
and having a good time and playing music, I
would have been . . . thrilled. So I try to be
out there as much as possible. On the radio,
and in my job. I do these volunteer
orientations where anyone who’s interested in
being involved can come to hear about it, and
I let them know that I’m a lesbian and we’re
not looking for small minds at KB(X).
“ People are always amazed that I’m a
mother. I have pictures all over my office and
they say. Who is that?’ I say, “That’s my
daughter.’ and they go, ‘You’re a mother?’
Yeah! And she’s even heterosexual. Coyote is
an incredible child.
“ 1 think children of lesbians . . . I think our
daughters are incredible. I think they’re going
to be on the vanguard of some kind of
progressive thinking when they get to college.
With sons, it’s dicier— from teaching them
how to pee standing up to teaching them how
we choose to be with women, but we don’t
hate them. I’ve seen some numbers put on
boys, where the anger towards men just flows
over to the sons. It’s hard. I’m glad 1 had a
daughter.
“ I think these families we create are really
important. We need these short people in our
lives. We can’t be a whole family of the same
height. We make great parents. Coyote’s
friends are more impressed with the fact that
she calls me ‘Linda’ than with the fact that
I’m a lesbian. I know there’s a lot of
homophobia and racism and sexism in the
younger generation, but I see a little glint, a
little dent in their armor, that they ’re willing
to listen more.
^
j
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