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On a late December evening in 1956, public radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, broadcast a poetry reading by a young writer whose first book, Howl and Other Poems, had just appeared that fall from local publisher City Lights Books. Allen Ginsberg, who had recorded the tape in KPFA’s studios a few months earlier, performed three poems from the book, including the long poem “Howl.” The broadcast was Ginsberg’s first appearance on radio and the first sound recording of “Howl” to reach a public audience. While the audience for a late-night poetry reading on a noncommercial FM radio station would undoubtedly have been small by commercial network standards, listeners in the San Francisco Bay Area who did tune their FM receivers to KPFA’s frequency would have heard an early recording of one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century. They also would have heard a groundbreaking moment in the history of queer media. As David Lamble, a Bay Area reporter, cultural critic, and queer media innovator would later state, “the first truly gay broadcast occurred whenever Allen Ginsberg first ‘Howled’ on Pacifica Radio’s KPFA” (fig. 1). A few months later, Howl and Other Poems was embroiled in the infamous censorship case that began with the attempted seizure of the book’s second printing by customs officials on the San Francisco docks in March of 1957, and that culminated in the trial and acquittal of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for the sale of obscene material. KPFA followed the local case with interest as it developed. In June, soon after San Francisco police arrested Ferlinghetti and Shigeyoshi Murao of City Lights Bookstore, the station broadcast a special program on “The ‘Howl’ Controversy,” which featured an edited rebroadcast of Ginsberg’s 1956 recording followed by a live panel discussion on the obscenity charge. At Ferlinghetti’s trial, defense attorney J. W. Ehrlich even cited KPFA’s broadcasting of “Howl” in his closing remarks as evidence that the work had been publicly received as having literary and social value. But while Judge Clayton W. Horn’s decision resolved the issue of Howl’s right to circulate in print, raising the bar for determining obscenity in literary works in the state of California, the struggle to broadcast the title poem freely, without censorship, would prove long and discouraging.
