Back of the Book — April 4, 2026,

Gay and Lesbian Demonstrators in Albany on March 14, 1971, Agosto Crystal Machado is holding a sign
Photo by Diana Davies

1. Arthur Evans
2. Agosto Crystal Machado (holding sign)
3. Marc Rubin
4. R. Paul Martin
5. Pete Fisher
6. Nath Rockhill
7. John Paul Hudson aka John Paul Hunter
8. Marty Robinson

The zone is certainly being flooded by Trump and his pals. So much so that last week all of that crowded out even a mention of the 56^th anniversary of my getting involved with the Gay Activists Alliance, or GAA as we all called it. I was in GAA from March 26, 1970, to December 13, 1979, longer than anyone else. There are not a lot of former GAA members left.

I read in The New York Times this week that artist Agosto Machado had died on March 21, the first full day of Spring. The Times said, He was believed to be in his late 80s. I knew him back in the '70s. He was a fellow GAA member. We would see each other at meetings and demos. One time in the Trucks I sucked his dick.

I hadn't known how much a part of the avant-garde scene he was back then. But then a lot of people who were in GAA were involved in all sorts of artistic endeavors, and any number of GAA members were pretty removed from the main stream of society, and for more than their sexual orientation.

I knew that his name was Agosto Machado but he preferred to be called Crystal when I knew him. The Times said that no cause of his death was given, and that he has no known survivors. A lot of gay men have no children and so outside of our partners no one is left after we die. Pickles of the North is pretty much guaranteed to outlive me, but we have no kids either.

Crystal described himself as a street queen long ago and he wore his own sort of costumes. He had a lot of clothing from thrift stores and he had no problem with being what some folks would call flamboyant. He attracted the attention of Jackie Curtis who cast him in Amerika Cleopatra, one of Curtis' theatrical works.

Crystal was a part of the Theater of the Ridiculous in downtown Manhattan. That was avant garde, all right.

Crystal Machado worked with a number of avant garde people in various media and was well known among those folks and the people who came to see their productions.

Crystal was apparently at the Stonewall for the start of the riots in 1969. He was certainly in a bunch of GAA demos. On my Web site I have an image of a bunch of us at a big demo in Albany in 1971, and a lot of the folks in that photograph are no longer with us.

Crystal got heavily into care-giving for his friends who were dealing with AIDS. And he also had a large part of his social circle die from AIDS, as I did. He erected little shrines to some of them and even hosted the ashes of 14 of his friends who had passed away in his apartment, including some famous and almost famous ones.

The Times says that Crystal prepared for his own death by paying cash in advance for his cremation, in order to get a discount, and they report that he left instructions for his executors to mix a bit of his ashes with those of his friends to sprinkle them the Hudson River. The Museum of Modern Art made a film about him last year called, The Underground Archivist: 50 Years of Saving New York History in which he says, A generation or so in the future they'll say, Who was that queen? No, they won't. They'll say, Who was this person?

For quite a while Crystal lived in an apartment on East Fourth Street in the East Village. He had to move after a while as the landlord cleared the building of tenants. He took a great deal of his stuff with him, including the shrines he'd made to friends who had died. The Times says that some of his shrines have ended up in museums.

So another former GAA member has died. There are very few of us left.

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A Senseless Speech

On this program we talked about Donnie Bonespur Trump's bizarre speech on Wednesday night. Maybe he just couldn't stand that the launch of the Artemis II spacecraft would get all of the attention that day. Pickles and I watched that speech. He said nothing new in it. It was disjointed, disorganized and was only about him and cheering on his war with Iran.

At least this speech didn't last as long as some of his others. Maybe he just can't do another long rambling speech about nothing anymore, or at least he can't do them in rapid succession.

We noticed that the TV commentators after this speech were all pretty unanimous in their view of it and in agreement with our take that he said nothing, really. Maybe the media are getting less intimidated by Trump. That'd be good. Still, it was one stupid speech.

And then he fired Pam Bondi the next day! And so bye-bye Pam Bondi. There's a line in one of the Space Trilogy books by C.S. Lewis where one character says to another about the bad guys, They ruin their tools, in reference to how the bad guys treat their operatives. Looks like the same thing goes on here.

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The Greek Moon goddess Selene

Pickles here, glad we humans still choose to go to the Moon, as we did when I was a little kid many decades ago! NASA must have ignored the memo from the Administration to cut out diversity in its ranks what with two of the three NASA astronauts being a woman and an African American, and the forth astronaut a Canadian! The mission is built on cooperation between NASA and four other space agencies - the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre of the United Arab Emirates, plus a bunch of US commercial companies. Aside from being part of a new space race with China, the mission is fueled by the human desire to explore.

In tribute to the mission we offered one of the Homeric Hymns, To Selene who in Greek mythology was the personification of the Moon. These hymns date back to between c. 800 - c. 480 B.C.E., and are attributed to Homer, but may date back even further to the oral tradition. This translation from the Greek was by Hugh G. Evelyn-White in 1914.

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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.

One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board, owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people board that was just totally out of hand.

In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.

Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board during the program.

Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.

There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.

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