Living in the 70s

5 Dec 2024

Happy birthday JOY

History, Music

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This week the show went to air on December 1, which happens to be both World AIDS Day and JOY’s 31st birthday. Arising from a desire by JOY’s founder, John Oliver to bring community and comfort to HIV positive gay men isolated in hospital during the AIDS crisis, JOY first went to air on World AIDS Day in 1993. 31 years later, Australia’s first LGBTIQ radio station is still going strong.

JOY has a commitment to strongly feature LGBTIQA+ musical content across its programming. For niche shows like ours, it can be hard to do this every single show – a lot of artists in the 1970s were not as open about their sexuality and/or gender as they might have been today and there also may not be a lot of information about the personal lives of every band member, producer, song writer or session musician that never became a huge star. Nevertheless, every now and then we like to dedicate a whole show to featuring artists who we know for certain were part of our rainbow community. It seemed appropriate to do so this week. Happy birthday JOY – may we see many more.

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