In the early 1990s, John Oliver was walking out of the Fairfield Infectious Diseases hospital in Melbourne after visiting another friend struck down by Aids.
He knew he needed to do something to help get the message across to his community – he had watched too many of his friend die.
That something started with the sound of Jimmy Barnes. In 1993, with a group of friends, mainly gay men, Oliver started JOY Media, Australia’s only LGBTQIA+ radio station.
On 1 December, they were working past midnight to get the wiring right, when one realised they had actually started broadcasting – Barnes’s Working Class Man was blasting through the airwaves.
“How butch could it be,” JOY’s archivist, Chris Furneaux, says with a laugh.
The group panicked and switched it off. At 6.20am – an hour later than planned – they went to air with Kylie Minogue.
“John had left the microphone on. He said, can I have a cup of coffee and then we’ll get going. And that’s when Kylie went to air – Celebration,” Furneaux says.
‘Representing ourselves’
In the early 1990s, Australia’s queer community was visible – but still widely persecuted. Gay sex was illegal in parts of the country, men were still being murdered by gangs in Sydney, and the prime minister, John Howard, told the media he would be disappointed if any of his children were queer.
By 1996, nearly 16,000 people in Australia had been diagnosed with HIV and 5,116 had died from Aids-related illnesses.
In Melbourne, many of them were treated at Fairfield hospital.
“So many of our community were going to Fairfield hospital and not coming back,” Furneaux, 75, says.
Oliver wanted to keep his community safe, so he made on-air segments focus on safe sex, interviewing doctors and providing messaging free from stigma. But he also wanted to keep his community company as they were being treated.
“He did the radio program to the hospitals and one person rang up and said, I love the program. It’s a pity I can’t listen for much longer, my life is coming to an end,” Furneaux says.
“And two days later he was gone. That’s how Aids was in those days.”
With hardly any money, JOY started broadcasting from a small office in South Melbourne. In 1996, the station broadcast interviews with members who had been at the Tasty nightclub raid in Melbourne, where about 40 police detained 463 people for hours. They were stripped in front of one other, paraded outside the building, and cavity searched.
“A few of our members were there,” Furneaux says. “So we had first-hand knowledge.
“We were able, therefore, to interview some of our own people, to get their reactions and just warn the listeners. We were defending ourselves, representing ourselves.”
‘These people are family’
Despite being forged in an era of protest, a lot of JOY’s focus has been on fun. Rachel Morrison, 32, is the co-host of the breakfast program and has been at the studio for 10 years.
Morrison has waxed hairy men on air, auctioned off a cast of another presenter’s chest and interviewed the Village People, who stayed for an hour and a half, despite their publicist saying they would only be there for 10 minutes.
“They were having so much fun,” Morrison says. “They were like, we’re not leaving, no.”
The daughter of a minister, Morrison started as a guest on the spirituality show, before moving into hosting roles. Until JOY, she says she didn’t have much connection to community.
“I didn’t do radio to get into radio, I did radio to get into the community,” she says.
“As I stepped into JOY, there’s just this feeling of ‘these people are family’ and straight away they take you under their wing.”
She says one of the best things about the station is finding it in unsuspecting places, like “walking past a building site, with a huge CFMEU flag, but they’re listening”.
On Drive, Morrison and co-host Dean Arcuri focus on community across the country. She says the biggest thing LGBTQ+ Australians are talking about right now is hate directed at the transgender community.
“So it’s our responsibility to serve our community and break down those conversations and prove them wrong.”
Focus on the community
A strong community has been built around the rainbow airwaves, but it is not without resistance and challenges.
One of the longest-running hosts, who passed away during lockdown, used a pseudonym – Tim Lennox – the whole time he was on air, meaning if anyone from his day job heard him, they would not know.
Even today there are still hosts who use an alias. It’s not hard to understand why.
In 2021 JOY moved into the new Pride Centre in St Kilda, where most of the state’s major LGBTQ+ organisations now have offices. When the former CEO Ange Barry was pulling into work on her first week, she drove straight into a noose someone had tied to the car park.
“There was a noose made from gaffer tape hanging off the car park,” Barry says.
“I would say it was probably a local reaction to the Pride Centre being built … It happens.”
Barry has just left her position, but she can rattle off the numbers quickly. She counts 160 volunteers, presenters beaming out from four states, 500,000 monthly listeners on FM, one pandemic, one huge move and one on-air same-sex marriage – the first in the world.
“It was incredibly beautiful. Like I was standing there, I’m not a crier, and I’m standing there with tears running down my face, thinking this is so, so beautiful.“
She says JOY will keep on growing, but its focus will always be on the community.
“I’m so proud of JOY, you know, because I just think we’re talking about the issues that the community need us to talk about, and that’s really, really important.”
