KFAI's MinneCulture Presents

Ep. 17: Fresh Fruit - Over 40 Years of Queer Radio from the MinneCulture Podcast We kick-off Season Three chronicling the history of the nation's longest running weekly LGBT radio show!  Fresh Fruit first aired on Twin Cities community radio station KFAI, on May 11, 1978 and has been broadcasting ever since . This audio documentary begins in 1977 by introducing us to the original collective -- a group of activists living in a queer hippy commune in Minneapolis -- and takes us right up to present day in an interview with Dixie Treichel , one of the program's current hosts. Hell Yeah: Queer and Radical Performance Art by Dixie Treichel In the 1990s, queer performance artists like created radical, experimental, and often politically risky work. Artists were rebelling against Reagan politics, the AIDS crisis, Senator Jesse Helms’ attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts, and the era's culture wars. In 2018 a  curated  exhibition   chronicled the era ...

Producers for KFAI's MinneCulture took home five awards from the 2019 MN Society of Professional Journalists’ annual Page One Awards! Anna Stitt and Ryan Dawes took home first and second place in the Best Feature category. Reporter Melissa Olson received third place in the Special Project/In-Depth Series category. Plus, and perhaps most unbelievably, KFAI producers cleaned up in Sports News Coverage. This week on the show, we'll the most recent winners as well as some stories celebrated at the 2018 Page One Awards (as many as we can fit in.) Huzzah! A Violinist Grapples with Death by Ryan Dawes Near the end of his life, Franz Schubert composed "Death and the Maiden." Two centuries later, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja grappled with the dark subject as she and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra brought the piece to life for new audiences. Their recording won a Grammy award. Why She Skateboards, Despite the Pain by Katie Thornton As a teenager, KFAI's...

June 5th - Part One: Minnesota's HIV/AIDS Crisis (1981-1986) by Britt Aamodt In July 1981, the New York Times published an article about a mysterious illness plaguing gay men in New York City. After reading the article, Bruce Brockway , a gay activist and publisher of the Twin Cities' first gay newspaper, turned to his partner and said, " I think I have that ." That was AIDS and Bruce was right. Numbers-wise, Minnesota was never a hot zone of infection. But for the Minnesotans living with HIV/AIDS , the struggles were the same: to stay alive and to fight the homophobia that wanted to ignore an epidemic dismissed as a gay man's disease. June 12th - Part Two: Minnesota's HIV/AIDS Crisis (1986-1996) by Britt Aamodt Five years into the epidemic, people living with HIV/AIDS were still dying of it in increasing numbers and the President of the United States had yet to acknowledge the crisis in public. In Minneapolis, as in other cities, activists were now tak...