THE FILE ON STORMY FOSTER
A Cartoon Movie Serial in Twelve Chapters
CHAPTER SIX:
“MIDNIGHT MESSAGE”
TIME AND PLACE:
HAWAII, 1990 (and in flashback, 1943)
CAST OF CHARACTERS:
FREDDY BANG, the STUDIO OWNER
IRENE BANG, the CLUB OWNER
FANNIE FOSTER, the MUSIC DIRECTOR
STORMY FOSTER, the GREAT DEFENDER
SNOOKS, the PARROT
Irene Bang here again. Last week, my husband Basil and I told you how an ex-boxer named Nirmahl Ben-Absalom discovered an uncharted Hawaiian island in 1942. On that island he encountered the Kauwa people, an ancient culture that regarded same-sex orientation as a divine status. After converting to the mystical religion that these people practiced, Nirmahl acquired miraculous powers over the earthly elements.
Taking direction from Kauwa faith elders, he returned to Honolulu with a sacred mission: Protecting Gay Hawaiians from a Nazi plot designed to exterminate them! He took on two new identities: That of nightclub singer Stormy Foster, and that of a masked hero, The Great Defender. We maintain that he was a founder of the modern American Gay Rights movement.
It was early 1943 when The Defender’s exploits started making news, and that’s also when my brother Freddy and I released RHUMBA CHILDREN SING FOR YOU. That was the second 78 RPM album we recorded with Rhumba Children, the group in which Stormy Foster was a featured singer. Let me take a few minutes to talk about those recordings, because his participation wasn’t the only thing that made them special.
Their first two albums were the most popular and widely-distributed, although none of them are easy to find today. Collectors who do find them have noted that Noro Morales and Machito’s Afro-Cubans, two famous Latin bands, are credited with accompanying the Children on their songs. Later releases credited Xavier Cugat, Enric Madriguera and Ray Kinney’s orchestra.
That needs explaining, because those famous musicians were never in the studio with us!
We wouldn’t have been able to afford them and what’s more, there was an American musicians’ strike going on at that time. Those orchestras couldn’t have played on their own records, much less ours! All the same, those credits are valid.
I’ve already told you how Freddy made his living processing audio for movie studios. Some of the films he worked on had Latin music sequences in them and invariably, some good production numbers ended up on the cutting room floor. I won’t say how, but I managed to acquire the right to use some of those soundtrack cast-offs. It was Freddy’s idea to beef up Rhumba Children’s records with them.
PROMO FOR THE 1943 RHUMBA
CHILDREN SING FOR YOU ALBUM
Everybody talks about “sampling” nowadays, but my brother was the first record producer to use that technique. He and music director Fannie Foster would sit and listen to those audio clips, and she’d identify musical passages that she liked. Freddy would single them out, using the crude editing techniques that were available back then, and then record his edits onto an acetate. There was no magnetic tape in those days. He’d give the acetate to Fannie and she would incorporate soundtrack music into her song arrangements. However, Rhumba Children didn’t duplicate that music on their instruments. No, they played and sang along to it!
While the group was recording, we’d be playing back one of Freddy’s acetates over the studio speakers; the playbacks and the live performances were captured at the same time. It was primitive double-tracking, much like what record producer Phil Spector did years later. This is what gave our productions such a unique sound.
Freddy always had a few of those acetates on hand, and sometimes in the middle of a recording session, I’d use a double turntable set-up to switch from one to another just like deejays do today. Those were my first Disco mixes! I've done many more since then, mostly at Gay circuit dance parties. That's a whole other story!
Listening back, it was sometimes hard to distinguish which orchestra’s music the Children were overdubbing. Some of those credits might not be properly matched up, and that’s my fault; but unlike most of today’s record samplers, my brother and I always acknowledged the musicians we “borrowed” from. So that’s the story behind our celebrity musical accompaniment!
By the way, not only did Freddy pioneer sampling, he anticipated long-playing albums. Those didn’t officially hit the market until the late ‘40s, but from 1942 on we pressed our releases on 78 RPM plastic discs that were similar to vinyl. We wanted to bypass wartime shellac rationing, so Freddy invented an alternative. These discs played on existing phonographs and could hold more music than regular 78s: We were able to put two songs on both sides. That saved us a lot of money on the manufacturing end! Freddy also experimented with stereo, which I’ll tell you about later on; my brother was ahead of his time in many ways.
By the Spring of 1943, Rhumba Children were selling out my nightclub, The China-Bahama. People came to see and hear them perform great Sabu songs like “Love Rush”, "Midnight Message", “Red Light Lover” and “Gimme Back My Love Affair”. For that era, the lyrics were quite raunchy - almost lewd! I remember this line about a streetwalker trading cash for thrills. You'd never have heard music like that on the radio but it was like catnip to my clientele: Well-to-do folk always tend to have cutting-edge tastes.
Toni Santamaría would sing lead on the up tempo numbers, or duet with Stormy. Then Fannie would slow down the tempo and Stormy would thrill the women in the audience with swoon-worthy ballads like "For You", "All The Way" and "Help Me Love Again". There was so much demand for the Children, weekend shows weren’t enough: I had to add a third show on Friday nights.
Not that my talent roster wasn’t already strong: Torch singer Cheshire Wu was our big attraction before the Children came, and the dancing Mako Brothers always got a big response; they’d have given the Nicholas Brothers a run for their money, that’s how good those boys were!
It’s safe to say that most of our male patrons came to see the Theresita Carmen Dancers. They were a Folies Bergère-style revue that often performed topless, but they were sophisticated artistes, not strippers. All of the girls had a professional attitude about their work; Theresita insisted on it, and so did I.
Flossie Fan Tootie, our resident comedian, was a laugh riot and a favorite of our servicemen patrons; and Todd Yamaha conducted the sharpest orchestra in the islands. Jazz, showtunes, Latin, hillbilly, traditional Hawaiian melodies! Todd’s band could play anything you wanted; but it was Rhumba Children, fronted by Toni and Stormy, that proved to be the SRO attraction I’d been hoping for.
1943 FLYER FOR CLUB CHINA-BAHAMA
I recall designing an elaborate flyer for the club in early ‘43. I also purchased time on local radio stations and had Flossie record some promos for the club. Those promos were successful in more ways than one: Not only did they keep attendance high, they gave Stormy the idea for his most innovative means of fighting Deacon Diamond’s anti-Gay rhetoric. He became Hawaii’s version of “Tokyo Rose” but instead of pro-Japanese propaganda, he broadcast Gay Pride speeches! I’m sure they were the first radio broadcasts of that kind anywhere in the world.
The Great Defender’s clandestine meetings with groups of Gay people got bigger every time he convened one. The bigger they got, the riskier they got! He needed a way to connect with the community that wasn’t so dangerous. Flossie Fan Tootie cut her radio promos at Baby Grand, my brother's recording studio, and Stormy attended one of those sessions. After she left, he asked Freddy: “What if The Great Defender recorded some motivational speeches? Wouldn’t that be safer than appearing before people in person?” I agreed that it would be, but wondered how those kinds of speeches could be aired. We certainly couldn’t expect radio stations to take them!
Freddy was the kind of man who loved a challenge. He decided that he could set up a broadcasting unit at Baby Grand. It was something he’d already been working on, just for his own amusement. The building had this attic room where he retreated to work on special projects; it was his private sanctuary, and I was the only other person who knew about it up until then. He turned it into a hidden soundstage!
It took Freddy about two months to get the equipment together and rig it all up. He set up a signal tower in a big, abandoned water tank out behind the studio; it was small but very powerful.
Then he secured an open bandwidth near the end of the radio dial. It wasn't licensed so it never had official call letters, but we christened it “Radio Station P-R-O-U-D”!
Of course, Freddy had to devise a way to conceal the source of the broadcasts. It was a daunting task, and that's an understatement: There were military bases nearby, with state-of-the-art communications and tracking equipment. Avoiding detection was an incredible feat to pull off, but he made it look easy. If not for America's ban on Gay recruits, Freddy's technical genius would’ve made him invaluable to the Allied forces; it was definitely their loss! But by helping to protect Gay Hawaiians from Nazi aggression, my brother did become part of the war effort.
March 12th, 1943 was the first time we aired a Franklin Roosevelt-style “fireside chat” by The Great Defender. At what was going to be his last private gathering, Stormy announced that going forward, he could be heard on the air. Subsequent broadcasts were publicized by word-of-mouth. We broadcast for eighteen months, once a month, ending in early August of 1944. The signal usually went out at midnight. It was never a live transmission; Stormy would come to the studio in secret and record his speeches. Then I would come in the next day to edit and time them.
SECRET GAY PRIDE RADIO BROADCASTS
At first it was just Gay people tuning in, but inevitably the general population discovered our bandwidth. Stormy wanted that to happen; reaching a wider audience raised his profile and better positioned him as Deacon Diamond’s adversary. The Great Defender went from urban legend to cult figure overnight! Those “fireside chats” threw the islands into an uproar, especially after young heterosexuals declared support for his message. The authorities were outraged, and they scoured the islands trying to find him. They even tried to block our bandwidth but my brother outwitted them; he always kept us one step ahead!
Stormy never spoke in his natural voice when portraying The Great Defender. He disguised it with a high, piping tone, sort of like how Pop star Michael Jackson speaks. It was totally different from his normal baritone register. He told us he did that not only to conceal his true identity but also to de-stigmatize Gay men with effeminate voices. Somehow, Stormy never sounded silly or stereotypical, and I think that was due to his sincerity, his charisma, and his formidable skill as a public speaker.
Sometimes he also sang, using that same falsetto register; he’d do protest songs set to traditional Hawaiian melodies. I helped him write lyrics for some of them. Later on, Basil composed some original music. We hadn't planned on there being a musical component, but we noticed that hymns were a big part of meetings at the anti-Gay Children’s Protection Committee. The widow Bancrofft would lead them. She was a socialite and good at motivating attendees to donate money. We weren’t fundraising, but Stormy felt that music could underscore his message, too.
The Great Defender ended up singing live as well as on the radio. As I sit here talking, it strikes me how absurd it was: A masked hero performing protest music in front of an audience! But we were dead serious about what we were doing. At first, there weren’t going to be any more secret meetings but they did continue, just on a more infrequent basis. Stormy worried that his message wouldn’t be as effective if he were just a voice on the radio. He may have been right, but that’s a decision he would come to regret!
Thinking back on things The Great Defender did to fulfill his mission, I’m tempted to say that the consciousness-raising meetings and radio broadcasts were the most important. Still, he was given special powers for a reason and that was protecting Gay people from harm. We needed a lot of protection; wartime Hawaii was never a safe place to be openly Gay or Lesbian, but if you were discreet you could usually expect to be left alone. That changed after the Children’s Protection Committee started spreading heterosexist poison disguised as Christian evangelism!
It wasn’t just the vigilantes, it was the police and, well, everybody! McCarthyism had a trial run in Hawaii during the early ‘40s. There got to be this urgency about ferreting out homosexuals in your community. They started hunting us down like they should have been hunting Nazi fifth columnists! You didn’t know who to trust, so it was necessary to watch your step constantly: How you walked, how you talked, where you were seen and who with, what sorts of things you were interested in.
If you were a man who looked too effeminate, you’d get chased and beaten up. The same thing happened if you were a butch woman; you might also be raped! Sections of parks and beaches where Gay men cruised for hook-ups became known and suddenly thugs with baseball bats were “patrolling” them. All of this was encouraged by Deacon Diamond and his band of Bible-waving demagogues, and most of the public seemed to approve. Local bullies were made out to be heroes for cracking an innocent Gay man’s skull! We lived in what I can only call a genocidal atmosphere for a few years.
One of the worst incidents that I can remember was when a bunch of hooded men surrounded the house of a Lesbian I knew. She had thrown a party for some girlfriends on this particular evening. Maybe it was an orgy and maybe it wasn’t, but those bastards believed it was and that’s all the justification they needed to commit murder. A dozen or so wannabe Ku Klux Klansmen chanted kill the dykes! and die, bitches! to terrorize the women. Then they blocked every exit from the house and used torches to set it on fire!
“KILL THE DYKES!”
It would have been an awful atrocity, but Stormy’s parrot Snooks always alerted him to impending danger. He followed her to the house and arrived just in time. The Great Defender caused the woman’s rosebushes to extend their branches and lacerate those arsonists! Then he gave them a taste of their own medicine by making their torches explode. I wish I’d been there to see it!
Stormy said they ran off howling like whipped dogs. “They deserved a lot worse, and I wanted to give it to them,” he told me, “but I had to keep that house from burning down." He also had to get back to Club China-Bahama; a Rhumba Children show was about to begin! His power over fire made it relatively easy to douse the flames. The party attendees were badly shaken up, but nobody was seriously injured.
Whether or not The Great Defender was actually sent to us by gods, he was definitely a godsend! His intervention saved hundreds of people from serious injury, and I'm not exaggerating. Snooks the Parrot did her part, too: She could always be counted on to lead Stormy to the scene of a bashing just before it happened; and if ever he was on stage or otherwise occupied, she would patrol the islands alone and decoy vigilantes away from would-be victims. Stormy told me so.
Snooks also seemed to know when a Gay gathering place was going to be raided. That bird became as familiar to Oahu’s Gay community as The Defender was, and it got to the point where all she’d need to do was fly in the door of a place. People would recognize it as a warning, and they’d scatter long before the police arrived!
You've just read Chapter Six! Click below to read
Fifth chapter in the Stormy Foster saga
Then be sure to read
Seventh chapter in the Stormy Foster saga
Concept by HAMPTON JACOBS and PATTY BALL
Art by STUFFED ANIMAL
Costumes by HENRIETTA la del BARRIO
Project Assistance by RODERICK MACK and DAVE PEARSON
Text by HAMPTON JACOBS