At 9:40pm tonight Kamikaze Jones presents an experimental radio play that mines the history of—and utilizes—CB radio to sonically investigate the underrepresented legacies of gay cruising culture in the trucker community.
CB radio in the United States has historically subversive connotations: primarily as a tool to evade police detection during the 1973 oil crisis, in which a nationally mandated speed limit hindered truck drivers’ productivity and earnings. CB radios were further implemented as a means of organizing blockades to protest the speed limit and, concurrently, to discreetly facilitate sex work. The implicit risks of chance homosexual encounters on the open road (exposure, arrest, persecution) were significantly reduced by the ‘misuse’ of these devices.
For this piece, in addition to the manipulation of archival and field recordings, Kamikaze will quite literally ‘cruise the airwaves’ of the Hudson Valley and incorporate the raw recordings of his encounters to explore the innately queer hauntologies and dissident materialities of CB radio.
How does CB radio, an arguably outmoded tool that is nevertheless still used today, continue to inform sexual ideologies? Has the lineage of these technologies moved further away from—or closer to—a homosocial syntax? To what extent have these devices permanently sculpted the semiotics of queer consciousness? It is Kamikaze’s objective to immerse himself in these conceptual inquiries as both an active participant and a sonic medium, to receive and transmit some of the spectral mysteries that exist within these obscured correspondences.