End of an era

David Taffet

TAMMYE NASH | Managing Editor
Nash@DallasVoice.com

In era is coming to an end for LGBTQ+ North Texas. After 35 years as a co-host on Lambda Weekly, David Taffet is retiring following a Parkinson’s diagnosis a year-and-a-half-ago. And he’s looking for someone to replace him.

Lambda Weekly, the longest-running LGBTQ+ radio show on the air anywhere, airs each Sunday from 1-2 p.m. on KNON 89.3, North Texas’ public radio station. Taffet first joined the show in 1989.

“In 1989, I was writing travel articles for Dallas Voice, and Bill Travis — who was the Lambda Weekly host at the time — asked me to come on each week to do a travel spot,” Taffet recalled this week. “Usually, the piece was recorded and then played on the air. So I usually wasn’t even in the studio when it was broadcast.”

Then Alonzo Duralde joined Travis as the show’s cohost until 1992, when both men left the show on the same day — Travis to move to San Francisco and Duralde to move to Los Angeles. Steve Walters stepped in then to take over as host.

“Steve had radio experience, but his first day at Lambda Weekly, he was just really nervous,” Taffet said. “I went into the studio to see if he wanted me to keep doing the travel spot, and he was so nervous, I asked him if he wanted me to stay. He said yes, so I sat down and we just spent the hour talking about whatever.

“At the end of the hour, I asked if he wanted me to come back the next week, and he said yeah. So I became his cohost,” he added. “That way, he had someone to talk to. We got gay newspapers from all over the country back then, from all over the world. And we would read the articles and find things to talk about. And we would fill in between the segments with music.”

Before long, Taffet said, he and Walters started inviting guests to join them on the show each week, either for a short segment or for the whole hour, “and they would just join our conversations about whatever garbage we were talking about that day.”

Walters left the show in 1998, and Cathy Tipps stepped up as Taffet’s new cohost. The two started advertising for a third cohost, and that’s when, in about 1999, Lerone Landis joined the show. Shortly after, Tipps left, and “that’s when Patti [Fink] came along. She came on first as a guest. Then Lerone and I asked her to come on as a cohost,” Taffet said.

Taffet, Landis and Fink then spent the next 25 years together, cohosting Lambda Weekly each Sunday, until Landis stepped down from the show in late 2024.

“We went through a lot together,” Taffet said of those two-and-a-half decades he shared cohosting duties with Landis and Fink. “ Same-sex marriage — when Lerone [and his partner] started talking about having a kid, we insisted that they go to Canada and get married, because we didn’t want their kid to be a bastard!”

Landis and his now-husband did, indeed, go to Vancouver and get married before they had their daughter though surrogacy. Then Patti and her partner, Erin Moore, were married.

“Then Brian [Cross] and I got married,” Taffet said, “and then Brian passed away eight months and 27 days later.”

Through it all, Taffet said, he and his cohosts “talked about everything on the air. We were open about everything and discussed all of our own life events. We talked about the LGBT news locally, around the state, around the country and the world.

And we heard from people all the time about how much Lambda Weekly meant to them,” he continued. “Patti’s favorite story to tell is about the guy who called us once to tell us that he was a student at Baylor [a notoriously anti-LGBTQ+ school in Waco], and every Sunday he would drive up to Hillsboro [about 35 miles north of Waco] so he could get KNON’s signal and listen to Lambda Weekly, just so he could have a connection with somebody else who was gay.”

Guests to remember
Although it wasn’t always recorded, these days the Lambda Weekly show each Sunday and then re-aired as a podcast. Those recordings help cement the shows place in LGBTQ+ history.

“So many of our interviews are history, like our interviews with [actor] Leslie Jordan. He’s gone now, but he was on our show five times, and the recordings of those shows live on.

Same with [the late Congresswoman] Eddie Bernice Johnson. She was on a number of times, and several of those interviews are recorded,” Taffet explained.

The list goes on and on, ranging from local community members talking about their lives to international celebrities and politicians and elected officials both LGBTQ+ and straight: Cleve Jones, founder of The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, actresses Doris Roberts and Ruta Lee, former Houston Mayor Annise Parker and former state representative and Lesbian and Gay Rights Lobby executive director Glen Maxey.

Former Texas state Rep. and now Congresswoman Julie Johnson is on that list, as is state Rep. Jessica González, “every gay city council member Dallas has ever had, and the heads of all the local nonprofits,” Taffet said.

While every guest was special, there are some who stand out in Taffet’s memory, like attorney and politician Jim Mattox, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 to 1983 and was Texas Attorney General from 1983 to 1991. “I will never forget him telling me, ‘Ya know Dave, a gay person voting for a Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders!’ I wish we had that interview recorded!”

Another of Taffet’s favorite guests was Spanish actress and guitarist Charo. “When she was on the show, she told this story about how, one night, she was walking through the Castro and she saw this bar that was having a Charo look-alike contest. So she decided to enter.

And she lost!,” Taffet laughed.

Then, later, Charo sent Taffet a letter, thanking him for a unique interview, saying that he was the first person to ask about HER rather than just her stage persona. “She is a very talented flamenco guitarist,” Taffet said, explaining that instead of asking her to show off her famous “cuchie-cuchie” routine, he asked her how that bit got started. She explained that it started when she was a teenager making her American debut on Xavier Cugat’s TV show. She didn’t speak much English then, so when someone asked a question she couldn’t understand well enough to answer, she would just smile, repeat the phrase “cuchie-cuchie” with the hip wiggle added for emphasis!

What they’re looking for
Taffet said that Lambda Weekly isn’t looking for someone to replace them who will make a 35-year commitment to the show, “just somebody who will be there every Sunday, who lives to have a nice conversation with people.” The ideal cohost is someone who can book guests, who can be there early on Sundays to let those guests into the station and then pre-interview them before the show starts. They need someone who can learn to run the sound board and keep up the show’s logs, attend a couple of station meetings each year, record the show each week and run the quarterly pledge drive.

“We need somebody with an interest in politics, entertainment, lifestyle culture — all that stuff — and who can go from interviewing a member of Congress one week to interviewing a local actor in a play the next week,” Taffet said.

Cohosting Lambda Weekly may be a volunteer gig, he said, “But we need somebody who will treat it like an actual job. I am ready to retire, but I will stay long enough to help a new person get started.

“We cover local, state and national LGBTQ events and news. A new person coming in can make the show into whatever they want. We did that before,” Taffet said. “I just want someone to replace me who will enjoy doing this over the next several years as much as I have enjoyed it over the last 35 years.”

Anyone interested in joining the Lambda Weekly cohost crew can contact David Taffet at Taffet@DallasVoice.com. Put “Lambda Weekly cohost” in the subject line.