31: Transcribed

The word "homosexual" was first uttered on American television on the night of October 21st, 1963. The show was Breaking Point, a drama series set in a psychiatric hospital. The episode was a confronting take on sexual harassment and toxic masculinity that directly posed the question to its audience: "What is a man?" Despite network objection, this milestone in queer history happened solely because of the determination of the show's producer: George Lefferts.

This show was just one of many socially conscious, thoughtful and progressive projects from Lefferts, a man whose long life was defined by his writing and his deep empathy for others. In 1960, he spent hundreds of hours interviewing everyday women about their problems for a groundbreaking show called Special for Women. But it was in radio that he'd really cut his teeth in the early days, working on dramatised science fiction shows like Dimension X and X Minus One in the 1950s.

In 1953, he worked with Frank Sinatra on a noir drama series for NBC Radio, Rocky Fortune. Together, they came up with a wacky noir premise for which almost every episode followed the same formula: Rocky is unemployed. Rocky gets a new job. It all goes wrong for him in some way, and he ends up implicated in a murder. Rocky talks his way out of it and catches the killer. Rocky ends up unemployed again. The show was not a hit at the time, and decades of Sinatra biographers have dedicated one or two pithy sentences to it at most.

Today, with every episode widely available online in the public domain, Rocky Fortune sounds different. This week on SUDDENLY, we listen to two full episodes of the show plus one of To Be Perfectly Frank, Sinatra's other NBC show from the same period that saw him in the role of DJ. Looking at the work of Lefferts, Ernest Kinoy and Norm Sickel, we attempt to put Rocky Fortune in his proper context - and reclaim him as a hero for the marginalised, for women, and for the unemployed.

Selected works of George Lefferts:
* Dimension X: "The Professor Was a Thief" (1950) Radio episode, adapted from a story by L. Ron Hubbard. Available on Spotify, YouTube, Internet Archive.
* Rocky Fortune (1953-54) Complete radio series available on Spotify, YouTube, Internet Archive.
* X Minus One: "The Defenders" (1956) Radio episode, adapted from a story by Philip K. Dick. Available on Spotify, YouTube, Internet Archive.
* World Wide '60: "The Living End" (1960) TV film about senior citizens, cast with nursing home residents. Lost or unavailable.
* Special for Women (1961) TV series, either unavailable or lost. Book of original scripts available to read in full on Internet Archive. One episode, "The Lonely Woman", is available on film at the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
* Breaking Point: "The Bull Roarer" (1962) First use of the word "homosexual" on TV. Watch the full episode on YouTube.
* Teacher, Teacher (1969) TV movie about an underqualified and ill-tempered teacher taking on the education of a disabled child. Watch on YouTube.
* Family Album, U.S.A. (1991) Sitcom designed for English learners. Complete video series available on YouTube.

Norm Sickel was a writer active in 1950s American radio. He wrote banter for Sinatra's 15-minute DJ series, To Be Perfectly Frank. Later, he wrote for Rocky Fortune, apparently at Sinatra's request. His episodes were among the most dramatic and socially conscious of the series. They differed in tone considerably from the comedic noir that Rocky Fortune became most known for. Later, his poems inspired the 1956 instrumental album Frank Sinatra Conducts Tone Poems of Color. Little else seems to be publicly known about Sickel. If you have any more information on what else he might have done creatively or where he ended up, we'd be interested in hearing from you.

Join the Australian Unemployed Workers' Union (AUWU) at their website, or follow them on Twitter. AUWU member Jeremy Poxon is also a great Twitter follow to keep up with the latest around Australia's corrupt and cruel welfare regime.

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