Joey J
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Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States Of America, Joey J was a DJ and Program Director at KYMC-FM from 1991 to 1992. Among several other alternative rock music shows on KYMC, he hosted a controversial talk show on Saturday nights called Midnight Virus, which became quite popular in the area. Common topics included rationalism, religion, racism, and homophobia. At its peak in the spring of 1992, KYMC was more than paying for itself through pledge drives and sponsorships, but most funds went into the YMCA's coffers.
KYMC was the only station in existence to be owned by a local chapter of the YMCA. In July of 1992 the YMCA began to fire many DJs at KYMC-FM, reportedly for their choice of music, their lifestyles, and their religion. Joey J quit the station and led two protest rallies outside the YMCA that summer, distributing flyers with the YMCA acronym spelling out "Young Minds Can't Air" to passers by. The protests made the front page of the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. Another article appeared in the West County Suburban Journal by journalist Mary Shapiro. Additional coverage was printed in the Riverfront Times by journalist C.D. Stelzer, in which he wrote that "a police informant was lurking about," purportedly to gather intelligence on the protesters. Because future US President Bill Clinton was campaigning in Saint Louis at the time, the rallies received no television news coverage.
After the rallies and negative press coverage, KYMC-FM then changed its format to be more family-friendly, and promoted its station as a "radio camp" for YMCA kids. Without the proceeds and sponsorships from the higher ratings before the format change, the station eventually became too costly to run, and shut down in 2007.
Joey J has recordings of all his radio shows on KYMC and is prepping them for distribution in podcast form on the Internet.
Previous to KYMC, Joey J created and operated the largest computer bulletin board system (BBS) in the Saint Louis and Los Angeles areas. Offworld BBS started in 1984 as Dial-Your-Match #88 and grew to 32 phone lines by 1989. Offworld was relocated to Saint Louis in the Fall of 1991. It was shut down permanently in 1994 amidst controversy over system responsibility for user-contributed content. Former Offworld users still congregate at http://offworld.ws.
