recognition through several industry awards, including sharing a Peabody Award and a Major Armstrong Award for his work on the program “Conversations with Horowitz,” and another Peabody Award for “New York City Musicbox.” In 1994, he began working at as a production engineer at WQXR until his retirement. Pitts died on May 21, 2015, from lung disease. Social and Political Beliefs Sexual Freedom Historian Toby Marotta notes that Pitts marked an exception from the norm among early Gay Liberation Front activists, who had become politicized within the New Left and generally lacked a “strong and positive sense of identification with the gay subculture.” By contrast, Pitts and a few others were “self-taught radicals with strong libertarian biases and little experience in the organized Movement,” which informed his divergent perspective from the nascent sexual politics of the GLF radicals. While many of the young activists criticized gay male sexual culture, condemning promiscuity and anonymous sex, Pitts consistently defended and celebrated it. Pitts insisted that young people were sexual beings and deserved the opportunity to explore their erotic selves with themselves, their peers, and adults. His support for the right of younger and older people to form intergenerational sexual relationships, as he advocated in discussions on his program “Out of the Slough,” proved one of his most controversial topics, attracting significant criticism. Pitts was a practitioner and defender of S&M and a participant in the gay leather community. While emphatically defending the validity of consensual S&M, Pitts joined with other “radical gay sadists” in criticizing the “conservatism, consumerism, hipsterism, and outright sexism” he perceived in gay male leather and S&M communities emerging visibly in the 1970s and exemplified by figures such as filmmaker Fred Halsted and author Larry Townsend. Consumerism Pitts was a vehement critic of consumerism, particularly its impact on gay communities. In a 1989 letter to his doctor published in the journal And Then, he lamented that before the AIDS epidemic, gay men “bought into an ugly, vicious scene, where one’s value was only what could be currency in that money-culture: money itself, or saleable good looks.” In contrast to the original inclusive, counter-cultural message of gay liberation, he believed, they were “utterly consumed with what they could consume, since their freedom and equality as human beings ended with their wallet or their credit line, whichever went first.” Free Speech Pitts passionately advocated for free speech without restrictions. He put