Karel and engineer fired in one-paragraph e-mail and three-minute phone call

karel/jack swanson

Charles "Karel" Bouley, San Francisco's lone gay voice on KGO-AM (810) talk radio, was fired Tuesday afternoon, a week after some profanities went out on air when he thought his microphone was off.

"They silence the most prominent gay voice in the Bay, right as Prop 8 passes. How lovely," said Karel in an email.

Karel said Swanson told him "it got too big."

It's a sad day for Bay Area talk radio. Karel was a colorful figure, and, in his 40s, the youngest talk host on KGO, which has little else to attract younger listeners. Karel played disco and house music, but is surprisingly sharp in a range of topics. He could take apart a car engine, for example, and talk at length about cars and technology and economics.

He had the qualities that make for great talk: he wasn't a party line guy; he wasn't affiliated with the knee jerk groups you might expect; and his show was always a surprise. Not to mention that he was flamboyantly gay and honest about it, something you never hear in the media in San Francisco, the capital of all things gay.

Swanson hasn't yet returned my call, but I've dealt with him long enough to bet that he will say that the company was worried about the fines that such irresponsible behavior could incur.

The real reason, I'd also bet, is that general manager Mickey Luckoff, an old school guy, didn't get Karel and didn't like his schtick. Swanson and Luckoff supported another loose cannon, Michael Savage, and watched him rise from a Marin County wack job to the top of the national radio heap. Radio folks are less inclined to take such risks today.

Let's not forget, Luckoff passed on Rush Limbaugh early on....which he later said was the biggest mistake of his otherwise successful career. I put this one in a similar category.

But I have no doubt that Karel will end up on the air somewhere, just as Savage had his biggest success after he left KGO sister station KSFO for KNEW and syndication by Mark Masters' Talk Radio Network.

In his defense, Karel says that he was told by the engineer, who left the studio to use the bathroom, that his microphone was off. The engineer was also told, he says, to make sure it is off during breaks because Karel talks to his chat room during the breaks, saying things not appropriate for the air.

"Weekends are cheap and they were using a cheap engineer for my show," he said. "My show shouldn't have had an inexperienced engineer for my show, which is done remotely, and in which the host doesn't have an on/off switch on his mic They put an inexperienced driver in the seat and the show crashed."