Why Disco

The first post I was going to write was about how everybody, I mean everybody, loves Motown and examine what that meant for a music and style emerging right in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. But the events in Orlando changed that.

When people talk about disco now, it’s often as this weird period of huge bell bottoms, cropped tops, mirror balls, and music that was a irresistible blend of soul, funk, salsa, and pop. They think about John Travolta and that white suit. They think disco died sometime in the 1980s.

Disco never died. It morphed into House Music and became the progenitor of every EDM form that’s sprouted, flowered, and died ever since.But I want to write about disco right now because it was the music of gay bars in the 1970s.

In 1974, I’d moved to San Francisco with a good friend. She got a job as a cook and I got a job as a nanny. We were both live-in servants for rich families in Pacific Heights. It was about as bad as you can expect, imperious kids, absent parents, ridiculous hours (basically from 6 in the morning until 10 at night). After ten though, we’d go out and we’d go out to The City. The City was a huge dance club, at Montgomery and Broadway. It was about 99% gay men, with a sprinkling of women who came to dance. And we danced and danced and danced until the club closed and we had to drag ourselves home to grab maybe four hours sleep before the day started.

Dancing to disco at The City was all about sex. It was about heat and sweat and a world without limits, at least for the time you were on the dance floor. It was about living your desires openly, at a time when being gay was only safe in a couple of places, even in San Francisco.

No one gave better voice to that than Sylvester.

A member of the wildly improvisational and uneven Cockettes, Sylvester sang about lust, funk, and.realness. So in memory of the people shot in Orlando and in celebration of queerness in all its forms, let’s funk.