Last week, I was asked by the Maricopa County Democratic Party LGBTQ+ Committee to talk to their June meeting about LGBTQ+ history in honor of Pride Month. I decided to take the opportunity to talk about a topic I have been thinking a lot about: the connection between the rise and fall of disco in the 1970s and the first decade of post-Stonewall LGBTQ+ activism.
I had a great time with the LGBTQ+ committee last week discussing this topic, though as I always do, I had grossly overestimated how much I could fit into my allotted time, and found myself rushing through much of what I wanted to say. So I thought that this week, for my last post of Pride Month 2021, I’d present an extended version of this talk for all of you here. I have organized this history of disco around several key songs, which are linked below. They are also available on an accompanying playlist, along with some other disco classics I couldn’t fit into the talk but thought everyone should hear. You can find the playlist here.
I hope you enjoy!
Pride & Disco
So why talk about disco during Pride Month? There are two main reasons I chose this as the subject for a Pride Month history talk.
First of all, this past year, we were reminded of the importance of being able to gather physically in one space, to dance and listen to music and to share in a joyful communal experience. So I think as we are starting to gather together again this summer, it is good to remember how people had to fight for queer people to be able to gather and of the revolutionary potential of coming together and dancing.
Second, this is also very much a Pride story. It starts with Stonewall and ends with two other riots that both happened within a few weeks of the 10th anniversary of Stonewall in 1979. It is about the first decade of Pride, about revolutionary changes that the Stonewall generation brought about and the backlash to it. It has a lot to teach us. And it is also simply a reminder of the power of queer joy.
1969: Stonewall
Song: The Delfonics, “That Funny Feeling”
So you probably know the story: June 28, 1969. Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. A group of angry gays, trans people of color and sex workers beat back the cops after a raid. I promised I wasn’t going to rehash Stonewall tonight, but there are two important takeaways that are important to our story:
While Stonewall was not the beginning of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, it was a huge turning point, as young people who had come of age in the civil rights, women’s and antiwar movements started advocating for their rights as queer people. Dozens if not hundreds of political organizations are founded around the country in the year after Stonewall, and Stonewall becomes enshrined in gay history with the creation of the first Pride parades a year later.
Stonewall highlights how hard it was to socialize as a queer person in 1969. Stonewall itself was a semi-legal Mob-run shithole that washed glasses in a slop bucket because they didn’t have running water at the bar. While it did have a famously great jukebox, which would have been playing great Philly soul like The Delfonics, it was no one’s ideal of a great queer meeting space. Gay bars in New York (and most other places) were all Mob-run because there was actually a law against men dancing together in New York at the time and gay bars couldn’t get liquor licenses. And when people did get together to dance, meet each other, and hook up, it was always done under the constant threat of a police raid.
As Edmund White, a Stonewall veteran and later author of The Joy of Gay Sex, put it in a Stonewall remembrance in 2007:
GLBT leaders like to criticize young gays for not taking the movement seriously, but don't listen to them. Just remember that at Stonewall we were defending our right to have fun, to meet each other, and to have sex.
1970: The Loft
Song: Manu Dibango, “Soul Makossa”
Because it was so hard to socialize as a queer person, there had been a culture of underground, private dance parties that were either exclusively or largely queer going back to at least the mid-60s. Out of these dance parties came the modern figure of the DJ.
David Mancuso was one of these early DJs. He was a vagabond who had spent most of the 60s as a hippie and acolyte of LSD proselytizer Timothy Leary. He was also a record collector who loved R&B, soul, and funk and audiophile who had built a killer sound system in his New York loft apartment. Starting in 1970, he began hosting weekly invite-only dance parties at his loft. Known simply as The Loft, Mancuso’s dance parties became the prototype that almost all disco clubs of the 70s would emulate, down to the mirrorball he hung from the ceiling.
The crowd was racially mixed and largely but not exclusively queer and the invite-only system ensured a safe space for queer people to be themselves. As Mancuso later said in an interview:
There was no one checking your sexuality or racial identity at the door. I just knew different people.
At this time, there was no actual disco music. DJs like Mancuso played records from their vast collections and started innovating modern DJ techniques like looping and mixing records to keep the dancers on the floor. The music was largely a mix of Black styles such as R&B, soul, and funk and Latin music like samba. In one famous story, Mancuso found an obscure song called “Soul Makossa” by Cameroonian jazz musician Manu Dibango and made it into a hit just by playing it at The Loft. Record stores and Dibango’s record label itself were shocked when people started requesting the record. It was one of the first hints of the commercial appeal of these new spaces.
1971: The GAA Firehouse
Music: MFSB, “Love is the Message”
Disco started to bubble above ground in the early 70s thanks to a confluence of the popularity of spaces like Mancuso’s The Loft and also thanks to the activism of the post-Stonewall movement. New York repealed the ban on same-sex dancing in 1971. Explicitly gay clubs and bars started getting liquor licenses, some actually run by gay people, and many began imitating the underground dance parties by hosting all-night DJ sets.
Thus, the rise of disco is intimately tied to the rise of the post-Stonewall gay movement, and the influence went both ways. Gay activism created the ability of queer people to gather in their own clubs and bars, and not just the Mob-run dives like Stonewall. And gay clubs and discos became a place for activism, recruitment, and organizing. One great example of this two-way relationship is The GAA Firehouse. In 1971, the Gay Activists Alliance, one of the largest of the post-Stonewall activist groups, took over an abandoned firehouse as their headquarters and turned it into one of the first queer community centers. This naturally included hosting a disco dance party on Saturday nights, which became one of the GAA’s best recruitment tools.
1973-1977: Disco and Queerness Go Mainstream
Music: Donna Summer, “Love to Love You Baby”
By 1973, disco clubs were popping up all over the country and disco as a distinct genre of music was starting to be born. This was music specifically designed to be played in these new clubs, with an emphasis on pounding bass lines, soaring strings, and powerful vocals. One of the earliest recognizable disco songs was Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” The explicit sexuality of “Love to Love You Baby,” which features Summer essentially enacting an orgasm on record, was perfectly matched to the sexually open disco ethos.
One of the most fundamentally queer aspects of disco was its emphasis on a sexuality that existed outside of cis and hetero normativity. Disco dancing was not constrained to heterosexual couples enacting courtship rituals in paired dances, as much American dancing had been up until that point. Instead, they allowed freedom to mix and match partners of different genders, as captured by DJ Frankie Knuckles in this beautifully evocative description of early discos:
You could be on the dance floor and the most beautiful woman that you had ever seen in your life would come and dance right on top of you. Then the minute you turned around a man who looked just as good would do the same. Or you would be sandwiched between the two of them, or between two women, or between two men, and you would feel completely comfortable.
As discos spread across the country in the mid-70s, they brought this queer ethos to straight, white Middle American audiences who often would not have even clocked this practices as queer, but just knew they liked them. And at the same time that disco was making American music more queer, mainstream American society was becoming a little more queer too.
Pride parades continued to proliferate, with new cities hosting them every June throughout the 70s. Harvey Milk began his several runs for public office in San Francisco which, though unsuccessful, built up the Castro District’s reputation as a queer mecca and Milk’s reputation as the Mayor of Castro Street. In 1975, Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich became the first openly gay person on the cover of Time magazine due to his battle against the US military’s ban on gay service members. And some cities and counties began passing non-discrimination ordinances that offered employment and housing protections for gay people.
1977: Night Fever
Music: The Bee Gees, “Night Fever”
1977 was the year both disco and the gay rights movement hit middle America like never before, and also experienced the beginnings of a backlash that would fundamentally reshape American culture and politics for the next several decades.
1977 was the year disco fully hit the mainstream. Clubs exploded all over the country, ranging from high end places like New York’s Studio 54, which opened that year, to thousands of smaller clubs in former rock clubs and bowling alleys across the country. And it was also the year of disco’s most famous cultural products: Saturday Night Fever and its soundtrack.
Crucially, Saturday Night Fever went out of its way to strip disco of its Black, Latinx, and especially its queer origins. The main character is a working class white Italian kid named Tony Manera (played by John Travolta). And while we see Tony spending plenty of time on his clothes and his hair, the movie wants to make sure we don’t get the wrong idea about him, so we get a scene in which Tony and his friends harass a gay couple and another in which they sexually assault the only female member of their friend group in the back of car.
The soundtrack by the Bee Gees — three straight white Australian brothers who had previously been a folk rock band — further whitewashed disco while also becoming the defining sound of disco for much of middle America. Still one of the best-selling albums of all time, it was the one disco album your average straight person was likely to own.
Meanwhile, also in 1977, the gay rights movement had its biggest successes but also saw the beginning of a backlash that would last for years to come. This is the year Harvey Milk was finally elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but also the year pop singer Anita Bryant formed Save Our Children — the first explicitly anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy group in the country — to repeal Miami-Dade County’s gay rights ordinance. After an overwhelmingly successful campaign in Miami, Bryant took her act on the road, leading repeals of civil rights ordinances in other cities.
Bryant famously argued that gay people were trying to “recruit” children into their lifestyle since they cannot reproduce on their own. In Bryant’s world view, queer culture like disco was particularly dangerous because it seductively introduced impressionable youths to the gay lifestyle. As disco scholar Gillian Frank put it:
At the heart of SOC’s campaign was the belief that homosexuality was contagious and that exposure to it might turn anyone gay, especially male children.
Bryant’s rhetoric about a creeping contagion of queerness overlapped with the dozens of magazine articles published that year which attempted to explain disco to straight audiences. Many of these articles used the same imagery to portray disco as something that began in gay clubs and is no spreading like a disease across the country, as in this Newsweek article quoted by Frank:
What started a few years ago as all-night dance music in African-American and gay clubs has moved into the American heartland and is fast taking over the pop-music business.
1978: Sylvester vs. Anita Bryant
Music: Sylvester, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”
Despite the best efforts of Anita Bryant and the producers of Saturday Night Fever, disco created space for unabashedly queer artists in the mainstream like never before. The best example is Sylvester, who in 1978 released one of the great disco anthems of all time, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”.
In A Queer History of the United States For Young People, Michael Bronski and Richie Chevat point out the unexpected parallels between Sylvester and Anita Bryant, who in 1978 was launching her most ambitious campaign, a ballot initiative in California which would have banned queer people and allies from teaching in California public schools. Both Sylvester and Anita grew up loving music and church and starring in their church choir. But while Bryant would use her public platform throughout her career to push a fundamentalist Christian worldview that became a foundation of the emerging Religious Right, Sylvester left his family church when he was 13 because he was already openly gay and gender nonconforming. He moved to San Francisco and joined the drag performance art troupe the Cockettes and became a celebrity in San Francisco gay culture before breaking through to the mainstream with his disco album Step II in 1978.
On the excellent “Disco Demolition Night” episode of the You’re Wrong About podcast, Michael Hobbes described Sylvester as “designed in a lab” to freak out conservatives like Anita Bryant, but music critics have also frequently pointed to the obvious gospel influences in his work, such as critic Ann Powers, who described “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” as “like Mahalia Jackson on poppers.” As Bronski and Chevat put it:
Anita Bryant and Sylvester were both, in a sense, religious in their music. She sang to praise God as she understood him. Sylvester’s church was the gay bar and disco music the hymns he sang to celebrate the joy of love and being alive.
So if you were a gay activist in San Francisco in 1978, you were probably spending your days canvassing in opposition to Proposition 6, Bryant’s initiative to ban gay teachers, and then going out at night and dancing to Sylvester.
In November 1978, the whiplash of progress and backlash was probably felt most strongly when the Briggs Initiative failed but then just weeks later, Harvey Milk was murdered alongside San Francisco mayor and gay ally George Moscone by homophobic former Supervisor Dan White.
1979: A Tale of Two Riots
Music: The Jacksons, “Blame It On the Boogie”
And this brings us up to the summer of 1979, the tenth anniversary of Stonewall, and two riots that happened within just a few weeks of the anniversary of that famous riot.
First, on May 21, 1979, the jury in the Dan White case returned a verdict of manslaughter, which had a maximum sentence of only seven years, despite the fact White had walked into City Hall with a loaded gun and shot the mayor of the city and a city supervisor at point blank range. It was widely seen as the jury supporting White’s action. That night, a planned peaceful protest turned violent as gays and allies smashed windows at City Hall and torched police cars in what was known as the White Night Riot.
And then on July 12, the Chicago White Sox hosted Disco Demolition Night. Disco Demolition Night had been cooked up by rock DJ Steve Dahl, who had been on an anti-disco crusade for the previous six months, which was part of a growing Disco Sucks movement across the country. As Gillian Frank has documented, Disco Demolition was the most famous but far from the only act of violence associated with the Disco Sucks backlash:
The antidisco backlash involved acts of intimidation and violence against disco fans and the destruction of disco records. That year in Seattle hundreds of rock fans gathered at fairs and attacked a mobile dance floor. In Portland, Oregon, thousands cheered as a radio disc jockey cut through a stack of disco records with a chainsaw. In Detroit and Chicago antidisco clubs attracted thousands of members.”
The Disco Sucks movement was a precursor modern culture wars like GamerGate. As with GamerGate, Disco Sucks was a movement of young, mostly white, mostly straight men who were angry that pop culture was no longer specifically tailored to their interests. Like video gamers in 2014, rock fans in 1979 had been raised on two decades of cultural product that had largely been enacting the sexualized, violent fantasies of young straight white men. The introduction of other perspectives and, most dangerous of all, the idea that young straight white men may need to change their behavior, threatened this adolescent masculinity. As Gillian Frank explains:
The backlash against disco saw heterosexual men attack disco music because they believed that disco culture limited their ability to interact with women, excluded them from heterosocial spaces, imperiled their heterosexuality, and privileged an inauthentic form of masculinity.”
This idea became so prevalent that it found its way into disco music itself. The Jacksons’ 1979 disco song “Blame It On The Boogie” is about a straight man who can’t “get no loving” because “my baby’s always dancing” at discos, presumably with gay men.
At Disco Demolition Night, the planned stunt in which Dahl would blow up a crate of disco records went awry when the crowd rushed the field and started a full blown riot. While the gays in San Francisco had been rioting weeks earlier because the criminal justice system had told them that even the life of their most famous leader had no value, the young, mostly white, straight and male crowd in Chicago was rioting because a type of music was challenging their masculinity.
The Aftermath: So What?
So Disco Demolition Night is usually where the story of disco ends. By 1980, its commercial popularity had crashed and it became a cultural punching bag. Similarly, The White Night is usually also told as the end of the first era of gay rights activism. The following year, Ronald Reagan was elected on the strength of the Religious Right backlash powered by people like Anita Bryant. A year after that, the discovery of AIDS would radically rewrite the next 15 years of gay activism.
But disco did not actually die. It transformed into “dance” music and later genres like house and EDM. Disco is still everywhere in pop music. Ironically, one of the greatest albums of 2020, a year that will be forever remembered for our inability to gather together in groups and dance, was Dua Lipa’s heavily disco-influenced and poignantly titled Future Nostalgia.
And what we now know as the LGBTQ+ rights movement also did not go away. Even in the depths of the plague years in the 1980s and early 90s, the movement would be defined just as much by the spaces it created for gathering, celebrating, and often mourning, as it would be by street protests and legislative battles. From the Ashes Action in 1992 — where ACT UP members threw ashes of loved ones lost to AIDS on George H.W. Bush’s White House lawn — to virtual drag shows in 2020, the movement has always found new ways to create space for community.
So what can we learn from this:
Expressions of queer joy will always scare reactionary forces, and we have to be prepared to withstand their backlash and fight back. I see that firsthand when I have to deal with protestors harassing kids outside of Drag Story Hour events. But this also shows how important and revolutionary queer joy, queer art, queer spaces, and queer culture are.
Don’t let people, whether they’re reactionaries on the other side or joyless cranks on our side, make you feel guilty for going out and dancing, for creating music and art. If you’ve ever been in a safe queer space, where you could dance with whoever you wanted to dance with and wear whatever you want to wear, you have the queer elders who made those spaces possibe. That includes the activists in the streets and getting elected to office but also the DJs and musicians and dancers who created disco. And you owe it to them to spread your own queer joy now and make sure those spaces are still around for the generation after you.
Further Exploration
If you want to know more, check out some of my key sources for this week:
Ann Powers, Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music
Michael Bronski and Richie Chevat, A Queer History of the United States for Young People
Gillian Frank, “Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash Against Disco”
Discussion
Let me know in the comments:
What queer spaces have been important to your life?
How has the pandemic changed your relationship to queer spaces?
What is your favorite disco song?