Licking-Off The Dancing Story
Disco Fever!
By M.J. Rahahleh
If I could hop on a time machine and travel back in time, it’d be to a gay bar in Iowa during the summer of 1972, one of the early many spots of gay disco music in the world. The music would be smooth to adjust to, although a bit irritating to first time listeners, but it’s sweeping across the crowd faster than Anna Nicole Smith’s 5$ eyeliner. It soon would become the only music any regular attendant would like to listen to, even during non-clubbing hours because they really began to dig it, although it was rather hard to find albums or records of that style of music at first, even throughout trips to other larger towns like Chicago.
Later on, clubs started knowing the term of ‘mixing music’ and creating song sets that gave an air of excitement on the dance floor for the patrons of dance bars.
Dancing was getting to be more fun all the time. Within a year there was a new title for "bar music" - Disco. Instead of calling them dance bars, the concept was evolving into the name "disco" (in the 1960s there were discothèques; it's a derivative of that word). By late 1975 or 1976 discos were standard fixtures of much of gay life everywhere!
The music was getting better all the time, and somehow, imperceptibly, the music heard in gay bars seemed to be becoming "our music." Perhaps in urban areas it was also a straight phenomenon - there are those who nowadays maintain this - but back then, it was not the music of straight people.
By 1976 disco music was hot on the charts, and at first even without much air play. It signified a shift in what music people were buying; previously radio stations controlled what people heard and this controlled what music they bought, but now, suddenly, disco songs were selling more and more records of the music people heard when they went out dancing.
Disco music was never meant to be listened to while staying at home stoned alone (or with friends) pondering the deeper meanings of life; it never pretended to have insight into the meaning of life. It was unadulterated fun. Fleetwood Mac and other 70s straight groups and their own formulaic genres of the day provided ample albums of music for people to ponder carefully if they wished. Disco music was for dancing, disco was for having a good time, and gay people, who had been prevented from dancing together in virtually all the bars across the United States until the very late years of the 1960s (or in some cases in the 1970s), embraced it and were liberated by it.
There were, of course, many gay people who did not go dancing, who did probably not even care for the music. But for sure, they must’ve missed out on a fine experience during those liberating times.
By 1976 disco music was grand. Many of the artists singing it were gay, black, and women (and assorted combos of these classifications), at times these artists represented perhaps 80% of the songs that were popular; rock and roll proper had never allowed much or any music from these parties into its mainstream. Of course some black singers and groups (James Brown; Earth, Wind, and Fire, etc.) had been deemed OK and given the blessing of the mainstream with white audiences, but women artists were really a real rarity even into the 1970s, and at this point there were no gay mainstream singers who were out. In fact gay disco groups or artists remained essentially closeted until the days of Sylvester. Even the Village People, who sang about the dangers of sex in the bushes of Fire Island (NY), leather boys on Folsom Street in San Francisco, staying at notorious YMCAs, and on and on, throughout the 70s tried to deny or avoid answering any questions about their pretty obvious sexual orientation, a course of action which royally pissed off a lot of gay people whom they'd quite nicely exploited for support in their earliest days.
If I could hop on a time machine and travel back in time, it’d be to a gay bar in Iowa during the summer of 1972, one of the early many spots of gay disco music in the world. The music would be smooth to adjust to, although a bit irritating to first time listeners, but it’s sweeping across the crowd faster than Anna Nicole Smith’s 5$ eyeliner. It soon would become the only music any regular attendant would like to listen to, even during non-clubbing hours because they really began to dig it, although it was rather hard to find albums or records of that style of music at first, even throughout trips to other larger towns like Chicago.
Later on, clubs started knowing the term of ‘mixing music’ and creating song sets that gave an air of excitement on the dance floor for the patrons of dance bars.
Dancing was getting to be more fun all the time. Within a year there was a new title for "bar music" - Disco. Instead of calling them dance bars, the concept was evolving into the name "disco" (in the 1960s there were discothèques; it's a derivative of that word). By late 1975 or 1976 discos were standard fixtures of much of gay life everywhere!
The music was getting better all the time, and somehow, imperceptibly, the music heard in gay bars seemed to be becoming "our music." Perhaps in urban areas it was also a straight phenomenon - there are those who nowadays maintain this - but back then, it was not the music of straight people.
By 1976 disco music was hot on the charts, and at first even without much air play. It signified a shift in what music people were buying; previously radio stations controlled what people heard and this controlled what music they bought, but now, suddenly, disco songs were selling more and more records of the music people heard when they went out dancing.
Disco music was never meant to be listened to while staying at home stoned alone (or with friends) pondering the deeper meanings of life; it never pretended to have insight into the meaning of life. It was unadulterated fun. Fleetwood Mac and other 70s straight groups and their own formulaic genres of the day provided ample albums of music for people to ponder carefully if they wished. Disco music was for dancing, disco was for having a good time, and gay people, who had been prevented from dancing together in virtually all the bars across the United States until the very late years of the 1960s (or in some cases in the 1970s), embraced it and were liberated by it.
There were, of course, many gay people who did not go dancing, who did probably not even care for the music. But for sure, they must’ve missed out on a fine experience during those liberating times.
By 1976 disco music was grand. Many of the artists singing it were gay, black, and women (and assorted combos of these classifications), at times these artists represented perhaps 80% of the songs that were popular; rock and roll proper had never allowed much or any music from these parties into its mainstream. Of course some black singers and groups (James Brown; Earth, Wind, and Fire, etc.) had been deemed OK and given the blessing of the mainstream with white audiences, but women artists were really a real rarity even into the 1970s, and at this point there were no gay mainstream singers who were out. In fact gay disco groups or artists remained essentially closeted until the days of Sylvester. Even the Village People, who sang about the dangers of sex in the bushes of Fire Island (NY), leather boys on Folsom Street in San Francisco, staying at notorious YMCAs, and on and on, throughout the 70s tried to deny or avoid answering any questions about their pretty obvious sexual orientation, a course of action which royally pissed off a lot of gay people whom they'd quite nicely exploited for support in their earliest days.
"... a backlash began against disco music, regardless Travolta's care-free disco moves in tights... this backlash happened and disco retreated to the closets"
Smelling the lure of large profits, the recording industry began to devise ways of bringing disco music to the masses. This was inevitable as the sound had become more and more popular. What the recording industry didn't care about was the fact that a lot of the masses weren't necessarily really all that interested in dancing, and many of the white straight males, in particular, did not like the sound of black people's music, women singers, and music rumored to have gay overtones.
This didn't stop the entertainment industry. In 1977 the movie "Saturday Night Fever" was released. It was about a group of straight, homophobic, racist, Italian-American twenty-somethings in New York who went dancing nightly wearing odd looking clothes and probably too much after shave lotion (they looked nothing much like people I saw or knew in gay discos). The movie was a success, and because of the endless music of the Bee Gees now heard whenever you turned on the radio, a backlash began against disco music, regardless Travolta's care-free disco moves in tights!
This didn't stop the entertainment industry. In 1977 the movie "Saturday Night Fever" was released. It was about a group of straight, homophobic, racist, Italian-American twenty-somethings in New York who went dancing nightly wearing odd looking clothes and probably too much after shave lotion (they looked nothing much like people I saw or knew in gay discos). The movie was a success, and because of the endless music of the Bee Gees now heard whenever you turned on the radio, a backlash began against disco music, regardless Travolta's care-free disco moves in tights!