Disco: The Music of Gay Liberation

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Disco was one of the biggest cultural trends of the 1970s: its explosion into a mass commercial phenomenon was driven by the 1977 box office smash hit Saturday Night Fever. The film’s soundtrack, featuring the Bee Gees, blanketed the billboard charts for months and was, until Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the top-selling album in music history. Disco became so omnipresent that it ignited a backlash from rock critics and people who just disliked its association with black and gay people. Almost overnight disco was declared dead.

But disco never died for gay people, because it was always more than just music. We've talked a lot about the writing and literature that made gay culture, but dance music has arguably been just as, if not more, important. (OK, we've talked about that, too: see our episodes on going out and on Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance.) The communal group dancing that characterized disco clubs emerged in part from dances held by early gay liberation groups in New York, and the experience of dancing together, often shirtless, became a physical enactment of the ideals of gay liberation that would live on through the AIDS epidemic, the circuit parties of the 1990s until today.

In this episode, disco blogger and DJ Thomas Del Pozo joins David and Domenic to talk about some of the disco writing that appeared in Christopher Street, including Sean Lawrence’s “Discaire” column, Andrew Holleran’s reviews of New York discos, and a 1982 interview with Sylvester. We talk about how looking at music history through a gay lens changes how we interpret disco and dance music. We break down some disco hits to follow the evolution of the disco sound over time, and share some of our favorite lesser-known disco bangers.