The Gilded Boys
The gilded boys are dancing
with their lovers brothers lover.
Those golden lads are having one fine time.
Swaying rather wildly
to the ever present bass hum
from a hundred hidden speakers
within their platform heels.
As colored lights come screaming
to glitter off their denims
to glance on plastic pins.
Felice Picano, The Gilded Boys (1975)
There’s a somewhat guilty secret I’ve not shared with anyone before.
I’m a gay man, out from the late 70’s onwards and I don’t really like disco. Not till it was far too late, at least. Shocking isn’t it?! I never felt that happy with it, within it, around it. To enjoy it I felt you needed to be off your face, inhibitions thrown to the wind. What might have worked in Club 54 in New York seemed to me to fall flat on its face at Foxy’s or Roxies nightclub in outer suburbia. Sure, I went through the motions but it was more a Saturday Night Chill, than full on fever. I fully realise that I’ll be shouted down on this one though. For many, confident enough in their moves and grooves it was heaven – and Heaven every time.
In a seminal 2011 article entitled ‘Disco & the Queering of the Dance Floor’ Tim Lawrence succinctly covered the development & attraction of disco music and the power its clubs held over gay men during the 1970’s. Certainly these were the places that you went to in London, at least when I arrived on the scene in the late 70’s, along with such people I suppose as Neil Tennant, in his high heeled shoes. Clubs such as Spats in Oxford St, Bang in Tottenham Court Rd and Heaven in Charing Cross were already well established.
Looking back at footage now of men and women dancing in those clubs it seems a different era; well, it was. For me, standing watching Amanda Leer sing ‘Ring My Bell’ (clip below) in Spats and throwing samples of her record to the audience is a key memory. I don’t think I ever managed to catch one in my life: blame my all too diminutive height.
I met someone who became a good friend, much later on, the much missed artist (there I go again..) John Mansell, who was able to recall the event as well; by remembering our relative positions, close to the speakers, we realised that we must have been within touching distance then, maybe even next to each other. In fact we were able to plot our parallel lives through such relative positions when watching various club acts, in the period – Divine, Grace Jones and on, often close but never meeting, just another face in the crowd. It was to be thirty years on from those nights, that we first talked.
If I am to talk about the London I knew in this period and go on to address the ‘alternative scene’ to this alternate scene, as it developed in the early 80’s, I suppose that I must also address, at least to an extent, the hold that such large commercial clubs had on their gay audience by then, if I am then to explain why some of us felt the need to- if not reject it- create some kind of alter alternative.
Lawrence talks about how in New York, ‘by turning on a single spot, then, dancers could move in relation to a series of other bodies in a near-simultaneous flow and as part of an amorphous and fluid entity’. Well, you know what he means. He also mentions Ronald Bogue’s 2004 notion about how, in such situations:
‘the dancer becomes a decentred body that has ceased to function as a coherently regulated organism, one that is sensed as an ecstatic catatonic regulated organism, a personal zero degree of intensity that is in no way negative but has a positive existence’.
Again, if you’ve been in such a place, you’ll probably well know what he is getting at. Disco music was arguably not the first to do this but it was perhaps the first time the barriers to create such an experience fell away to such an extent, so regularly and on demand.
For many, if not most, this experience was a revelation. The freedom to dance in an atmosphere where inhibition was minimal and yet the experience was a regulated one, controlled by the host, the DJ, a place of relative safety, security, where the everyday could be forgotten for a night. For gay men that covered a huge multiplicity of interests: desire, attitude, behaviour, dress and so on. The idea of looking and dressing in a similar fashion was becoming popular for men.. so much so that the word ‘clone’ caught on for this look. It enabled gay men to make a statement about their sexuality and its related power to other gay men and more widely to the world at large. That is not to say the look or dress code at such clubs was completely similar, as some men dressed flamboyantly, to make a similar statement. In fact clothes of the period were often flamboyant, partly as a result of the influences from the fusion of natural textures & fabrics which came into prominence in the late sixties during the beatnik/hippy period, along with the huge array of colours and textures becoming available using synthetic mass produced fabrics & materials such as polyester and rayon in the early to mid seventies, along with the notion of the boutique shop, in which to purchase them.
However they dressed, gay men were always going to have a lot invested in this new disco experience that had been created, at least to some extent, primarily for them. The heyday of disco has been well covered in popular culture, in relatively mainstream films such as ‘54’ about the New York club Studio 54 which opened in 1977 and literature like ‘The Band Played On’ (full movie version of book, 1993). Most important to the disco experience however was of course the anthemic sound.
The notion of a gay ‘anthem’ is perhaps something developed in more recent decades, ‘I am what I am’ by Gloria Gaynor perhaps being the most commonly identified gay anthem, and something I can hardly even bear to listen to now, due to its over prominence on so many playlists, for so long. There were ten elements identified by the editors of the 2002 book Queer, which they claim describe themes common to many gay anthems: “big voiced divas; themes of overcoming hardship in love; “you are not alone;” themes of throwing your cares away (to party); hard won self-esteem; unashamed sexuality; the search for acceptance; torch songs for the world-weary; the theme of love conquers all; and of making no apologies for who you are.”
True, these were indeed the themes that we took to the disco and shared with our fellow dancers in the 1970’s. Yes, we held our head up high and shouted out ‘I am what I am’. (Unfortunately, in retrospect, probably rather too many times in relation to that particular song, as far as I am concerned). For me personally, I suppose the song I recognised then & now as being of my era was Sister Sledges 1979 classic ‘We are Family’ (see below). This was one of the most anthemic songs at ‘Bang’ on the Charing Cross Road in London, where I used to go regularly on a Saturday night. Another was ´Ring my Bell´ by Anita Ward, who I saw live at the gay club Spats in Oxford Street also during 1979.
It wouldn’t be right when discussing gay disco, not to mention Sylvester as well. Although he was performing well before the disco era (in 1970 he joined the San Francisco phenomenon The Cockettes, and released several albums of mostly R&B oriented material) he struck gold in 1978 with a pair of disco classics, “Dance Disco Heat” and “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real.”
As happens fairly often with a music track that does particularly well, it was actually the production genius of Patrick Cowley, who really delivered on the song and made it into such a huge success. The songs were often about the personal relationships we embarked upon in our lives (‘Its Raining men, hallelujah’ sang the Weather Girls in 1979, and a little later as disco’s up tempo cousin, hi energy (hi N R G) music developed ‘So many men’, so little time’ echoed Miquel Brown). The songs were seldom linked to notions of what became known as queer liberation though, beyond the personal.
Even as early as 1977, the experience had become homogenised, sterilised, cloned and recreated for heterosexuals to enjoy. Discos sprung up right across the UK in both large and small towns. Films such as Saturday Night Fever paved the way for the widespread commercialisation of disco music and clubland both in the USA and in most other western centres. None of this is new anymore and has been well covered by a host of writers in recent decades. Less well covered perhaps, is what this commercialisation did to gay sub culture, how it divided gay culture and marginalised some in the process. For some of us, its excessive masculisation never appealed in the first place or simply became a bore.
Yet for others it provided new opportunities and new beginnings. Many, in the larger towns where gay clubs existed had gone to discos to dance simply because ‘that was what you did’. Options were often very limited for gay men. Before disco, dancing between couples was very regulated. The freedom offered by rock and roll dance for couples, the Jitterbug for example, to engage in close physical contact did not extend to same sex couples. Disco changed that. You could dance closely, if you wished with just about anyone, if they were willing too. And very often they were.
