Disco Almost Passes Me By
I was completely unprepared for disco’s takeover of popular music in the mid-70s. I was out of the country from 1974 to 1977 and so missed the early warning salvos from the Hues Corporation (“Rock the Boat”) and Gloria Gaynor (“Never Can Say Goodbye”). While living in Paris, I went to see Saturday Night Fever (version originale), and when I left the cinema, I walked down the Champs-Élysées with a singing heart and footsteps echoing John Travolta’s confident steps in “Stayin’ Alive.” I had no idea why I felt so exhilarated.
It was disco, of course, calling me to the gay community. I was a difficult convert back then, still longing for my first experience of sex with a man (at age 27, no less), filled with internalized homophobia, and clueless about coming out, which is partially why I chose to continue my graduate education in Bloomington, Indiana, a midwestern town of 50,000 people. 30,000 of those were university students.
Nonetheless, in 1978 Bloomington had its one gay bar, Bullwinkle’s, serving both men and women, and disco provided the soundtrack of my coming-out years. And not just the music. Silky shirts with loud patterns and wide collars were quite fashionable. Concentric squares of varying colors made up the dance floor, often lighting up on the beat of the current selection.
I didn’t make much progress on my coming out journey until I fell in love with a Black man in the summer of 1979 and moved to Washington, DC to be with him. Michael was six years younger than I, loved to dance, and grooved to the whole bar scene. I was less enthusiastic but accompanied him often in the innocence of our honeymoon stage. And though I enjoyed dancing, the songs didn’t land with me the way they would have had I recognized myself as part of the community.
The paths to gay identity are many. Some are better trodden than others, but everybody makes their journey at their own speed and in accordance with their individual psychology. By the time I began to fully inhabit my gay identity, I wasn’t looking for community; I was looking for Love. Living in DC, the community was there, the bars and dance clubs being its most visible manifestations, but I treated them – and the music they played – as way stations on my quest for individual fulfillment. Of course I recognized “I Feel Love,” “I Will Survive" and "We Are Family” when they blasted from the speakers, but did I relate to them as calls to a collective identity? Sadly enough, not until much later, after my heart had been many times broken and my happiness self-sabotaged on multiple levels.
I was 30 by the time I entered the gay world. The music that had formed my impressionable soul in late adolescence and early adulthood was rock and roll, folk music, and jazz. No visible gay presence there. Disco made the link between homosexuality and music explicit, but my ears were mostly plugged up to the deeper connection. I just wanted to dance and get laid.
Occasionally, sometimes drug-enhanced, I would experience the collective joy of a talented DJ taking me higher, surrounded by beautiful shirtless men, surrendering to the exhilarating commands of rhythm and movement. You could never mistake disco’s beat, and it seemed, as the dj smoothly transitioned from one song to another, that the music could go on forever. In those rare moments of transcendence, even sexual fulfillment seemed secondary (unless you went to the balcony where the priorities were different).
I couldn’t live in that world nor find community there. Not on the dance floor. That was my limitation. Still, I’m grateful to disco for the joy that it brought, for Sylverster, Donna Summer, the infectious silliness of “It’s Raining Men,” and even the giddy reimaginations of “A Fifth of Beethoven” and Stars 54 “If You Could Read My Mind.”
And as for those white racist sexist assholes who rioted at the so-called Disco Demolition Night in the summer of 1979, they got what they deserved in Donald Trump. But for the rest of us? Put “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” on the turntable and let’s dance! Our music will never die.
(N.B. Yes, I'm aware that it’s Black music, but disco is inclusive and when sister Diana sings “I'm Coming Out,” I know exactly what she means.)
— Robert Philipson
Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in How Black Culture Birthed the First Gay Anthem.
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