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Two years after the Stonewall riots, where the LGBTQ community rebelled against the overpolicing of gay bars, New York City legalized the act of two men dancing together. With this, the burgeoning disco scene in New York’s gay community flourished. Gay people traded in serious rock music and weighty protest songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” of the 1960s to dance their worries away and escape into a world of glamour, hedonism, and sensuality. Disco was born out of gay liberation. People; gay, straight, Black, brown and white, crowded dancefloors where bass boomed and disco balls rotated from the ceiling, reflecting shimmering lights throughout low-lit rooms. For a few short hours, their differences were of no consequence. In its purest form, disco was unabashedly black, queer, and sensual. The best example of this is Sylvester, the openly queer singer of “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Sylvester’s androgynous
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appearance and falsetto encapsulated the queerness and Blackness of disco. His ethereal falsetto blurred the lines between masculine and feminine with its non-descript sound. Blurring the gender binary was not uncommon in disco music. Michael Jackson followed suit with his upper register on “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” and Donna Summer subverted gender norms by empowering female sexuality and sex work on “Bad Girls.” In 1977, disco mainstream America co-opted with the film “Saturday Night Fever.” It presented disco in a white, masculine, heterosexual package, making a genre popularized by Black women and enjoyed by gay men palatable for the average American. Many Black or queer artists still dominated the charts after the film. However, the question remains: why could this not occur with them at the forefront of the genre? Not only did white, straight men make disco mainstream, they also killed it. On July 12, 1979, The Major League Baseball organization promoted Disco Demolition Night. Attendees were allowed entry for 98c if carrying a disco record. Around 50,000 people crowded the stadium. At the end of the baseball game, disc Jockey, Steve Dahl, burned disco records. This sparked a riot, with police making 39 arrests. This event hastened disco's demise as there was already an oversaturation of the genre and growing conservatism in the United
