Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (10 page)

While the British soul scene helped create the blueprint and the foundation for the disco craze of 1977–79 with its lost-in-translation version of African-American music, this was only the beginning of its influence. From the birth of Europop and the culture of the collector through the specter of the cult of Mod hanging over
Saturday Night Fever
to the birth of Hi-NRG, Northern Soul, with its throbbing beat and stilted take on Motown, would cast a long shadow over disco.

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“I’M JUST AN OUTLAW, MY NAME IS DESIRE”

Disco and Sexuality

Do you think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are.

—Gay Liberation Front

If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

—John Wayne

Music is the connective tissue between protest, rebellion, violence, sexual awareness and community.

—Lydia Lunch

It’s 11:30 p.m. on a weekend night in 1970, and in the basement of the old Ansonia Hotel on Seventy-fourth Street and Broadway an unknown singer named Bette Midler takes the makeshift stage by the swimming pool and performs a camped-up version of the scandalous Duke Ellington number “Sweet Marijuana.” Not only is Midler the only woman in the enormous room, but all the men, including her pianist, Barry Manilow, are wearing nothing but towels slung low on their hips. Of course, the men frolicking in the pool aren’t even wearing towels. While most of the crowd is either rapt by Midler’s vampy rendition of Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues” or hoping to cure their own by cruising the packed dance floor, others are ignoring the show and working out on the exercise equipment in this health-club-cum-nightspot. All of this activity, however, is merely a sideshow to the club’s main purpose—sex. Sex of the most vehement, uninhibited kind. While most of the rampant fornication was hidden from view in the Finnish and Russian saunas, steam rooms, massage parlors, private cubicles, and showers, one visit to the candy machine cured any misapprehension that this was anything but a coitus cloister. Alongside the expected Snickers and Three Musketeers bars, the vending machine dispensed sachets of K-Y jelly. The in-house VD clinic was also a pretty good indicator of where the club’s priorities lay.

This fleshpot was the legendary Continental Baths, which was opened by former cantor and Fuller Brush salesman turned entrepreneur Steve Ostrow in September 1968. Gay-oriented bathhouses had existed in New York since at least the turn of the twentieth century, when gay men started to frequent the Everard Baths (inevitably nicknamed the “Ever Hard” Baths) on West Twenty-eighth Street, but the Continental Baths marked the beginning of a new era. Instead of the secretiveness and seediness usually associated with the bathhouses, Ostrow was relatively open about his baths and aimed them at an upmarket crowd, advertising them as recapturing “the glory of Ancient Rome.” Ostrow’s all-male health club was festooned with that ultimate symbol of early ’70s luxury—the rattan wing chair—while the glass pillars lent his pleasure palace a classical grace. It was a rather different form of “classicism,” though, that made the Continental Baths truly important. While the first shots in the battle for gay civil rights were fired in 1966 by the Mattachine Society, a group of gay Communists that split from the main party because of their unwillingness to recognize homosexuality as part of the struggle,
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the Caligula-like scenes at the Continental Baths marked the first defiant steps of an out and proud gay
sexuality.
This was not a claim on citizenship or belonging, but a confrontational demand by a group of pariahs
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to be accepted on their own terms and a ritualistic celebration of those terms. Disco was born in the rubble of New York, but it was in this pungent hothouse atmosphere that disco really started to take shape.

The multigenre musical cluster fuck constructed by the wandering ears and fingers of the early DJs mirrored the delicious promiscuity of the bathhouses. Their smooth blends and segues were emblematic not only of a newfound group identity but also of a newly liberated pleasure principle that exploded out of its shackles with such intensity that it wanted to keep going full-bore all night long without stopping. It was a music and a scene of prodigious physicality, an embrace of a previously forbidden body and pushing that body to the absolute limits. Disco was all about breaking the bonds of shame that had imprisoned gay men for centuries. It was a declaration that pleasure didn’t have to be inextricably meshed with guilt and self-loathing.
The Kinsey Report
and Masters and Johnson may have showed people that there was more to sex than the missionary position, there may have been communes and ashrams promoting “free love,” John Sinclair’s White Panther Party may have advocated “dope, guns and fucking in the streets,” but never before had a popular culture moment so wantonly wallowed in the pit of carnal depravity as disco.

Despite all of the marches on the Capitol, all the flag burnings and bra burnings, all the sit-ins and the be-ins, the most radical social change that occurred in the 1960s was wrought not by hippies, yippies, or civil rights marchers, but by chemists. With the possible exception of the airplane and the personal computer, no twentieth-century invention had such a profound impact on American life as the birth control pill. Hitting the market in 1960, the Enovid-10 pill swept through a nation of bluestockings and Puritans with the force of a category-five hurricane. “The widespread use of the Pill at the beginning of the sixties made sex simpler, more accessible and seemingly less consequential,” wrote gay historian Charles Kaiser. “It also encouraged public acceptance of a truly radical notion for a prudish nation: the idea that sex might actually be valuable for its own sake. The idea represented a sea change in the way millions of Americans of all orientations thought about copulation.”
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The full ramifications of this revolutionary new attitude were felt in the early ’70s. The first few years of the decade saw an explosion of sex in mainstream heterosexual popular culture: It was the era of the suburban swinger and wife-swapping parties; Dr. Alex Comfort’s best-selling erotic manual,
The Joy of Sex,
was first published in 1972; Erica Jong’s roman à clef,
Fear of Flying,
was published in 1973, and its shockingly frank depictions of female sexuality and casual sex incited huge debate; the first “big-budget” porn flick,
Deep Throat,
caused a sensation in January 1972 when it was released and has allegedly grossed hundreds of millions of dollars since; the slightly more respectable
Last Tango in Paris
(1972) and the Warren Beatty bedroom farce
Shampoo
(1975) both brought controversial sexual practices to mainstream cinema. But it wasn’t just hetero heart-throbs like Beatty who were enjoying all the benefits of looser sexual mores. As Kaiser wrote, the birth control pill and the attitude it fostered “was
the
fundamental philosophical leap,
the
indispensable step before homosexual sex could gain any legitimacy within the larger society.”
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While the Continental Baths was a debauchee’s paradise, legitimacy was the operative word there. Perhaps because Ostrow was a bisexual with a wife and a daughter (who both helped out at the club), the Continental Baths never quite became as truly wild as later bathhouses like Man’s Country, St. Mark’s Baths, or First Avenue Baths did. Ostrow’s entertainment program ensured that sex was never the only focus of either the club or its patrons, much to the chagrin of clubgoers like writer Edmund White, who complained that when Midler performed “everybody stop[ped] their sexual activities to listen to her.”
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With the success of the shows (aside from Midler and Manilow, performers like LaBelle, Peter Allen and, umm, Wayne Flowers and Madame attracted notoriety from their appearances there), Ostrow decided in 1971 to turn the dance floor into a discotheque when there was no one on stage. The first DJ was Don Finlay, who was soon replaced by Bobby DJ Guttadaro, whose mixes of uptempo but highly polished soul helped make the club into the hottest nightspot in New York. When Guttadaro left the Baths for the super-hip Le Jardin, the Baths became something of a DJ academy with Joey Bonfigilio and future dance music legends Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles manning the wheels of steel.

With the aroma of musk and spunk perfuming the air so strongly in the ’70s, it was perhaps inevitable that the Continental Baths was eventually resurrected as a swingers’ club. Plato’s Retreat opened on September 23, 1977, in the same basement location and re-created the Baths’ notorious hedonism for straight people. While the swimming pool remained—Plato’s Retreat even followed New York City regulations and had a lifeguard on duty—the glory holes in the showers were filled in, the saunas and steam rooms were replaced with a Jacuzzi big enough for sixty people, and the exercise room was transformed into the “Orgy Room,” whose floor was covered from wall to wall in mattresses. While numerous celebrities—Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Dreyfuss, Rodney Dangerfield, Wolfman Jack, ex-Yankee Joe Pepitone, the who’s who of the ’70s porn industry—dropped by to check out the scene and usually remained clothed and chaste (aside from the porn stars, of course), most of the clubgoers followed the old Baths tradition and walked around in nothing but a towel.

The club was presided over by portly, middle-aged divorcé Larry Levenson, who could often be found mud wrestling with some of the waitresses. He usually sported a jacket emblazoned with “King of Swing” on the back and he boasted that he bedded some twenty thousand women during his reign. While most of the action was happening in the side rooms and the Orgy Room, there was a dance floor—presided over by former Le Jardin DJ Bacho Mangual—and one of the city’s best sound systems. However, dancing wasn’t really the order of the day, and certainly no opera singers ever performed at Plato’s Retreat. In 1980, when the owners of the Ansonia Hotel wanted to turn the building into luxury condos, the club was forced to relocate to an old warehouse at 509 West 34th Street. Then, in 1981, Levenson was found guilty of skimming the receipts and evading income tax and was sentenced to prison, where he was visited by porn star Ron Jeremy, who showed up with a bevy of starlets. The writing was on the wall for the club, however, and with the emergence of the AIDS crisis it was finally shut down in November 1984.

The charged atmosphere on the dance floor and the growing fame of the performances
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meant that heterosexuals wanted to join in the fun. Of course, that meant the intrusion of women into this beefcake Eden. In late 1972, women were allowed into the club on Saturday nights, but they had to remain fully clothed—there was no women’s locker room. While “slumming it” had existed since at least the 1920s, when the Cotton Club became all the rage, the Continental Baths was perhaps the first gay venue to be ferociously cruised by the cultural tourists. The craze reached its peak in 1973, when the Metropolitan Opera’s Eleanor Steber gave a “black towel” concert at the Baths and the souvenir towels were available for purchase at Bloomingdale’s. By the following year, much of the hard-core gay crowd that the Continental Baths originally attracted had fled to bathhouses that didn’t feel the need to put on shows to attract a more upscale clientele, and Ostrow was forced to close his club.

With its rapid rise among the sexually voracious club cognoscenti, explosion into mainstream prominence, and subsequent detumescent fizzle into commercial blandness, the Continental Baths encapsulates in a way the history of disco in miniature. The wild, unbridled carnal energy that characterized the Baths buzzed throughout New York nightlife and lit up the discos that followed in the Baths’ wake. Disco’s surging bass lines and pulsating rhythms carried this sexual dynamism out of the back room, onto the dance floor, and into the streets, where it filtered into style, community action, and protest.

*   *   *

The Stonewall Inn wasn’t the likeliest of places to host a revolution. The dingy Mob-run firetrap at 53 Christopher Street in the West Village didn’t even have running water. It was the kind of place where instead of repairing the disconcertingly regular fire damage, the owners of the bar would just put up a new coat of black paint to hide the smoke burns. The establishment, which was frequented by drag queens and students, was so dirty and dingy that it was the suspected source of a hepatitis epidemic in the winter of 1969.
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Nevertheless, this unlicensed “bottle club” seemed to be a bit of a celebrity hot spot. The bar’s log, which, according to the law, everyone had to sign, showed that Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland visited several times each night.

“Judy Garland” even visited on Friday, June 27, 1969—the night of her funeral. So too did half a dozen policemen under the command of Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine. Although the Stonewall had been raided by the cops on numerous previous occasions, this night was different. The standard practice was that the owners would be notified in advance of any raid (the Stonewall forked over two thousand dollars a week in payoff money to the local precinct
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), but no one was warned that night that the NYPD would be enforcing the state’s archaic laws regarding the fraternizing of homosexuals. Even though the raid was a surprise, they still managed to flash the warning lights in time for people to stop dancing, and the cops arrested only a few drag queens (out of the two hundred or so patrons) for violating the statute that bar-goers’ attire had to be gender-appropriate.

The scene outside the bar was initially festive, with a crowd “composed mostly of Stonewall boys who were waiting around for friends still inside or to see what was going to happen. Cheers would go up as favorites would emerge from the door, strike a pose, and swish by the detective with a ‘Hello there, fella.’”
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Soon enough, though, the mood turned darker when the police got rough with some of their prisoners. Instead of the docility that usually accompanied such incidents, the crowd started throwing both pennies and insults at the cops. “Limp wrists were forgotten,” Lucian Truscott IV wrote in
The Village Voice.
“Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows, and a rain of coins descended on the cops.”
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Or, as the New York
Daily News
reported it, “Queen power exploded with all the fury of a gay atomic bomb. Queens, princesses and ladies-in-waiting began hurling anything they could lay their polished, manicured fingernails on … The lilies of the valley had become carnivorous jungle plants.”
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