Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (11 page)

The riot lasted until about four in the morning, with four policemen getting injured and thirteen protesters arrested. The numbers might not have been any worse than a typical Friday night punch-up at a rowdy bar in Brooklyn, but Stonewall served as a catalyst for political awakening as surely as Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus in Alabama. Just as soul music came to voice the pride and assertiveness that accompanied the civil rights struggle, disco quickly became the sound of this new movement. As the cultural adjunct of the gay pride movement, disco was the embodiment of the pleasure-is-politics ethos of a new generation of gay culture, a generation fed up with police raids, Victorian laws, and the darkness of the closet. That this new movement was born on the night of Judy Garland’s funeral couldn’t have been more appropriate.

Of the numerous political groups that formed in the immediate wake of the Stonewall uprising, perhaps none was as important to the history of disco as the Gay Activists Alliance. Founded on December 21, 1969, by Arthur Bell, Arthur Evans, Kay Tobin Lahusen, Marty Robinson, and Jim Owles, the GAA operated under the slogan “Out of the closet and into the streets.” In accordance with their slogan, the GAA pioneered direct action techniques (called “zapping”) in the quest for gay rights: members shouted “Gay Power” during a speech by Mayor Lindsay on April 13, 1970, they staged sit-ins at
Harper’s Magazine
after it ran an article by Joseph Epstein that declared, “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth,” they hosted one of the first shows on public access cable television, and they blockaded the George Washington Bridge. After a prolonged campaign launched by the GAA, in December 1971 the superannuated laws that regulated homosexual admissions and ratios at New York nightspots and restaurants were changed.

However, almost as soon as the GAA won its campaign to allow gay men to dance together as couples, couple dancing became as old-fashioned as the Judy Garland camp of the preliberation era. Mirroring the backroom and bathhouse bacchanals that accompanied liberation, the ability to dance with a single partner was immediately skipped over in favor of an orgy of multiple partners. Ironically, one of the first places this dance floor debauch occurred was at the GAA’s Firehouse. Opened on May 6, 1971, in an old fire station at 99 Wooster Street in SoHo, the Firehouse was Manhattan’s first gay and lesbian community center. Painted bright red, the Firehouse was famous for its intense and frighteningly earnest political meetings, but a hint of frivolity entered into the premises when it hosted dances from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Saturdays. Typically, the politicos didn’t really get music, and the first few parties were fairly stolid affairs despite the $2 admission price, which got you free drinks for the evening. When Barry Lederer (who was not affiliated with the group or particularly involved in gay activism) was hired as the DJ, however, the parties took off, and even though the Firehouse had four floors, it got so crowded that there were safety fears. Lederer was playing what he calls “heady, drug-oriented music”
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—slightly dark funk records like the Equals’ “Black Skinned Blue-Eyed Boys,” Bill Withers’s “Harlem,” and Billy Sha-Rae’s “Do It.” The new gay dance floor wasn’t just interested in mirroring bathhouse promiscuity, it also wanted a longer, more intense, more trancelike experience, something different from the old three-minute jukebox chop-and-change routine. “I was mixing records,” Lederer remembers. “However, since I was new, I was not the greatest. Luckily, the music transcended my mistakes.”
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In 1972, Lederer left and was replaced by Richie Rivera, who played until the dances began to fizzle out in 1973 when the GAA came under heavy criticism for being overwhelmingly white, for marginalizing its lesbian contingent, and for targeting too heavily Mayor Lindsay, who was generally liked in the gay community. On October 8, 1974, the Firehouse was destroyed in an arson attack that still hasn’t been solved.

In part, the GAA lost momentum because, in a sense, the rise of the discotheque made activism largely irrelevant. It was never going to change discrimination enshrined in law, but disco culture was the most effective tool in the struggle for gay liberation. Disco didn’t have to hit anyone over the head with slogans or bore you into submission with earnest missives; its “message” was its pleasure principle. Disco was born of a desire that was outlawed and branded an affront to God and humanity, so its evocation of pleasure was by necessity its politics, and by extension its politics was pleasure. The percolating sexual energy and communitarian spirit of the early discos were the perfect antidote to the lingering ’60s hangover—the gay-derived sense of theatricality and refusal to peer beneath the surface were instantly understandable to anyone tired of the denim solemnity of the Woodstock Nation.

Even more than winning friends and influencing people, though, disco was emblematic of a new kind of political resistance, of what French theorists and psychoanalysts Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Guy Hocquenghem call a “revolution machine.” As opposed to the individual expressions of desire in capitalist societies that necessarily force one to view the world in either/or structures, Guattari and Delueze proposed a collective linking of libidos and desires that would open up innumerable possibilities for sexuality other than the oedipal death drive of capitalism.
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Liberated from social, economic, and political forces, desire is set free and humans become pure “desiring machines” that interface with any and every other “machine” with no hang-ups, no repression, no constraints. The group grope of the disco dance floor, the anonymous antics of the back room, and the heedless hedonism of the bathhouses were probably as close to such a polymorphously perverse paradise as humans will ever get.

We are all pied pipers, tempted to gather here by irresistible things.

—Tarjei Vesaas

When you conjure the image of a disco fleshpot in your mind’s eye, a rural, coastal, carless idyll of rolling sand dunes, big surf, and sassafras trees teeming with sapsuckers probably aren’t the first things that come to mind. Add to that the fact that this fairy-tale locale is reachable only by ferry and didn’t even have electricity until the early ’60s and it would seemingly rank right up there with Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, as a hotbed of dance music. Nevertheless, if disco had a second home outside of New York City, it was here in Fire Island, a tiny strip of land off the coast of Long Island about fifty miles from the Big Apple.

For centuries, Fire Island was little more than a lighthouse and a refuge for smugglers, but in the 1920s it became a bohemian enclave when writers, musicians, and showbiz types started to congregate on this relatively isolated barrier island to escape the clutches of Prohibition. Most of their activity centered around the tiny community of Cherry Grove, which quickly became a popular resort for gays and lesbians thanks to the bohemian atmosphere and lax policing. In the 1940s, Cherry Grove was populated in the summer by such prominent figures as Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, and Patricia Highsmith, and the Grove’s outrageous theme parties, drag theatrics, and camp aesthetic made it the most famous gay and lesbian resort in the world. By the 1960s, much of the community’s social life revolved around the Sea Shack hotel and restaurant. Owner Jimmy Merry added a dance hall to the hotel when his establishment finally got electricity, and people would dance the lindy to old rock-and-roll records.

After the 1969 summer season, the Sea Shack was sold to Ted Drach and Tiger Curtis, who enlisted the help of former Broadway dancer Michael Fesco in transforming the old dance hall, which was nicknamed “the Boom Boom Room.” Fesco stripped out the Boom Boom Room’s old stereo system, lightbulbs, and Christmas lights in favor of mirror-paneled walls (perhaps the first nightspot to use them), a DJ booth, and a lighting system that was synchronized with the music. Named after Tarjei Vesaas’s novel of the same name, the Ice Palace opened on Memorial Day weekend in May 1970 and was an instant success.

Word spread fast about the Ice Palace, and its format was copied two weeks later by Ron Malcolm and Gene Smith, the owners of the Sandpiper restaurant in the Pines, another predominantly gay community located across the sand dune from Cherry Grove.
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The Pines was a newer community and attracted a much more affluent, less bohemian crowd than Cherry Grove. And true to the Pines’ upward mobility, the Sandpiper, a restaurant that would turn into a disco at 11 p.m., soon trumped the Ice Palace thanks to DJ Don Finlay, who started playing records like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” there in 1971. “It was pure magic,” Barry Lederer says about that summer. “It was just the height of dancing, especially knowing the condition we were in [i.e., drugged up to the gills] … Don was absolutely incredible. Everyone could not wait to go out on Friday and Saturday to dance. It was one of those magic summers, and I consider it a highlight of music in my life.”
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The following summer Lederer started to spin at the early evening tea dances at John Whyte’s Botel in the Pines, and Tom Moulton started making tapes for the Sandpiper (see Chapter 1). Moulton’s tapes would eventually be replaced by DJs Roy Thode and Tom Savarese. Meanwhile, in the Grove, Bobby DJ Guttadaro was reasserting the Ice Palace as Fire Island’s preeminent disco with his infectious, high-energy party mixes. Both Lederer and Guttadaro played acetates of “Love’s Theme” by Love Unlimited Orchestra months before it was played on the radio, and their championing of the record—and, of course, the reaction of their audiences—made it the first “disco” record to become a #1 hit. In many ways, “Love’s Theme” was the perfect disco record: its unabashed celebration of “beauty” and lushness and its complete willingness to go over the top in the pursuit of that goal; its swooning strings; its groove, which is somehow at once the least funky thing this side of Phil Collins and as redolent of sex and spunk as Ron Jeremy’s basement; and, ultimately, its utter lasciviousness. More than that, though, it was the perfect Fire Island record. Its string zephyrs and almost singsong lilt hit you like a sea breeze, while its slow-grind rhythm and wah-wah riff gave it a tribal quality perfect for shirtless boys enjoying their first carefree summers of freedom.

In many ways the Fire Island clubs were even more of a fairyland than the original New York discos. The Ice Palace, Botel, and the Sandpiper weren’t escapism so much as pure, unadulterated fantasy. Here, on this island of astounding natural beauty seemingly light-years away from the real world of discrimination and homophobia, hundreds of tanned, toned men gathered together to dance and have sex in the Meat Rack
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without the watchful eyes of the state or the church gazing down on them. Fire Island was a place where the wildest fantasy—from the extravagant theme parties of the old Cherry Grove to the wanton abandon of the new Rack—could be acted out without fear that anyone from the straight world would find out about it. This idea of cloaked permissiveness would soon pervade not only the gay discos of New York City but also the celebrity palaces like Studio 54, where anything could happen under the dim lights of the VIP areas and no one would ever be the wiser.

While Francis Grasso and David Mancuso laid down the basic framework of the disco sound in the city, the Fire Island crowd’s reaction to the music spun by Guttadaro, Moulton, and Lederer helped create disco’s intensity. By 1972, the dancers at Fire Island had become particularly discerning—whistling and stomping if they enjoyed a record and abandoning the floor or even booing if they didn’t—and this almost symbiotic relationship between crowd and DJ became one of the hallmarks of gay disco. The bodies, the drugs, the heat, the sweat, the sunrises, and the throb of the music all conspired to create a heated sense of nowness, a sense that nothing existed outside of that room. No past, no future, no promises, no regrets, just right now and those strings from “Love’s Theme” cascading all over you and prickling your skin.

The real fantasy that Fire Island peddled, though, was that of class, particularly in the Pines. Not only was the Pines crowd a more affluent group of people than those that congregated in Cherry Grove, they were better connected, they were prettier, they spent more time in the gym. It was a very incestuous scene, and it was in this tiny enclave that the “clone” look was born. In its original incarnation, the clone was invariably butch, well toned, ruggedly handsome, with short hair and a well-trimmed mustache, and he usually wore a flannel shirt and Levi’s. The uniform was accompanied by a shared attitude about sex and sexual partners. To the clone, sex was a sport—with definite winners and losers—and partners were viewed as mere conveniences or vehicles, if not outright opponents. The hypermasculine, hypersuccessful clone was the reaction to decades of popular culture characterizing gay men as effeminite or as somehow failed men. While the multiple bedroom conquests, macho exterior, strange tribal individualism, and flaunting of achievement sought to prove that the gay man was a “real” man, the clone was also the ultimate expression of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machine, only with the capitalist death drive very much intact. Spreading quickly from its Fire Island base, the clone stereotype was exalted—in the form of gay porn star Al Parker and the stable of Colt models—as the ultimate in manhood.

The clone quickly replicated itself in New York City. In December 1972, Pines habitués David Sokoloff, Jim Jessup, and David Bruie opened a small club on the tenth floor of 151 West 25th Street. The three were designers who had made names for themselves throwing lavish theme parties on Fire Island, the most famous of which featured an erupting volcano constructed on a barge that floated just off the coast of where their house was situated. Their Manhattan club was more restrained—gray industrial carpeting, white walls, and big flower arrangements, nothing else—but no less memorable. This minimalist setting where the people functioned as the decor became the template for nearly all underground discos, gay or straight, that followed.