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Abstract
Disco is associated commonly with the highly commercial and socially regressive Studio 54 and Saturday Night Fever. However, the movement that preceded, ran parallel and ultimately outlasted these articulations of the culture was queer in terms of its refusal of both straight normative and gay normative articulations. The queer make-up of disco culture was grounded in its sexually mixed demographic base in New York private party and public discotheque venues, which constitute the focus of the article. Four key areas of queerness are considered in turn: disco's break with traditional couples dancing as the basis of social dance, and the queer recasting of the dancing body as a site of affective intensities that underpins a form of collective sociality; the DJ practice of cross-generic sounds and creating a musical set in conjunction with the dancing crowd; the sonic make-up of disco music, and in particular its polymorphous component; and the alternative experience of temporality and space on the dance floor, as well as the destabilizing impact of a range of dance floor technologies. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Richard Dyer and Judith Halberstam is considered. The article concludes with an analysis of the politicised backlash against disco in the late 1970s.
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Notes
1. Albert CitationGoldman initiated the gay-straight binary of disco in his book Disco, which was published in 1978, in the midst of disco's most commercially successful year. Goldman's basic premise has been rearticulated in a number of accounts of contemporary dance culture by authors such as Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Matthew Collin, Sheryl Garrett, Kai Fikentscher and Simon Reynolds.
2. George Chauncey (Citation1995) provides a partial account of the rise of drag ball culture in Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940.
3. All quotes are drawn from interviews conducted by myself unless otherwise stated. I interviewed David Mancuso several times while researching my first book, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–79 (Lawrence 2003). This article brings together and develops the points made about social dance in that publication.
4. Research into the repeal of state laws that prohibited male-only dance environments has yet to be conducted. The vanguard position of New York with regard to gay liberation politics and the development of male gay dance settings suggest the city would have been one of the first, if not the actual first, to introduce reforms.
5. Edmund White (Citation1980) provides a first-hand account of the self-formed elite that gathered at Flamingo in States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (pp. 269–275).
6. The de facto exclusionary door policy of the Tenth Floor and Flamingo, whereby black and Latino men were admitted if they were the lover of a white member, or if they had acquired a level of celebrity status, is discussed in Love Saves the Day (Lawrence Citation2003, pp. 79–80, 139).