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Disco, it is commonly understood, drummed its drums and twirled its twirls across an explicit gay-straight divide. In the beginning, the story goes, disco was gay: Gay dancers went to gay clubs, celebrated their newly liberated status by dancing with other men, and discovered a vicarious voice in the form of disco's soul and gospel-oriented divas. Received wisdom has it that straights, having played no part in this embryonic moment, co-opted the culture after they cottoned onto its chic status and potential profitability. With Sylvester and John Travolta marking out the polar opposites of disco's terrain, it was supposed to be easy to spot the difference. The sequined black gay falsetto, who delivered soul and gospel-charged disco, embodied the movement's gay roots, while the white straight hustling star of Saturday Night Fever, who was happiest dancing to the shrill pop of the Bee Gees, represented its commercialisation and suburbanisation. In this article, however, I want to refract this popular analysis through a queer lens in order to explore not just the mixed composition of early dance crowds, which I take to be a historical given (Lawrence 2004a), but, more importantly, the way in which both the dance floor experience and disco's musical aesthetics could be said to be queer (rather than gay). I will also examine how disco producers, responding to the mainstreaming of disco culture from the mid-1970s onwards, took the genre in fresh and unsettling directions. These questions will be explored through the decidedly odd figure of Arthur Russell, whose disco releases stand as an allegory of the unexplored relationship between gay and queer disco.

Russell was disco's barely known crown prince ⎯ and this in a culture where, as the darkened floors and faceless studio producers indicated, anonymity was already the norm. An awkward dancer who was prone to shyness and lacked confidence in his pock-marked looks, Russell would lurk in the corner of favourite nightspots such as the Gallery, the Loft and, a little later, the Paradise Garage. He did not release his first disco record until the end of 1978, some six months before the savagely homophobic and racist backlash against disco prompted the major record companies to scuttle away from the genre, and his forays into disco before and after the pivotal summer of 1979 were undertaken behind the camouflage of a series of band names such as Dinosaur, Dinosaur L and Loose Joints. As if to make sure he did not become known for his disco output, Russell pursued simultaneously a myriad of other music projects, including a score for theatre producer Robert Wilson's Medea; his own forty-eight hour art-vernacular composition, Instrumentals; pop-rock projects with the Flying Hearts and the Necessaries; folk-mutating-into-mantra performances with Allen Ginsberg; and other folk-oriented acts such as the Sailboats. In short, Russell did not know how to plot a career in music (he pursued too many genres) and did not pin his flag to any movement (always broke, he could not have afforded all the flags). Within disco, no record label latched onto Russell as a figure who was worthy of development, and no DJ bought a record just because the small print included his name. Yet when compared with Carl Bean, the Village People and Sylvester, disco's best-known gay acts, Russell could be described as the culture's most self-reflexive gay artist...


Journal of Popular Music Studies, 18, 2, 2006, 144-66


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