Feminist/Queer Desires
[Last updated: 14.06.2008 17:22]
I
was invited by Angela McRobbie, Professor of Communications at
Goldsmiths College, to present a paper on the theme of "Disco and the
Queer Dance Floor" at the third annual Gender and Theory Conference,
which took place on Wednesday 11 June 2008. The conference was
excellent; how could it not be, with Angela talking in a line-up that
included Sara Ahmed and Lisa Blackman, as well as the sharp and
hilarious Mandy Merck. The conference opened with Sara and Lisa, and by
the time Lisa spoke the room was so packed she commented she felt like
Foucault. I spoke next and will paste my paper below. If you would like
a copy of the paper that includes footnotes, please contact me at
tlawrence1@mac.com.
Disco and the Queer Dance Floor
Presented by Tim Lawrence at Feminist/Queer Desires: Past, Present and Future, the third annual Gender and Theory Seminar at Goldsmiths
In this paper I want to think through the relationship between sexuality and the dance floor in 1970s disco culture ⎯ a culture that is commonly ridiculed, yet which stands as a formative period for contemporary dance culture thanks to its innovations within DJing, remixing, dancing and sound system practices. As with so many accounts of popular culture, it has become commonplace to read disco as the staging of a binary contest between gay and straight; in this case, that disco emerged as a male gay outgrowth of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969, and existed as a gay subculture before it was adopted by the straight mainstream and heavily commodified by artists such as the Bee Gees, venues such as Studio 54, and films such as Saturday Night Fever, after which a homophobic backlash against its perceived gayness contributed to its downfall in the second half of 1979. Rather than repeat this narrative, I'm going to outline some of the ways in which the gay/straight binary doesn't account for the sexual trajectory of disco, and I also want to argue that the blurring the occurred around the question of sexuality in fact underpinned disco's queer potential ⎯ its potential to enable an affective and social experience of the body that exceeded normative and dominant conceptions of straight and gay sexuality.
So what came before queer disco? The North American practice of dancing to pre-recorded music in an indoor space goes back to the emergence of jukeboxes in the 1930s and sock hops in the 1950s, after which Oliver Coquelin imported the French innovation of the discotheque to New York at the beginning of the 1960s. Reacting against the elitist framing of these early New York discotheques, a midtown Manhattan discotheque called Arthur opened its doors to a crowd of young urban professionals in 1965, and gay men were ushered to the front of the door queue on the basis that they would help energise the dance floor ⎯ even though, once inside, they could only take to the floor within the structure of the ostensibly heterosexual couple. The structure of that couple remained patriarchal inasmuch as the male dancer would invite the female dancer onto and off the floor, normally to dance the Twist, but the ensuing dance itself also contributed to the undermining of the authority of the male lead, largely because the largely independent movements of the Twist reduced the ability of the man to lead the woman. Here we can see the way in which social dances beginning with the Waltz [IMAGE: Waltz] and the Foxtrot [IMAGE: Foxtrot] and running through to the Lindy Hop or Jitterbug [IMAGE: Lindy Hop], the Texas Tommy [IMAGE: Texas Tommy] and finally the Twist [IMAGE: Twist] allowed for an increasing level of space to exist between a dancing couple, and accordingly provide the female dancer with more freedom to move independently of her male partner. With the Twist, the non-contact nature of the dance continued this process ⎯ even if there were only so many ways a dancer could improvise while swivelling up and down through ankle and hip movement.
Because of its explicit dependence on the singular sound of rock and roll and the rather limiting dance style of the Twist, discotheque craze began to fade towards the end of the 1960s, and when Arthur closed in June 1969 it appeared to mark the end of a relatively short-lived fad. But instead of disappearing, social dance acquired a new form at the beginning of 1970 when David Mancuso staged the first in a long series of private parties in his NoHo apartment that came to be known as the Loft, and around the same time two gay entrepreneurs known as Seymour and Shelley who ran a series of bars in the West Village took over a failing straight venue called the Sanctuary. Together these venues forged a relationship between the DJ and the crowd that continues to inform the core practice of contemporary dance culture. And although gay men were undoubtedly an important and at times a majority presence in both of these settings, none of the participants I spoke with considered either venue to have been marked as gay.
The Loft brought together several contrasting elements: the rent party tradition that dated back to 1920s Harlem; the practice of loft living in downtown New York, which emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s; the rise of audiophile sound technologies, which followed the introduction of stereo in the late 1950s; Timothy Leary's experimental LSD parties; and the gay liberation, civil rights, feminist and anti-war movements that Mancuso aligned himself with during the second half of the 1960s. Having grown up in an orphanage in upstate New York, Mancuso [IMAGE: Mancuso] was used to experiencing families as unstable and extended, and he brought this outlook into his parties, which catered for a diverse demographic. "There was no one checking your sexuality or racial identity at the door," Mancuso told me. "I just knew different people." Because the Loft was run as a private party, Mancuso could have run it as an exclusively male gay event, but he chose not to, and in one of our many interviews together he added: "It wasn't a black party or a gay party. There'd be a mixture of people. Divine used to go. Now how do you categorise her?"
The Sanctuary was also indelibly heterogeneous. "It had an incredible mixture of people," Jorge La Torre [IMAGE: La Torre], a gay male dancer, told me. "There were people dressed in furs and diamonds, and there were the funkiest kids from the East Village. A lot of straight people thought that it was the coolest place in town and there were definitely a lot of women because that was part of what was going on at the time" ⎯ by which La Torre means that gay men were often involved sexually with straight women. "I would say that women made up twenty-five percent of the crowd from the very beginning, probably more. People came from all cultural backgrounds, from all walks of life, and it was the mixture of people that made the place happen." It would have been difficult for Seymour and Shelley to turn the Sanctuary into an exclusively gay discotheque, even if the idea had occurred to them. To begin with, New York State law continued to assert that male-male dancing was illegal and discotheques were accordingly required to contain at least one woman for every three men. While the Sanctuary's owners could have paid off the police in order to get around that obstacle, it's unlikely there would have been a thousand self-identifying dancers to fill up the venue in this formative stage of gay male dance culture. Finally, straight dancers wanted to be part of the nascent disco scene, and thanks to the venue's public status, which meant that anyone who joined the queue could potentially get in, there was no obvious way by which they could be identified and excluded.
I'm not simply questioning the common assumption that early disco culture was homogeneous in terms of its male gay make-up just because it might be inaccurate, but because the reductionist focus on this male gay constituency underestimates and even undermines the political thrust of early seventies dance culture, which attempted to create a democratic, cross-cultural affective community that was relatively open-ended in its formation. Dance crowds were aware of their hybrid formation as well as their proximity to the rainbow coalition of the countercultural movements of the late 1960s, and having witnessed the repressive state reaction against Black Panther activists, Stonewall Inn drag queens, and Kent State University and Jackson State University anti-war demonstrators, they began to explore the social and cultural possibilities of the countercultural movement in the relatively safe space of dance venues such as the Haven, Tambourine, Tamburlaine and the Limelight, as well as the Loft and the Sanctuary. In these settings they engaged with a cultural practice that didn't affirm their maleness or their femaleness, or their gay or straight predilections, or their black, Latin, Asian or white identifications, but instead positioned them as agents who participated in an destabilising ritual that recast the experience of the body through a series of affective vectors that I'll briefly outline.
First: social dance. Whereas dancers in the 1960s took to the floor within the regulated structure of the heterosexual couple, dancers in the 1970s began to take to the floor without a partner. The shift was grounded in the historical experience of gay male sexuality: the longstanding practice of cruising encouraged gay men to be open to the idea of moving onto the dance floor autonomously, while ongoing legal restrictions around male-male dancing also encouraged gay male dancers to take to floor and dance as singles ⎯ at least until the law that restricted men from dancing with each other was repealed in New York in December 1971. But again, it would be a mistake to simply attribute the innovation to gay male culture, because the shift to solo dancing had already been partially inaugurated in the practice of the 1960s music festival, where women and men had started to dance in a swaying motion to the sound of acid rock, so Sanctuary dancers who had participated in events such as Woodstock would have been habituated to the idea of dancing solo. Indeed the shift could even be interpreted as anticipating the arrival of neoliberal capitalism and the emergence of an aggressive form of individualism ⎯ although in this instance something else appears to have been at work, because individual dancers didn't experience the floor as a space of isolation, but instead as a collective setting that enabled them to exceed the relationship of the dancing couple.
That relationship was necessarily limited because the men and women who formed dancing couples had to concentrate on their partner in order to move rhythmically and expressively ⎯ and also void physical injury. As a result, dancing couples were internally focused, and communication with other dancers, never mind the musicians or the DJ, was necessarily limited. In contrast, the dancers who participated in the private party and public discotheque network of the early 1970s ⎯ such as this group of dancers [IMAGE: Le Jardin dancers], who were photographed in 1973 ⎯ were able to develop freeform movements, and because of this they experienced an increased ability to communicate and dance with multiple partners. As Frankie Knuckles, a gay male regular at the Loft, told me: "You could be on the dance floor and the most beautiful woman that you had ever seen in your life would come and dance right on top of you. Then the minute you turned around a man that looked just as good would do the same thing. Or you would be sandwiched between the two of them, or between two women, or between two men, and you would feel completely comfortable." By turning on a single spot, dancers could move in relation to a series of other bodies in a near-simultaneous flow, and this practice opened up the possibility of the dance floor being experienced not as a series of straight partnerships, but as an amorphous and fluid entity ⎯ or, to draw on Deleuze and Guattari, a Body without Organs.
The second factor to consider with regard to the queering of the dance floor is the shifting function of the DJ, which evolved in relationship to the emergence of the dancing crowd ⎯ because dancers didn't simply communicate with other dancers, but also with the DJ, who was tasked with the responsibility of supply music for the dance event. Earlier DJs saw themselves as puppeteers who could manipulate the dancers ⎯ and this was necessary given that one of the DJ's responsibilities was to encourage the dancers to leave the floor and visit the bar, because that was how most venues made their money. But as the Sanctuary DJ Francis Grasso told me, the newfound collective force of the 1970s dance crowd meant that the previous approach was no longer tenable. Grasso is particularly interesting because he was the only employee to survive Seymour and Shelley's buyout of the Sanctuary, so he witnessed the difference playing to the previously regulated straight crowd and the more open and heterogeneous crowd that began to dance at the venue at the beginning of 1970. "When the Sanctuary went gay I didn't play that many slow records because they were drinkers and they knew how to party," Grasso told me. "Just the sheer heat and numbers made them drink. The energy level was phenomenal. At one point I used to feel that if I brought the tempo down they would boo me because they were having so much fun."
Of course dancers didn't just communicate by booing the DJ. They would also clap and cheer and whistle, while the very energy of their movements was also communicative, and it became the primary role of the DJ to read the mood of the crowd and select a record that was appropriate to the moment. Because they were attempting to both lead and respond to the mood on the floor, DJs contributed to a form of antiphonic music making that has characterised a great deal of African American music, and in order to increase the effectiveness of their playing in relation to the crowd, DJs started to segue and then beat-mix between records in order to maintain the rhythmic flow, or even purchase two copies of the same record in order to extend the parts that their dancers particularly liked. As a result, a form of illegitimate music making emerged in which the conventional performing artist was displaced by the improvising figure of the DJ, who could draw on a wide repertoire of sounds and programme them within a democratic economy of desire. Thanks to the absence of the performing artist and the relative anonymity of the DJ, dancers began to respond to the disembodied affect of the music, and this unconventional circuit subtly challenged the hierarchical underpinnings of the music industry, in which the creative artist and producer held an elevated position above the listener. Thanks to the disembodied presence of the recording artist, who could be heard but not seen, the dancer could begin to think of her or himself a contributor to the collectively generated musical tapestry, and could also respond to the music outside of the hierarchical relations of artistry and fandom.
Third, I would like to consider the position of pre-recorded music in this moment of flux and change. Again, the contrast with the 1960s is instructive, for whereas discotheque DJs tended to play from a limited rock and roll repertoire that encouraged a constricted style of dance, and whereas festivals and concerts tended to foreground the singular sound of rock, club DJs drew from a broad range of sounds that eventually coalesced in the form of disco around 1973/74. In his 1979 article "In Defence of Disco", Richard Dyer outlined a number of the key distinctions that lay between rock and disco. Whereas rock confined "sexuality to the cock" and was thus "indelibly phallo-centric music", disco, argued Dyer, "restores eroticism to the whole body" thanks to its "willingness to play with rhythm", and it does this "for both sexes". Disco offered dancers the chance to experience the body as a polymorphous entity that could be reengineered in terms that confounded conservative models of masculinity and femininity, for as Dyer added: "Its eroticism allows us to rediscover our bodies as part of this experience of materiality and the possibility of change." In other words, disco opened up the possibility of experiencing pleasure through a form of non-penetrative sensation ⎯ and did so shortly before Foucault, following a trip to the United States, called for the making "of one's body a place for the production of extraordinary polymorphic pleasures, while simultaneously detaching it from a valorization of the genitalia and particularly of the male genitalia".
The contrast between "Jingo" by Santana and "Drums of Passion" by Olatunji ⎯ both of which were played by Grasso ⎯ illustrates the distinction well. Whereas Santana's rock version developed a rigid beat and foregrounded the phallocentric instrumentation of the electric guitar and the male voice, Olatunji's original recording emphasised rhythmic interplay along with a chorus of voices that developed a call-and-response interchange between themselves and with the drummers ⎯ so when Grasso DJed in front of the straight Sanctuary crowd he stuck to the Santana version, but when the crowd diversified he started to play Olatunji's polyrhythmic original. As Grasso told me: "I said to myself, 'If Santana works then the real shit is going to kill them!' I was good at mixing one record into another so I played the Santana and brought in "Jin-Go-Lo-Ba". The crowd preferred the Olatunji, where there's no screaming guitar. They got into it straight away."
The Olatunji was typical of the kind of record that DJs were hunting down in the early 1970s: with disco yet to come into formation, DJs drew on a broad range of sounds that included R&B, soul, danceable rock and a range of European and African imports ⎯ so the diversity of the music matched the diversity of the crowds. Because it evoked the hybrid flux of the dance crowd, "Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys" by the Equals became a popular record, as did Booker T's similarly symbolic "Melting Pot". Other tracks developed heterosexual themes that were ripe for appropriation, so "Free Man" by the South Shore Commission acquired a new layer of meaning when gay male dancers interpreted it an anthem of gay liberation rather than a tussle between two straight lovers. But sometimes the straight trajectory of a lyric didn't have to be reinterpreted if the delivery was strong enough, as Loleatta Holloway demonstrated on her rendition of "Hit and Run", which was remixed by Walter Gibbons in 1977. The record runs for eleven minutes; I'm going to introduce a short section that begins at 4:15:
MUSIC: Loleatta Holloway "Hit and Run" (4:15 to 5:00)
Invited to remix the album version of "Hit and Run" for Salsoul, Gibbons risked the wrath of the label by cutting the first two minutes of Holloway's vocal as well as all of her verses, which amounted to an unprecedented action on the part of the remixer, who was part of a nascent profession that existed well below the figure of the recording artist and the producer within the hierarchy of the music industry. In place of the cut vocals, Gibbons turned to the multitrack tapes of the original recording session, which included a five-minute improvised Holloway vamp that had only been sparingly used in the album version, but which Gibbons loved for its feisty, impassioned delivery. Intriguingly, he kept Holloway's vamped version of one of the cut choruses ⎯ the line "I may be old fashioned and a country girl // But when it comes to loving you // When it comes to loving you // I know what to do". Holloway told me the song was one of the worst she had ever had to sing, and Gibbons clearly made an astute decision when he cut the first take of the "country girl" verse from the remix. But Holloway's vamped version developed so much energy the affective force of the delivery overrode the linguistic meaning of the words ⎯ and functioned in effect as a secular version of the gospel strategy of repeating lyrics until their meaning is emptied out and the self is opened up to divine inspiration. That affective force lay at the heart of Holloway's popularity on the dance floor, and it was the reason why so many other African American divas, including Gloria Gaynor, Grace Jones and Donna Summer, rose to international prominence. African American women achieved an unprecedented profile within disco, and did so largely because dancers identified with their outsider status, their refusal to crumble in the face of adversity, and their emotional expressiveness.
To wrap up this section, I want to finally and briefly consider the way in which a series of technologies and strategies also contributed to alternative, non-dominant experiences of the body in the 1970s dance environment. Regarding the temporal experience of disco, the practice of staging parties late at night became the founding premise of a culture that aimed to invert the priorities of a society organised around daytime work, and the protection afforded by darkness as well as the protected space of the dance party enabled disenfranchised citizens a level of expressiveness they rarely enjoyed during the day ⎯ which is something Judith Halberstam has commented on in her book In A Queer Times and Place. The forward march of teleological time ⎯ the time of bourgeois domesticity and capitalist productivity ⎯ was upset within the disco environment, where repetitive and cyclical beat cycles created an alternative experience of temporality and the absence of clocks enabled dancers to move into a realm of pleasure in which work ⎯ the work of the dance ⎯ was not required to be productive in a conventional economic sense. Within this setting, DJs drew on a range of records that cut across temporal and spatial boundaries in order to evoke and in some respects create a radically diverse sonic utopia. Their practice of using two copies of a record to not only collapse but also extend time ⎯ extend the moment of the record that was most popular ⎯ culminated in a the creation of a new disco format ⎯ the twelve-inch single ⎯ that enabled record companies to produce long mixes that were specially-remixed for the dance floor.
The emphasis on temporal length was important: if the record was long, the dancer had a greater opportunity to lose her or himself in the music, and therefore to enter into an alternative dimension that didn't so much evacuate the site of the body as realign it within a new sonic reality. That new sonic reality acquired particular force in spaces such as the Loft, which didn't sell alcohol and could accordingly stay open long after the public discotheques that were governed by New York's cabaret licensing laws had to close. The extended hours encouraged partygoers to engage in marathon-style dance sessions in which the physical was prioritised over the rational, and this opened up participants to the experience of the body as an entity that was not bounded and distinctive, but rather permeable and connected.
The confined space of the dance floor, in which dancers would inevitably come into contact with one another, heightened the experience of the body as extended and open, and this was further enhanced by sound system, drug and lighting technologies. Julian Henriques has described the Jamaican sound system as a form of "sonic dominance", in which the sonic takes over from the visual and creates a community based on sound. In these situations, the sound permeates the body, and therefore creates a situation in which the bounded body is penetrated and becomes difficult to maintain as a separate and unified entity ⎯ and this was precisely the kind of situation that was engineered in disco, where figures such as David Mancuso as well as engineers such as Richard Long and Alex Rosner introduced a range of innovations in order to produce both purer and more powerful sound. Drugs ⎯ and in particular LSD ⎯ were consumed in order to create a non-normative experience of the immediate world, and encouraged dancers to enter into an alternative experience of both time and space, as well as to encourage the body to form a connected alliance with sound. Meanwhile, lighting was deployed sparingly, because bodies were more likely to exceed everyday constrictions in an environment that emphasised the connective dimension of the aural above the separating dimension of the scopic. Inasmuch as lighting was used, it was usually aimed at creating disorienting effects, again in order to encourage the dancer to experience the dance floor as an alternative and experimental space.
All of these factors contributed to the emergence of the early 1970s dance floor as a space in which non-dominant subjectives could be enjoyed and explored, and this explains why a range of disenfranchised groups ⎯ gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender subjects, straight women, African and Latin Americans, and various intersections of these identities ⎯ were so prominent on the dance floor. Straight men were welcomed into the scene, but would have only hung around if they felt comfortable with their non-dominant status ⎯ and many of them were. And while many participants experienced the dance floor as a space where identities and subjectivities could be consolidated rather than dissolved, the experience of dancing for an extended period time in a darkened, crowded space also produced an alternative experience of the body that was organised around not a fixed sense of self but rather a destabilised sense of self that positioned the body in a heterogeneous body-sonic network that exceeded normative experiences of gender, sexuality and race.
I want to try and wrap things up by noting that the queer potential of the early 1970s dance floor was vulnerable to various forms of dilution and cooption. This process unfolded in three notable ways. Firstly, a range of party organisers and accomplice dancers sought to split up the early disco scene into a series of discreet groups that were organised around identity, and this led to an inevitable closing down of the demographic range on a series of dance floors as well as a more normative and static conception of what kind of identities could be articulated in the dance setting. Second, as the demographic constituency of disco was divided and subdivided, a number of promoters began to seek out what they perceived to be an elite dance crowd, and this resulted in the introduction of a marked sense of hierarchy into the disco scene. Third, in order to sell disco to the perceived mass market ⎯ the suburban market, or the Middle American market ⎯ entrepreneurs reframed disco as the a popular site for patriarchal masculinity and heterosexual courtship.
These shifts came to be felt in the emergence of a specified white gay club scene [IMAGE: Flamingo flyer of white gay dancer with tambourine], which was forged in the white, upper-middle-class space of Fire Island in the summer of 1970 and established a foothold in Manhattan when the Tenth Floor opened at the end of November 1972 and deployed David Mancuso's Loft-style template in order to create a private party for a white gay crowd. That crowd quickly began to identify itself as being part of a so-called A-list elite, and the size of this niche scene expanded when Flamingo opened in December 1974. The flyer on view comes from Flamingo and illustrates the way in which the attempt to depict and market a dance scene leads to its narrowing. In this case, the idealised Flamingo dancer is marked as being bourgeois and beautiful ⎯ he is muscular, stylish and groomed ⎯ and he is also marked as being white ⎯ not just because of his skin, but also through his use of the tambourine, a high-end percussion instrument that is also physically held up high. Flamingo DJs did indeed move towards rejecting R&B-oriented disco in favour of the more rigid rhythms and complex orchestrations of Eurodisco, while black gay dancers [IMAGE: mural on front wall of Flamingo depicting black masturbating man], who also tended to be less economically wealthy than white gay dancers, were framed within a mythological, essentialised and pornographic discourse. Those I interviewed said they felt unwelcome at the venue.
Another striking element of the white gay dancer image is the way in which the subject is positioned as a solitary figure, and this speaks to the difficulty of framing ⎯ or perhaps I should say marketing and selling ⎯ disco as a collective rather than an individualistic endeavour. That problem became more marked in the second half of the 1970s, and in particular from 1977 onwards, when a series of huge midtown mega-discotheques opened on the premise that, like Flamingo, they would cater to an elite audience that was organised around the fashion industry, film stars, international jet-setters, beautiful people and so on. The most famous of these was Studio 54, which bore some intriguing links to the culture of the Loft, but ultimately instituted a competitive and hierarchical entrance policy. Huge crowds [IMAGE: crowd scene outside Studio 54] would form outside the venue every night, with the doorman and owner instituting an often cruel and random policy with regard to who could and couldn't enter, and while there was a declared intention to create a demographic mix within the venue, the mix was predicated on exclusion and hierarchy. It followed that a venue [IMAGE: Jagger, Warhol et al inside Studio 54] that was so self-absorbed with its status would pay more attention to the scopic than the aural, to lighting rather than sound, and to the possible presence of a celebrity, and so the primary activity at Studio came to be not dancing but looking. For reasons I've already outlined, this undermined the venue's potential to function as a space of queer becoming.
In this series of mini-snapshots of the appropriation of queer disco, I have to also ⎯ and finally ⎯ reference Saturday Night Fever [IMAGE: John Travolta], which was released at the end of 1977. Organised around the culture of the suburban discotheque and the figure of Tony Manero, played by John Travolta, the film enacted the reappropriation of the dance floor by straight male culture inasmuch as it became a space for straight men to display their prowess and hunt for a partner of the opposite sex. The film also popularised the hustle, a Latin social dance, and in so doing reinstituted the straight dancing couple at the centre of the dance exchange, and simultaneously contributed to the whitening of the disco aesthetic thanks to the central position of the Bee Gees in the soundtrack. None of this would have mattered if the film had sunk without a trace, but instead it went on to break box office and album sales, and in so doing established an easily reproducible template for disco that was thoroughly de-queered in its outlook.
Here's one version of how the story of 1970s disco ends. Following the unexpected commercial success of Saturday Night Fever, major records companies began to invest heavily in a sound that they didn't care for, and when the overproduction of disco coincided with the onset of the deep recession of 1979, a largely homophobic but also notably sexist and racist backlash ensued that culminated with a "disco sucks" record burning rally that was staged at the home of the Chicago White Sox in July 1979. The coalition of gay men, straight women, African Americans, Latinas and Latinos and other disenfranchised citizens that lay at the heart of disco culture became a scapegoat for the perceived failure of the 1960s and the 1970s, and in turn exemplified the shift to social conservatism that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s ⎯ a populist reaction that, as Stuart Hall and others have argued, proved to be a necessary strategic accompaniment to the punitive consequences of the simultaneous shift to free market liberalism.
Yet the backlash didn't mark an end to disco per se, because the Loft and many of its offshoots, including the similarly modelled Paradise Garage, continued to organise their dance floors according to the communal and explorative principles set out at the beginning of the 1970s. In effect, the perceived failure of disco was really therefore the failure of a form of disco that valorised the patriarchal, the heterosexual and the bourgeois ⎯ and so it wasn't so much a failure of queerness as a failure of these regressive attempts to appropriate disco. This failure of the dominant rather than the queer was born out in the aftermath of the backlash against disco, which would turn out to be a prolific period for non-hegemonic experimentation on the dance floor. But that's the argument of my next book, so I'll leave it to one side for now.
Disco and the Queer Dance Floor
Presented by Tim Lawrence at Feminist/Queer Desires: Past, Present and Future, the third annual Gender and Theory Seminar at Goldsmiths
In this paper I want to think through the relationship between sexuality and the dance floor in 1970s disco culture ⎯ a culture that is commonly ridiculed, yet which stands as a formative period for contemporary dance culture thanks to its innovations within DJing, remixing, dancing and sound system practices. As with so many accounts of popular culture, it has become commonplace to read disco as the staging of a binary contest between gay and straight; in this case, that disco emerged as a male gay outgrowth of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969, and existed as a gay subculture before it was adopted by the straight mainstream and heavily commodified by artists such as the Bee Gees, venues such as Studio 54, and films such as Saturday Night Fever, after which a homophobic backlash against its perceived gayness contributed to its downfall in the second half of 1979. Rather than repeat this narrative, I'm going to outline some of the ways in which the gay/straight binary doesn't account for the sexual trajectory of disco, and I also want to argue that the blurring the occurred around the question of sexuality in fact underpinned disco's queer potential ⎯ its potential to enable an affective and social experience of the body that exceeded normative and dominant conceptions of straight and gay sexuality.
So what came before queer disco? The North American practice of dancing to pre-recorded music in an indoor space goes back to the emergence of jukeboxes in the 1930s and sock hops in the 1950s, after which Oliver Coquelin imported the French innovation of the discotheque to New York at the beginning of the 1960s. Reacting against the elitist framing of these early New York discotheques, a midtown Manhattan discotheque called Arthur opened its doors to a crowd of young urban professionals in 1965, and gay men were ushered to the front of the door queue on the basis that they would help energise the dance floor ⎯ even though, once inside, they could only take to the floor within the structure of the ostensibly heterosexual couple. The structure of that couple remained patriarchal inasmuch as the male dancer would invite the female dancer onto and off the floor, normally to dance the Twist, but the ensuing dance itself also contributed to the undermining of the authority of the male lead, largely because the largely independent movements of the Twist reduced the ability of the man to lead the woman. Here we can see the way in which social dances beginning with the Waltz [IMAGE: Waltz] and the Foxtrot [IMAGE: Foxtrot] and running through to the Lindy Hop or Jitterbug [IMAGE: Lindy Hop], the Texas Tommy [IMAGE: Texas Tommy] and finally the Twist [IMAGE: Twist] allowed for an increasing level of space to exist between a dancing couple, and accordingly provide the female dancer with more freedom to move independently of her male partner. With the Twist, the non-contact nature of the dance continued this process ⎯ even if there were only so many ways a dancer could improvise while swivelling up and down through ankle and hip movement.
Because of its explicit dependence on the singular sound of rock and roll and the rather limiting dance style of the Twist, discotheque craze began to fade towards the end of the 1960s, and when Arthur closed in June 1969 it appeared to mark the end of a relatively short-lived fad. But instead of disappearing, social dance acquired a new form at the beginning of 1970 when David Mancuso staged the first in a long series of private parties in his NoHo apartment that came to be known as the Loft, and around the same time two gay entrepreneurs known as Seymour and Shelley who ran a series of bars in the West Village took over a failing straight venue called the Sanctuary. Together these venues forged a relationship between the DJ and the crowd that continues to inform the core practice of contemporary dance culture. And although gay men were undoubtedly an important and at times a majority presence in both of these settings, none of the participants I spoke with considered either venue to have been marked as gay.
The Loft brought together several contrasting elements: the rent party tradition that dated back to 1920s Harlem; the practice of loft living in downtown New York, which emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s; the rise of audiophile sound technologies, which followed the introduction of stereo in the late 1950s; Timothy Leary's experimental LSD parties; and the gay liberation, civil rights, feminist and anti-war movements that Mancuso aligned himself with during the second half of the 1960s. Having grown up in an orphanage in upstate New York, Mancuso [IMAGE: Mancuso] was used to experiencing families as unstable and extended, and he brought this outlook into his parties, which catered for a diverse demographic. "There was no one checking your sexuality or racial identity at the door," Mancuso told me. "I just knew different people." Because the Loft was run as a private party, Mancuso could have run it as an exclusively male gay event, but he chose not to, and in one of our many interviews together he added: "It wasn't a black party or a gay party. There'd be a mixture of people. Divine used to go. Now how do you categorise her?"
The Sanctuary was also indelibly heterogeneous. "It had an incredible mixture of people," Jorge La Torre [IMAGE: La Torre], a gay male dancer, told me. "There were people dressed in furs and diamonds, and there were the funkiest kids from the East Village. A lot of straight people thought that it was the coolest place in town and there were definitely a lot of women because that was part of what was going on at the time" ⎯ by which La Torre means that gay men were often involved sexually with straight women. "I would say that women made up twenty-five percent of the crowd from the very beginning, probably more. People came from all cultural backgrounds, from all walks of life, and it was the mixture of people that made the place happen." It would have been difficult for Seymour and Shelley to turn the Sanctuary into an exclusively gay discotheque, even if the idea had occurred to them. To begin with, New York State law continued to assert that male-male dancing was illegal and discotheques were accordingly required to contain at least one woman for every three men. While the Sanctuary's owners could have paid off the police in order to get around that obstacle, it's unlikely there would have been a thousand self-identifying dancers to fill up the venue in this formative stage of gay male dance culture. Finally, straight dancers wanted to be part of the nascent disco scene, and thanks to the venue's public status, which meant that anyone who joined the queue could potentially get in, there was no obvious way by which they could be identified and excluded.
I'm not simply questioning the common assumption that early disco culture was homogeneous in terms of its male gay make-up just because it might be inaccurate, but because the reductionist focus on this male gay constituency underestimates and even undermines the political thrust of early seventies dance culture, which attempted to create a democratic, cross-cultural affective community that was relatively open-ended in its formation. Dance crowds were aware of their hybrid formation as well as their proximity to the rainbow coalition of the countercultural movements of the late 1960s, and having witnessed the repressive state reaction against Black Panther activists, Stonewall Inn drag queens, and Kent State University and Jackson State University anti-war demonstrators, they began to explore the social and cultural possibilities of the countercultural movement in the relatively safe space of dance venues such as the Haven, Tambourine, Tamburlaine and the Limelight, as well as the Loft and the Sanctuary. In these settings they engaged with a cultural practice that didn't affirm their maleness or their femaleness, or their gay or straight predilections, or their black, Latin, Asian or white identifications, but instead positioned them as agents who participated in an destabilising ritual that recast the experience of the body through a series of affective vectors that I'll briefly outline.
First: social dance. Whereas dancers in the 1960s took to the floor within the regulated structure of the heterosexual couple, dancers in the 1970s began to take to the floor without a partner. The shift was grounded in the historical experience of gay male sexuality: the longstanding practice of cruising encouraged gay men to be open to the idea of moving onto the dance floor autonomously, while ongoing legal restrictions around male-male dancing also encouraged gay male dancers to take to floor and dance as singles ⎯ at least until the law that restricted men from dancing with each other was repealed in New York in December 1971. But again, it would be a mistake to simply attribute the innovation to gay male culture, because the shift to solo dancing had already been partially inaugurated in the practice of the 1960s music festival, where women and men had started to dance in a swaying motion to the sound of acid rock, so Sanctuary dancers who had participated in events such as Woodstock would have been habituated to the idea of dancing solo. Indeed the shift could even be interpreted as anticipating the arrival of neoliberal capitalism and the emergence of an aggressive form of individualism ⎯ although in this instance something else appears to have been at work, because individual dancers didn't experience the floor as a space of isolation, but instead as a collective setting that enabled them to exceed the relationship of the dancing couple.
That relationship was necessarily limited because the men and women who formed dancing couples had to concentrate on their partner in order to move rhythmically and expressively ⎯ and also void physical injury. As a result, dancing couples were internally focused, and communication with other dancers, never mind the musicians or the DJ, was necessarily limited. In contrast, the dancers who participated in the private party and public discotheque network of the early 1970s ⎯ such as this group of dancers [IMAGE: Le Jardin dancers], who were photographed in 1973 ⎯ were able to develop freeform movements, and because of this they experienced an increased ability to communicate and dance with multiple partners. As Frankie Knuckles, a gay male regular at the Loft, told me: "You could be on the dance floor and the most beautiful woman that you had ever seen in your life would come and dance right on top of you. Then the minute you turned around a man that looked just as good would do the same thing. Or you would be sandwiched between the two of them, or between two women, or between two men, and you would feel completely comfortable." By turning on a single spot, dancers could move in relation to a series of other bodies in a near-simultaneous flow, and this practice opened up the possibility of the dance floor being experienced not as a series of straight partnerships, but as an amorphous and fluid entity ⎯ or, to draw on Deleuze and Guattari, a Body without Organs.
The second factor to consider with regard to the queering of the dance floor is the shifting function of the DJ, which evolved in relationship to the emergence of the dancing crowd ⎯ because dancers didn't simply communicate with other dancers, but also with the DJ, who was tasked with the responsibility of supply music for the dance event. Earlier DJs saw themselves as puppeteers who could manipulate the dancers ⎯ and this was necessary given that one of the DJ's responsibilities was to encourage the dancers to leave the floor and visit the bar, because that was how most venues made their money. But as the Sanctuary DJ Francis Grasso told me, the newfound collective force of the 1970s dance crowd meant that the previous approach was no longer tenable. Grasso is particularly interesting because he was the only employee to survive Seymour and Shelley's buyout of the Sanctuary, so he witnessed the difference playing to the previously regulated straight crowd and the more open and heterogeneous crowd that began to dance at the venue at the beginning of 1970. "When the Sanctuary went gay I didn't play that many slow records because they were drinkers and they knew how to party," Grasso told me. "Just the sheer heat and numbers made them drink. The energy level was phenomenal. At one point I used to feel that if I brought the tempo down they would boo me because they were having so much fun."
Of course dancers didn't just communicate by booing the DJ. They would also clap and cheer and whistle, while the very energy of their movements was also communicative, and it became the primary role of the DJ to read the mood of the crowd and select a record that was appropriate to the moment. Because they were attempting to both lead and respond to the mood on the floor, DJs contributed to a form of antiphonic music making that has characterised a great deal of African American music, and in order to increase the effectiveness of their playing in relation to the crowd, DJs started to segue and then beat-mix between records in order to maintain the rhythmic flow, or even purchase two copies of the same record in order to extend the parts that their dancers particularly liked. As a result, a form of illegitimate music making emerged in which the conventional performing artist was displaced by the improvising figure of the DJ, who could draw on a wide repertoire of sounds and programme them within a democratic economy of desire. Thanks to the absence of the performing artist and the relative anonymity of the DJ, dancers began to respond to the disembodied affect of the music, and this unconventional circuit subtly challenged the hierarchical underpinnings of the music industry, in which the creative artist and producer held an elevated position above the listener. Thanks to the disembodied presence of the recording artist, who could be heard but not seen, the dancer could begin to think of her or himself a contributor to the collectively generated musical tapestry, and could also respond to the music outside of the hierarchical relations of artistry and fandom.
Third, I would like to consider the position of pre-recorded music in this moment of flux and change. Again, the contrast with the 1960s is instructive, for whereas discotheque DJs tended to play from a limited rock and roll repertoire that encouraged a constricted style of dance, and whereas festivals and concerts tended to foreground the singular sound of rock, club DJs drew from a broad range of sounds that eventually coalesced in the form of disco around 1973/74. In his 1979 article "In Defence of Disco", Richard Dyer outlined a number of the key distinctions that lay between rock and disco. Whereas rock confined "sexuality to the cock" and was thus "indelibly phallo-centric music", disco, argued Dyer, "restores eroticism to the whole body" thanks to its "willingness to play with rhythm", and it does this "for both sexes". Disco offered dancers the chance to experience the body as a polymorphous entity that could be reengineered in terms that confounded conservative models of masculinity and femininity, for as Dyer added: "Its eroticism allows us to rediscover our bodies as part of this experience of materiality and the possibility of change." In other words, disco opened up the possibility of experiencing pleasure through a form of non-penetrative sensation ⎯ and did so shortly before Foucault, following a trip to the United States, called for the making "of one's body a place for the production of extraordinary polymorphic pleasures, while simultaneously detaching it from a valorization of the genitalia and particularly of the male genitalia".
The contrast between "Jingo" by Santana and "Drums of Passion" by Olatunji ⎯ both of which were played by Grasso ⎯ illustrates the distinction well. Whereas Santana's rock version developed a rigid beat and foregrounded the phallocentric instrumentation of the electric guitar and the male voice, Olatunji's original recording emphasised rhythmic interplay along with a chorus of voices that developed a call-and-response interchange between themselves and with the drummers ⎯ so when Grasso DJed in front of the straight Sanctuary crowd he stuck to the Santana version, but when the crowd diversified he started to play Olatunji's polyrhythmic original. As Grasso told me: "I said to myself, 'If Santana works then the real shit is going to kill them!' I was good at mixing one record into another so I played the Santana and brought in "Jin-Go-Lo-Ba". The crowd preferred the Olatunji, where there's no screaming guitar. They got into it straight away."
The Olatunji was typical of the kind of record that DJs were hunting down in the early 1970s: with disco yet to come into formation, DJs drew on a broad range of sounds that included R&B, soul, danceable rock and a range of European and African imports ⎯ so the diversity of the music matched the diversity of the crowds. Because it evoked the hybrid flux of the dance crowd, "Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys" by the Equals became a popular record, as did Booker T's similarly symbolic "Melting Pot". Other tracks developed heterosexual themes that were ripe for appropriation, so "Free Man" by the South Shore Commission acquired a new layer of meaning when gay male dancers interpreted it an anthem of gay liberation rather than a tussle between two straight lovers. But sometimes the straight trajectory of a lyric didn't have to be reinterpreted if the delivery was strong enough, as Loleatta Holloway demonstrated on her rendition of "Hit and Run", which was remixed by Walter Gibbons in 1977. The record runs for eleven minutes; I'm going to introduce a short section that begins at 4:15:
MUSIC: Loleatta Holloway "Hit and Run" (4:15 to 5:00)
Invited to remix the album version of "Hit and Run" for Salsoul, Gibbons risked the wrath of the label by cutting the first two minutes of Holloway's vocal as well as all of her verses, which amounted to an unprecedented action on the part of the remixer, who was part of a nascent profession that existed well below the figure of the recording artist and the producer within the hierarchy of the music industry. In place of the cut vocals, Gibbons turned to the multitrack tapes of the original recording session, which included a five-minute improvised Holloway vamp that had only been sparingly used in the album version, but which Gibbons loved for its feisty, impassioned delivery. Intriguingly, he kept Holloway's vamped version of one of the cut choruses ⎯ the line "I may be old fashioned and a country girl // But when it comes to loving you // When it comes to loving you // I know what to do". Holloway told me the song was one of the worst she had ever had to sing, and Gibbons clearly made an astute decision when he cut the first take of the "country girl" verse from the remix. But Holloway's vamped version developed so much energy the affective force of the delivery overrode the linguistic meaning of the words ⎯ and functioned in effect as a secular version of the gospel strategy of repeating lyrics until their meaning is emptied out and the self is opened up to divine inspiration. That affective force lay at the heart of Holloway's popularity on the dance floor, and it was the reason why so many other African American divas, including Gloria Gaynor, Grace Jones and Donna Summer, rose to international prominence. African American women achieved an unprecedented profile within disco, and did so largely because dancers identified with their outsider status, their refusal to crumble in the face of adversity, and their emotional expressiveness.
To wrap up this section, I want to finally and briefly consider the way in which a series of technologies and strategies also contributed to alternative, non-dominant experiences of the body in the 1970s dance environment. Regarding the temporal experience of disco, the practice of staging parties late at night became the founding premise of a culture that aimed to invert the priorities of a society organised around daytime work, and the protection afforded by darkness as well as the protected space of the dance party enabled disenfranchised citizens a level of expressiveness they rarely enjoyed during the day ⎯ which is something Judith Halberstam has commented on in her book In A Queer Times and Place. The forward march of teleological time ⎯ the time of bourgeois domesticity and capitalist productivity ⎯ was upset within the disco environment, where repetitive and cyclical beat cycles created an alternative experience of temporality and the absence of clocks enabled dancers to move into a realm of pleasure in which work ⎯ the work of the dance ⎯ was not required to be productive in a conventional economic sense. Within this setting, DJs drew on a range of records that cut across temporal and spatial boundaries in order to evoke and in some respects create a radically diverse sonic utopia. Their practice of using two copies of a record to not only collapse but also extend time ⎯ extend the moment of the record that was most popular ⎯ culminated in a the creation of a new disco format ⎯ the twelve-inch single ⎯ that enabled record companies to produce long mixes that were specially-remixed for the dance floor.
The emphasis on temporal length was important: if the record was long, the dancer had a greater opportunity to lose her or himself in the music, and therefore to enter into an alternative dimension that didn't so much evacuate the site of the body as realign it within a new sonic reality. That new sonic reality acquired particular force in spaces such as the Loft, which didn't sell alcohol and could accordingly stay open long after the public discotheques that were governed by New York's cabaret licensing laws had to close. The extended hours encouraged partygoers to engage in marathon-style dance sessions in which the physical was prioritised over the rational, and this opened up participants to the experience of the body as an entity that was not bounded and distinctive, but rather permeable and connected.
The confined space of the dance floor, in which dancers would inevitably come into contact with one another, heightened the experience of the body as extended and open, and this was further enhanced by sound system, drug and lighting technologies. Julian Henriques has described the Jamaican sound system as a form of "sonic dominance", in which the sonic takes over from the visual and creates a community based on sound. In these situations, the sound permeates the body, and therefore creates a situation in which the bounded body is penetrated and becomes difficult to maintain as a separate and unified entity ⎯ and this was precisely the kind of situation that was engineered in disco, where figures such as David Mancuso as well as engineers such as Richard Long and Alex Rosner introduced a range of innovations in order to produce both purer and more powerful sound. Drugs ⎯ and in particular LSD ⎯ were consumed in order to create a non-normative experience of the immediate world, and encouraged dancers to enter into an alternative experience of both time and space, as well as to encourage the body to form a connected alliance with sound. Meanwhile, lighting was deployed sparingly, because bodies were more likely to exceed everyday constrictions in an environment that emphasised the connective dimension of the aural above the separating dimension of the scopic. Inasmuch as lighting was used, it was usually aimed at creating disorienting effects, again in order to encourage the dancer to experience the dance floor as an alternative and experimental space.
All of these factors contributed to the emergence of the early 1970s dance floor as a space in which non-dominant subjectives could be enjoyed and explored, and this explains why a range of disenfranchised groups ⎯ gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender subjects, straight women, African and Latin Americans, and various intersections of these identities ⎯ were so prominent on the dance floor. Straight men were welcomed into the scene, but would have only hung around if they felt comfortable with their non-dominant status ⎯ and many of them were. And while many participants experienced the dance floor as a space where identities and subjectivities could be consolidated rather than dissolved, the experience of dancing for an extended period time in a darkened, crowded space also produced an alternative experience of the body that was organised around not a fixed sense of self but rather a destabilised sense of self that positioned the body in a heterogeneous body-sonic network that exceeded normative experiences of gender, sexuality and race.
I want to try and wrap things up by noting that the queer potential of the early 1970s dance floor was vulnerable to various forms of dilution and cooption. This process unfolded in three notable ways. Firstly, a range of party organisers and accomplice dancers sought to split up the early disco scene into a series of discreet groups that were organised around identity, and this led to an inevitable closing down of the demographic range on a series of dance floors as well as a more normative and static conception of what kind of identities could be articulated in the dance setting. Second, as the demographic constituency of disco was divided and subdivided, a number of promoters began to seek out what they perceived to be an elite dance crowd, and this resulted in the introduction of a marked sense of hierarchy into the disco scene. Third, in order to sell disco to the perceived mass market ⎯ the suburban market, or the Middle American market ⎯ entrepreneurs reframed disco as the a popular site for patriarchal masculinity and heterosexual courtship.
These shifts came to be felt in the emergence of a specified white gay club scene [IMAGE: Flamingo flyer of white gay dancer with tambourine], which was forged in the white, upper-middle-class space of Fire Island in the summer of 1970 and established a foothold in Manhattan when the Tenth Floor opened at the end of November 1972 and deployed David Mancuso's Loft-style template in order to create a private party for a white gay crowd. That crowd quickly began to identify itself as being part of a so-called A-list elite, and the size of this niche scene expanded when Flamingo opened in December 1974. The flyer on view comes from Flamingo and illustrates the way in which the attempt to depict and market a dance scene leads to its narrowing. In this case, the idealised Flamingo dancer is marked as being bourgeois and beautiful ⎯ he is muscular, stylish and groomed ⎯ and he is also marked as being white ⎯ not just because of his skin, but also through his use of the tambourine, a high-end percussion instrument that is also physically held up high. Flamingo DJs did indeed move towards rejecting R&B-oriented disco in favour of the more rigid rhythms and complex orchestrations of Eurodisco, while black gay dancers [IMAGE: mural on front wall of Flamingo depicting black masturbating man], who also tended to be less economically wealthy than white gay dancers, were framed within a mythological, essentialised and pornographic discourse. Those I interviewed said they felt unwelcome at the venue.
Another striking element of the white gay dancer image is the way in which the subject is positioned as a solitary figure, and this speaks to the difficulty of framing ⎯ or perhaps I should say marketing and selling ⎯ disco as a collective rather than an individualistic endeavour. That problem became more marked in the second half of the 1970s, and in particular from 1977 onwards, when a series of huge midtown mega-discotheques opened on the premise that, like Flamingo, they would cater to an elite audience that was organised around the fashion industry, film stars, international jet-setters, beautiful people and so on. The most famous of these was Studio 54, which bore some intriguing links to the culture of the Loft, but ultimately instituted a competitive and hierarchical entrance policy. Huge crowds [IMAGE: crowd scene outside Studio 54] would form outside the venue every night, with the doorman and owner instituting an often cruel and random policy with regard to who could and couldn't enter, and while there was a declared intention to create a demographic mix within the venue, the mix was predicated on exclusion and hierarchy. It followed that a venue [IMAGE: Jagger, Warhol et al inside Studio 54] that was so self-absorbed with its status would pay more attention to the scopic than the aural, to lighting rather than sound, and to the possible presence of a celebrity, and so the primary activity at Studio came to be not dancing but looking. For reasons I've already outlined, this undermined the venue's potential to function as a space of queer becoming.
In this series of mini-snapshots of the appropriation of queer disco, I have to also ⎯ and finally ⎯ reference Saturday Night Fever [IMAGE: John Travolta], which was released at the end of 1977. Organised around the culture of the suburban discotheque and the figure of Tony Manero, played by John Travolta, the film enacted the reappropriation of the dance floor by straight male culture inasmuch as it became a space for straight men to display their prowess and hunt for a partner of the opposite sex. The film also popularised the hustle, a Latin social dance, and in so doing reinstituted the straight dancing couple at the centre of the dance exchange, and simultaneously contributed to the whitening of the disco aesthetic thanks to the central position of the Bee Gees in the soundtrack. None of this would have mattered if the film had sunk without a trace, but instead it went on to break box office and album sales, and in so doing established an easily reproducible template for disco that was thoroughly de-queered in its outlook.
Here's one version of how the story of 1970s disco ends. Following the unexpected commercial success of Saturday Night Fever, major records companies began to invest heavily in a sound that they didn't care for, and when the overproduction of disco coincided with the onset of the deep recession of 1979, a largely homophobic but also notably sexist and racist backlash ensued that culminated with a "disco sucks" record burning rally that was staged at the home of the Chicago White Sox in July 1979. The coalition of gay men, straight women, African Americans, Latinas and Latinos and other disenfranchised citizens that lay at the heart of disco culture became a scapegoat for the perceived failure of the 1960s and the 1970s, and in turn exemplified the shift to social conservatism that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s ⎯ a populist reaction that, as Stuart Hall and others have argued, proved to be a necessary strategic accompaniment to the punitive consequences of the simultaneous shift to free market liberalism.
Yet the backlash didn't mark an end to disco per se, because the Loft and many of its offshoots, including the similarly modelled Paradise Garage, continued to organise their dance floors according to the communal and explorative principles set out at the beginning of the 1970s. In effect, the perceived failure of disco was really therefore the failure of a form of disco that valorised the patriarchal, the heterosexual and the bourgeois ⎯ and so it wasn't so much a failure of queerness as a failure of these regressive attempts to appropriate disco. This failure of the dominant rather than the queer was born out in the aftermath of the backlash against disco, which would turn out to be a prolific period for non-hegemonic experimentation on the dance floor. But that's the argument of my next book, so I'll leave it to one side for now.