In her book on the story of disco music Alice Echols traces the nurturing of the sound to gay dance clubs. In order for there to have been gay dance clubs, first gay people had to be able to dance, yet same sex close dancing was illegal throughout the US up until the late 60s. In 1969, Echols emphasizes, the government’s policing of same sex closeness was still an active and dispiriting part of LGBT life. Echols believes that the relative freedom experienced at the Stonewall Inn was what opened hearts to the possibility of real escape from oppression rather than hiding and cowering.
[W]hen the Stonewall Inn opened in the spring of 1967, management and customers alike behaved as if the dance floor had been won. The unlicensed bar was a firetrap that doled out watered-down drinks in dirty glasses, but it quickly developed a loyal clientele because it was the only gay bar in New York City that as a matter of course permitted dancing between men. In contrast to another gay bar, the Tenth of Always, where ‘you knew that when the chandelier would flick on, you’d have to sit down,’ at the Stonewall ‘you were never told not to dance.’ Indeed, the only time the dancing came to a halt was when the police arrived. … [The raid that sparked the Stonewall riots] was hardly the first time that the police hit the Stonewall, but it was the first time they had not given notice to the management. And it was the first time that gays, angry about being treated like scum, fought back.
The dance floor, Echols is saying, became a site of the transformation of consciousness, where emancipation of the public body allowed a change in how gay men saw themselves and each other — and how, in a new solidarity, they saw the non-gay world. Dancers, no longer threatened by the paddy wagon, could enjoy themselves without looking over their shoulders.
It wasn’t just that the music’s volume and relentlessness encouraged physical intimacy and greater sexual straightforwardness between men. Disco’s sonics, with its thunderous bass and its bass drum kick, operated like an ‘audio orgasmatron’ … The music and the drugs pretty well obliterated any lingering sexual shyness. Moreover, the sweatbox quality of many gay discos made stripping to the waist all but necessary, which in turn made working out practically obligatory. … ‘Within a short five years, sculptured pectoral muscles had become one of the main attributes of gay male desirability.’ … Worked-out pecs came to be called ‘disco-tits.’ … [G]ay men rather than heterosexual men became the embodiment of masculinity and the fantasized object of desire for each other. … ‘We’re the men we’ve been looking for,’ as the protagonist of [novelist Edmund] White’s The Farewell Symphony put it.
I like recreational drugs. I like club music. But my body is not so into either. I’m not one who could go clubbing regularly because my body would just crash. Too many migraines, too many body aches, too little sleep. Besides, the drugs are too expensive, the music ultimately monotonous. As to ever having disco tits — I actually like working out, but my body that doesn’t. That sounds weird to everyone I’ve ever said it to. Still, it’s true. I can’t ramp up my work out routine to get those pretty muscles because my body basically says, nope, and sends me to bed for three days.
I always kind of envied club kids, their energy, their active social lives, the sex. But it’s not a lifestyle I could participate in, other than briefly and at a remove. But if we credit Alice Echols’ argument, the club was where gay liberation really began, so good for them! Dance the revolution!
source:
Hot Stuff: disco and the remaking of American culture
by Alice Echols
2010. W. W. Norton & Co., New York
No comments:
Post a Comment