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The book details the rise of disco in the city, starting with the influence of DJ Johnny “Disco” Hedges first in 1973 at the Mind Shaft club, then later at the luxurious City Disco, which mixed in live performance for a cabaret-like atmosphere. Menergy: San Francisco’s Gay Disco Sound, published by Oxford University Press, is written by musicologist Louis Niebur.
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Despite the homophobic and racist US backlash of the infamous Disco Demolition Night of 1979 - which saw a pile of records from mostly Black artists detonated in Chicago’s Comiskey Park as a white mob chanted “Disco sucks!” - the party in San Francisco never stopped. (Saturday Night Fever’s ultra-straight, Brooklyn Italian-American pick-up joints and Montreal’s quaintly experimental approach were just two variants.) That story also includes the way disco popularised inventions like mixing and beat-matching, technologically complex lighting and spatial sound design, 12-inch records and remixes arguably, disco popularised electronic music itself.Īlong with Sylvester, trailblazing producer Patrick Cowley, record company founders Marty Blecman and Johnny “Disco” Hedges and a slew of gay DJs were architects of the high-energy San Francisco disco sound, a delirious permutation that stoked 24-hour debauchery in the city’s dance palaces, bars, bathhouses and roiling street scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s. The actual story of disco, however, is more complex, beginning with the fascinating micro-diversity of its regional sounds and scenes. But it’s still a sonic monolith, a brief streak of mirrorball joy before they put everyone in neckties or on the dole. Shorthand for naughty dancefloor decadence pleasantly repackaged as nostalgia, disco has managed to shed much of its corny reputation.
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To many other listeners, disco has become a shimmering algorithm of sleek production and instantly recognisable hooks - endlessly sampled, retouched, remixed and edited to cast a beam of golden warmth on any party, wedding or household chore. In recent years, as DJs and dancers are more visibly celebrating the Black, queer roots of dance music, the outspoken, unabashedly gay Sylvester has risen to deity level - the falsetto-voiced Queen of Disco whose hits ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’, ‘Dance (Disco Heat)’, and ‘Do You Wanna Funk?’ have powered the LGBTQ community through triumph and heartbreak, and testified to the connection between disco’s rapturous hedonism and the Black gospel music of Sylvester’s youth. To save San Francisco disco, it takes a village, people.
#SAN FRANCISCO GAY SEX PARTY ARCHIVE#
It changed the course of electronic dance music - then was wiped out by a deluge of death.Ĭan the sounds and spirit of this essential scene be captured, before they fade away forever? Joining the archives in the effort is a new book documenting the history of San Francisco disco called Menergy, an online archive of DJ sets from the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society, a steady stream of previously unavailable music released by the Dark Entries label and a host of faithfully retro parties. Sylvester’s musical story frames a wild, liberating, eventually tragic but ultimately inspiring period in gay history one which unfolded on San Francisco’s dancefloors, amid the ecstatic jangle of tambourines and the whoosh and clack of hand- painted fans. Dedicated preservationists have catalogued and stored LGBTQ community artefacts since 1985, when the Historical Society was formed to save the belongings of people killed by AIDS from the trash heap. Sylvester’s effects are part of a growing disco collection at the archives. Also secured for future generations of disco pilgrims are his hair-pins, brooches, earrings, sequinned stage costumes and, touchingly, a mounted collection of exquisite satin gloves, which of course the diva framed himself.
#SAN FRANCISCO GAY SEX PARTY PROFESSIONAL#
Items inside the crate, recently transferred from his estate into the archives’ professional hands, include his gold records, industry awards, concert flyers, photographs and newspaper clippings. It contains the personal effects of Sylvester, the Black, gender-defying performer who started out as a countercultural star in the early 1970s and rose to become a global disco icon, before passing away from AIDS in 1988.
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Deep in the vaults of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society and Museum Archives, a modest wooden crate glows with the importance of a sacred reliquary.