Gay dance club music

This high profile party was part of a wider effort to have the section of King Street where it took place renamed Larry Levan Way, after the infamous DJ and the equally legendary club, the Paradise Garage, which once stood on the same block. Whether experienced in person or virtually, one thing quickly became apparent about the Larry Levan Street Party: This was not your typical dance music crowd.

With an average age well over 30 over 40, eventhis was clearly a party for adults. Look again and the multi-racial make-up of the audience not only skewed black and Latino, it was almost exclusively made up of minorities—and not just racially. A substantial percentage of those assembled at the Larry Levan Street Party were gay.

A subculture that, as the first rays of gay rights began to shine out of the closet, gave birth to the dance music culture that now goes around the globe. The depth one can delve into the history of gay dance music is only limited by how deep one wishes to dig. One queer not in question is David Mancuso and his infamous Loft party—marked by almost all authors, including Manuel-Garcia, as ground zero for the start of disco, gay or otherwise.

Knuckles would relocate to Chicago, where he would take up DJ residency at The Warehouse, and in the process give house music its genre name. Levan would remain in New York, where his own music at the Paradise Garage dance act as another key catalyst to DJ culture as we know it today. Both The Warehouse and Paradise Garage offered a gritty underground gay of the disco fever that swept the entire nation in the country in the mid-to-late 70s.

It was a cultural phenomenon most famously encapsulated in the glitz of Studio 54, but club accurately portrayed in the tough guy with twinkle-toes contradiction of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Far removed from the heartland hostility that consumed mainstream disco, the urban gay clubs continued to nurture the disco sound that would morph into house and techno music by the early 80s.

Yet despite these few outlier events, this seemingly fertile time for dance music innovation was in fact a fallow period in its popularity.

Dance Pride: The Gay Origins of Dance Music

Undeniably, AIDS only aggravated the issue, decimating much of the club-going generation with fear and its sexually transmitted death sentence. Dance music would not deliver another bumper crop of beats until the late 80s, this time in the UK with acid house and the rave revolution.

Fueled by the empathy-heightening powers of ecstasy, this scene famously turned brawling blokes into luved-up loons. Despite gay icons music Tony De Vit and infamous London club Trade, a vast majority of the acid house scene practiced the hetronormative sexuality of the club culture. The same could certainly be said for the U.

One could argue that the final nail was hammered into the original era of gay dance music when nightlife icon Michael Alig murdered his drug dealer and fellow fag Angel Melendez in a drug-fueled rage. It was a literal gay metaphorical double homicide that ended the life of the young man, as well as the flamboyant New York Club Kids scene, which Alig had ruled after escaping his own midwestern rural roots.

One might be tempted to analyze the irony of a white man from the Midwest killing a Latino man from Manhattan, and simultaneously pulling the plug on 20 years of gay dance music innovation in the process. From that point on, the dance music of the 90s would be defined by an almost asexual dance, all phat pants androgyny that was the utter opposite of hip-hugging disco denim.

Electroclash attempted to reclaim the fabulous fashion of the scene, but was mired in overwrought affect, despite the sincere sass of Larry Tee and the vocal queer feminism of Le Tigre. The other side of that coin was driven by the rediscovery of vintage gay dance music by mostly straight Brooklyn music nerds. Lead by conspicuously schlubby guys like James Murphy, along with The Rapture and Juan Maclean, these new pied pipers of underground dance music would eagerly introduce disco and house to a generation of hipsters previously fed a steady diet of The Strokes and PBR.

This is in no way meant to position these several generations of breeding beat-makers as anti-gay. There is also a distinct difference between conservation and cultural creation.