The term disco often brings to mind, images of polyester suits, coordinated choreography and flashy disco balls. John Badham’s 1977 cinematic classic Saturday Night Fever capitalized on those images to help mainstream society relate to this growing subculture. John Travolta’s portrayal of Tony Manero, a down on his luck heterosexual male, who uses disco as a means of escape from his everyday life, helps to demonstrate Hollywood’s encroachment on this growing cultural phenomenon. What Badham’s film fails to explore is the history of disco; the influence that it had on underground society in the United States. The story of Tony Manero lacks the colourful history of this musical tradition. For example, the film does not explore the homosexual institutions from which disco arose.
From the beginning, disco found a strong audience with the gay community. Gay-oriented bathhouses like New York’s Continental Baths were some of the first venues where disco tracks were spun. With this growing popularity, disco became more than a genre; it generated its own lifestyle. While disco music manifested itself in the heart of this growing lifestyle, it can be explored through “kinds of dancing, club, fashion, film-in a word, a certain sensibility, manifest in music, clubs and so forth, historically and culturally specific, economically, technologically, ideologically, and aesthetically determined.” This essay intends to prove that disco, both as a form of music and as a lifestyle, brought homosexuality “out of the closet” and helped to establish a visible gay subculture in the United States during the 1970’s by exploring how disco gave the gay community a place where they could unite as a people and how it presented them with an opportun...
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...ut in culture : gay, lesbian, and queer essays on popular culture, by Corey Creekmur and Alexander Doty, 407-415. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Hubbs, Nadine. "'I Will Survive': musical mappings of queer social space in a disco anthem." Popular Music, 2007: 231-244.
Hughes, Walter. "In the Empire of the Beat." In Microphone fiends : youth music & youth culture , by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, 147-157. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Lawrence, Tim. ""I Want to See All My Friends At Once": Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco." Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2006: 144-166.
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encyclopedia, by George Haggerty, John Beynon and Douglas Eisner, 618-620. New
York: Garland, 2000.
Shapiro, Peter. Turn the Beat Around. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc, 2005.
In Justin Pearson's memoir, From the Graveyard of the arousal Industry, he recounts the events that occured from his early years of adolesence to the latter years of his adulthood telling the story of his unforgiving and candid life. Set in the late 1970s "Punk" rock era, From the Graveyard of the Arousal Industry offers a valuable perspective about the role culture takes in our lives, how we interact with it and how it differs from ideology.
After reading Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” I began to think about disco as a product of capitalism. This is something that I had never really thought of before. When I think about the hip-hop industry I think capitalism, but not necessarily disco. In this article Dyer goes on to defend disco by identifying its key characteristics, and relating them to ways in which these characteristics allow gay men to escape the pressures of the dominant heterosexual society. Characteristics such as eroticism, romanticism, and materialism are outlined within Dyer’s article. Even though Disco may have been driven in capitalistic ways, I think that it has created an environment that helps to redefine gender and sexuality. Disco, like many other genres of music, has allowed for the creation of many dynamic cultures. These various sub cultures continue to evolve and flourish over time.
Rock n’ roll gave people the voice they did not have in the early years. As the genre of music became more wide spread, people actually began to speak out. Altschuler touches on the exploration of how the rock n' roll culture roughly integrated with replaced and conflicted with preceding cultural values. Many of these values were very touch topics. Besides black civil rights, sexuality were one of the most sensitive t...
But he does not simply dispel the myths of early 20th century gay life, he also details such myths to...
Released in 1994, 14 years into the AIDS epidemic, the film had a phenomenal response around the world and in Australia. Travelling from Sydney, the three main characters, played by Hugo Weaving, Guy Peirce and Terrance Stamp, travel to Alice Springs for a cabaret show hosted by Mitzi’s wife. The audience is positioned to sympathise with the main characters during their hardships, and good times. The movie confronts different types of masculinity in an extreme environment. The film presents the stereotypical behavior of gay men that is evident in our society.
They mention the transition of “the closet,” as being a place in which people could not see you, to becoming a metaphor over the last two decades of the twentieth century used for queers who face a lack of sexual identity. Shneer and Aviv bring together two conflicting ideas of the American view of queerness: the ideas of the past, and the present. They state as queerness became more visible, people finally had the choice of living multiple lives, or integrating one’s lives and spaces (Shneer and Aviv 2006: 245). They highlight another change in the past twenty years as the clash between being queer and studying queerness (Shneer and Aviv 2006: 246-7). They argue that the active and visible contests over power among American queers show that queers now occupy an important place in our culture. They expand on the fact that queerness, real, and performed, is everywhere (Shneer and Aviv 2006: 248). This source shows the transformation in American culture of the acceptance of queerness. It makes an extremely critical resource by providing evidence of the changes in culture throughout the last two decades. Having the information that queerness is becoming more accepted in culture links to a higher percentage of LGBTQ youths becoming comfortable with their sexual identity. However, compared to the other sources, this
The media considers the1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City the spark of the modern gay rights movement. This occurred after the police raided the Stonewall bar, a popular gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Allyn argues that the new energy and militancy generated by the riot played a crucial role in creating the gay liberation movement. Arguably, the Stonewall Riots have come to resemble the pivotal moment in gay rights history largely because it provided ways for the gay community to resist the social norms. In fact, the riots increased public awareness of gay rights activism (Allyn 157). Gay life after the Stonewall riots, however, was just as varied and complex as it was before. In the following era, ho...
Although the style of ‘Rock music’ is easily adaptable to many different sounds, it is still thoroughly identified by its definingly amplified rhythm. The sudden worldwide popularity of rock and roll resulted in an unparalleled social impact. Rock ‘n’ Roll influenced lifestyles, fashion, attitudes, and language in a way few other social developments have equaled. The social impact is so large that rock stars are worshipped worldwide. In its early years, many adults condemned the style of music, placing a stigma on its name, and forbid their children from listening and following its ways.
Richard Rodriguez in his piece “Late Victorians” paints a picture as an outside observer of gay culture in San Francisco. He opens and closes with thoughts from St. Augustine and continues through the paper to write of his heavy Catholic influence in his thinking. As a gay male that migrated to San Francisco, Rodriguez speaks of the stereotypes within the gay community, always putting himself in a different if not elevated category.
Glasser, Ruth. My Music is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and the New York Communities. (University of California Press, Berkaley 1995)
Harris, James F. “Listen to the music: the meaning of classic rock,” The World & I, Vol. 11, 12 Ed. (1996): December, pp. 306.
Halperin, David. "Is There a History of Sexuality?." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry
McLeese, Don. “The Spirit of a Rocker.” New York Times. 18 October 1987. Web. 11
So began my two-year ethnography on the American rave subculture. The scene described above was my initiation into the underground subculture where rave kids, typically under twenty-one years old, are given secret invitations to attend private warehouse parties with dancing, drugs, and thousands of their closest friends. Because of my youthful and unorthodox appearance, I was invited to join the then-highly-exclusive underground scene and attended numerous raves in several major cities in North Carolina. Although my chosen subculture was not typically examined by academia, I conducted an academic ethnography of what Maton (1993) describes as a "group whose world views, values and practices diverge from mainstream North American and social science cultures" (747). As a result, I received three graduate credit hours for "supervised research in ethnography" and conducted what may be the only academic ethnography on raves.
In the United states during the 1920’s, or roaring twenties, through the 30’s was a time of vast African American musical and artistical expression. This movement called “The Harlem Renaissance” gave way to new ideas about homosexuality and transgenders. This movement was also, “Marked by the attitude that homosexuality was a personal matter”(Gibson 52). In other words, they thought that being gay, lesbian, or transgender was a personal choice and should not be against the law. Although a lot of attention was being given to gays and lesbians during this time, not much was written about transgenders until later on in