by Ann Powers
Perhaps David Bowie was thinking of Sylvester, his onetime rival, when he too turned to disco on his 1975 album Young Americans. Bored with rock, his open marriage with Angie foundering, he’d moved to New York in 1974 and was keeping company with two different African American singers, Ava Cherry and Claudia Lennear. With Cherry, he went to Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater, catching a multi-artist bill that included the Main Ingredient, a big soul band David Mancuso favored in his Loft sets. With Lennear, he attended a Los Angeles club show by the soulful bluesman Bobby “Blue” Bland and sang along from his table when passed the microphone. In Philadelphia, he entered Sigma Sound Studios with the guitarist Carlos Alomar, who’d played with the Main Ingredient as well as James Brown; Alomar’s wife, the singer Robin Clark; and his best friend, Luther Vandross, who ended up doing all the album’s vocal arrangements.68
Bowie’s underlying goal with Young Americans was to unravel his relationship with race the way he had done with gender on earlier albums. “He was working in a studio run by black entrepreneurs, with mostly black musicians, on music that was inspired by the sound of black America,” notes critic Peter Doggett in his book on Bowie in the 1970s. “As a kid, that had been the most seductive part of the myth, before he knew what it meant to be black in this land. Now after the official end of segregation, the supposed death of discrimination, what was black America, the youngest America of them all?”69 But black America is also the oldest America. Connecting with soul in the disco age, Bowie finally challenged himself to face the core conundrum of the music he’d loved since his teenage years: the way racial anxiety, the desire to mix, and the long legacy of whites observing and exploiting African American culture created unbearable tensions made accessible, though never resolved, in popular music.
Bowie honed in on the centuries-old predicament behind the many blendings in disco, and, beyond that, the hopeful attempts to expand and order sexual experience in the 1970s. Unleashing emotionalism and eroticism within interracial music that reflected his own desires but which also spoke to a long history of white appropriation—he himself would later call Young Americans “plastic soul” and “the phoniest R&B I’ve ever heard,” only to take back those criticisms later—Bowie confronted the limits of individuals’ potential to transform themselves, erotically or otherwise. The album is overwrought, tragic, and beautiful. It carries an air of finality, anticipating disco’s own fall, after it had infiltrated the mainstream, in a backlash that obliterated its commercial and cultural presence.
By the time of the backlash—in 1979, when thousands of hard-rock-loving fans blew up disco records and rioted on Chicago’s Comiskey Park during a radio station–sponsored Disco Demolition Night—Bowie was long gone from America, living in Berlin and making experimental albums with little overt erotic appeal. The culture he’d mined and mirrored on his stateside journey had moved on, too. A new puritan mood was just beginning to emerge in the stringent sounds of punk, the raw rock style rising out of gutter clubs in New York and Los Angeles. American sex would go through many changes in the ensuing decades: a plague; an increasingly conservative political mood; in entertainment, the full emergence of a corporate culture that found its biggest sensual thrills within mass-mediated spectacles. The erotic heroines and heroes of the next pop era would no longer be preoccupied with intimate self-improvement. Instead, their major statements would throw into question the meaning and value of sex itself.
7
OH NO, IT HURTS
AIDS, REAGAN, AND THE BACKLASH
© Getty Images
NEW YORK, SAN FRANCISCO, SEATTLE, 1977–1997
The Disco Demolition Night of 1979 now seems ridiculously wrongheaded, but it did effectively end the music’s commercial reign. Organized by the rock radio DJ Steve Dahl and sportscaster and White Sox scion Mike Veeck, it was the sputtering war cry of classic-rock-loving dudes who felt backed into a corner by the vibrant identity movements of the 1970s. And it worked. Suddenly, in straight white America, it wasn’t cool to like disco anymore. Stations nationwide dropped their disco formats and returned to rock; record labels, not seeing profits from DJ-favored twelve-inch singles anyway, welcomed the backlash. Yet the demolition hardly killed dance music. That lived on in the inferno’s embers, mutating into new forms like the house remixes pulsing through the gay clubs of Chicago and New York and the New Wave synth-pop bubbling up to form a seedbed for what would become mainstream pop in the 1980s.
As the trends turned, a nearly six-foot-tall black woman with a jawline like a battleship stood on the bridge between disco and what would come next. The Jamaican-born, Syracuse-raised Grace Jones was a supermodel in Paris and an “It” girl on every chic guest list in New York before becoming a disco diva with “I Need a Man,” produced by the genre’s standard-bearer Tom Moulton, in 1977. An early Ebony magazine profile described the habitual provocateur as “a question mark followed by an exclamation point.” Especially adored by the gay male fans who loved to sweat to Moulton’s beats, the impossibly angular, deep-voiced Jones cultivated an image that, like Bowie’s, cast androgyny as the chosen response to the era’s ruling notion that gender, even the sexual urge itself, was constructed and mutable. For the covers of her pioneering 1980s recordings, Jones’s French lover and collaborator Jean-Paul Goude manipulated her image until she looked like a cat-human, a cubist sculpture, or a fearsomely alive mannequin. “So much of Jones’s aesthetic seems bound up with the eroticization of alienation,” the music critic team of Simon Reynolds and Joy Press reflected in their 1995 book on gender and pop, The Sex Revolts. By that time, Jones had become an icon of the technologically obsessed, art-damaged New Wave underground. From the ashes of disco’s inferno, she rose as a symbol of a new day, when desire would be melted down and reshaped as something sleeker, harder, perhaps unreal.1
A regular at discos like the Paradise Garage, whose DJ Larry Levan was moving disco forward using synthesizers and drum machines, Jones participated in the creation of safe spaces where the music’s exhortational, highly sexualized feeling of freedom could survive both its commercialization and those attacks by hard-rock-loving homophobes. She held the baby shower for her soon-to-be-born son with Goude at the club in October 1979, surrounded by male dancers dressed as toy soldiers. “The Garage was the kind of place where this kind of thing could happen,” Jones wrote in her memoir. “A world unto itself embedded in but separate from the surrounding city.” Like the crowd of devotees who, one reporter said, screamed for her to “show us the stomach, honey,” Jones felt the need for such sheltering. Alongside its report on her shower, Jet magazine ran an item about Jones almost being run out of the women’s room at Bloomingdale’s for “being a man”—until she flashed that stomach and proved her biological bona fides.2
The world was already beginning to close in on the sensual playground of the 1970s. The nation’s political mood continued to darken as the decade wound down, with two energy crises, a stock market crash, and massive unemployment feeding a pervasive mood of scarcity among average citizens. After an international hostage crisis his administration could not resolve, President Jimmy Carter, once a symbol of easy times who featured Southern rockers like the Allman Brothers on his campaign stops, lost his second-term bid to a new patriarch: Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, a hippie-hating, Communist-baiting social conservative who by 1984 was promising a new “morning in America.” Economically, Reagan’s policies favored the wealthy and attacked social programs for the poor; culturally, they were grounded in a conservative Christian framework that assumed “shared values” rooted in the Bible and a Puritan clarity about right and wrong. “The era of self-doubt is over,” Reagan declared in an address at the West Point military academy in 1981. “We’ve stopped looking at our warts and rediscovered how much there is to love in this blessed land.” For this president and his acolytes, the critiques raised by countercultural freaks or by milder folk who’d simply enjoyed trying new positions, erotic and otherwise, were like
a disease, one that required forceful suppression.3
Few suspected then that an actual virus, its spread abetted by Reagan’s cruel refusal to acknowledge it, would devastate multiple communities in the 1980s and the 1990s and do more to undermine erotic freedoms than any government policy could manage. The summer after Reagan’s inauguration, the first national reports of a strange “gay cancer” began appearing in the media. As early as 1979, the newly uncloseted men who’d flocked to the “gay ghettoes” of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles had begun noticing that a rising number of them were falling prey to strange afflictions that went beyond the usual syphilis and herpes that resulted from highly promiscuous lifestyles. By 1982, people were starting to call it a plague, and to use the acronym that would change America’s erotic life profoundly: AIDs, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
That year, Grace Jones found herself at another party dubbed “Showers”: the first major benefit for victims of this new epidemic, held at the Paradise Garage on April 8, 1982. She attended to support her friends, though the entertainment was provided by other disco acts, including Evelyn “Champagne” King and the Ritchie Family. The posters for the event, organized by the nascent activist group Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), screamed out the aversion many men felt at curtailing their pursuit of pleasure. The line drawing on one showed a well-endowed man from neck to thighs, holding a hose in one hand and an umbrella in the other, apparently torn between getting wet and protecting himself. The playwright and GMHC cofounder Larry Kramer objected to the image, but it helped attract 2,500 people for the event. The crowd laughed and yelled, “NO WAY!” when one of the female singers in the Ritchie Family sweetly lectured dancers to keep to “one lover at a time.” No one was yet ready for the future speeding toward them, when lovers would drop like the wounded during a massacre.4
As the 1980s became the 1990s, the AIDS pandemic and the cultural chill encouraged by the Reagan administration’s social policies would greatly undermine the openness and sense of liberation that characterized the sexual revolution and its aftermath. Explicit sounds and images still abounded in popular culture, but they became increasingly embattled. Spectacle and confrontation replaced the attempts to invoke feeling at the heart of both 1970s arena rock and disco. In some corners, where a rock style called “punk” was mutating, the critique of sexual excess eventually tilted toward the puritanical. The great pop stars of the 1980s—especially Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson—played freely within the dreamscape of eroticized fantasy, aided by the rise of the music video; yet their epic sound-visions still reflected the era’s fears and unresolved debates about normality and the perverse. A new musical style, “hip-hop,” became pop’s paradigm; its relationship to the erotic was conflicted from the first.
Through all these changes, a long arc of reaction and reformation that began to shift only when new medications made AIDS a chronic illness instead of a death sentence, popular music retained its central focus on the erotic. But the innocence that had always really been more mythical than maintainable was fading, replaced by a self-awareness tinged with both sorrow and rage.
BLOOD ON THE DANCE FLOOR
On June 23, 1983, the Washington Post ran an obituary for the sixth man to succumb to a new virus surfacing in the capital’s gay neighborhoods. “William (Dirk) Diefenbach was one of the most well-known figures on the homosexual nightclub scene here in the mid-1970s,” reported John Mintz. “A professional disc jockey, he was said to be able to ‘make or break’ disco records locally with the play he gave them at clubs and private parties. In some circles, he was known as ‘the king of disco in Washington.’”5
Diefenbach had held court at Lost and Found, one of DC’s disco palaces, with an 1,800-dancer capacity, seven bars, a restaurant, and two decks for summer nights. The club was emblematic of both the promise and the problems of post-Stonewall gay male nightlife, which had begun to develop its own confining roles, notably the highly muscled, mustached yet clean-cut white “clone” ideal, the action-movie opposite of the multicultural gender bending of the Cockettes era. Early on, the club was accused of discriminating against clubgoers of color and drag queens, a not-uncommon violation in an increasingly segregated gay America. Yet Lost and Found was also key in raising gay visibility in the DC area, winning prizes for its spectacular parade floats and hosting parties that fed the movement toward gay pride.
“Dirk was so talented,” his roommate, R. J. Quinn, told Mintz. “We were all drawn by his talent, his charm, his wit.” After he became ill, though, Diefenbach’s friends avoided him. They feared the mystery infection that so many young men had suddenly contracted. Quinn, who refused to leave Diefenbach, admitted that he hadn’t eaten in their shared apartment for months. “We feel like ticking time bombs,” he said of himself and David Brown, Diefenbach’s lover and fellow roommate. “I may be a dead man.”
What was it like to go dancing surrounded by bombs, knowing that you yourself might harbor a burning fuse inside? “Something we have done to our bodies—and we still don’t know what it is—has brought us closer to death,” said the GMHC’s board president Paul Popham from the stage of the Paradise Garage during the “Showers” fundraiser in 1982. AIDS was a wasting disease with hideous symptoms, covering its victims in the purple blotches of Kaposi’s sarcoma, hollowing their faces into death skulls because they couldn’t keep food down. Until 1984, no one knew what caused it; until 1987, no drug was available to treat it. During that time, more than fifty thousand AIDS cases were reported to the Centers for Disease Control, and the syndrome’s public face, though not the path of its actual epidemiology, was white and gay. The same men who had united in joy and hope during the liberatory 1970s were now carrying each other’s emaciated bodies into hospitals, begging for help—and being rejected by many medical and social workers, who were as afraid as they themselves were. The Reagan administration enforced the public’s fears by first refusing to acknowledge AIDS at all, and then perpetuating myths that marked its most visible victims as transgressors deserving of God’s wrath. “You are not to touch other flesh / without a police permit,” wrote the poet Essex Hemphill, an early leader in raising AIDS awareness among African American men, in 1987. From the early mystery years through the days of rage that invigorated AIDS activism, and into the 1990s, the AIDS pandemic spread as if it were a complicated terror campaign heightened by misinformed politicians and a prejudiced general public eager to believe incendiary headlines like the infamous 1985 Life magazine cover story that declared, in red block letters, NOW NO ONE IS SAFE FROM AIDS.6
Most heterosexual Americans had little risk of contracting the blood-borne human immunovirus that causes AIDS at that time. In the music world, however, the polysexual adventuring of the previous decade did leave all kinds of people wondering about their own health. “There was this world where friends and friends close enough to be family were disappearing all around you, leaving you feeling very vulnerable,” wrote Grace Jones, who got tested after her friend, the model Tina Chow, discovered she’d contracted it from a bisexual male lover. “AIDS was a dreadful, chaotic amplification of the deathless facts of mortality that we evaded while we partied in the ’70s.” Her closest friends had “suddenly dropped out of sight.”7
In the 1970s, music helped unfurl a rainbow of erotic desires and identities; and that rainbow became a flag, a symbol of a new openness. Now a sickness inextricably linked to music threatened to drive liberation back underground. The virus spread within groups of men who congregated at clubs like Lost and Found, the Stud in San Francisco, and New York’s Paradise Garage and the Saint, as well as in the bathhouses where beloved divas like Jones and Bette Midler regularly performed. Some of the first known cases were music makers: local celebrity DJs like Diefenbach and nationally known artists like Sylvester’s producer Patrick Cowley, who died in 1982. The singer and songwriter Michael Callen was diagnosed with what was then called Gay Related Immune Deficiency in 1982 and lived on for a remarkab
le eleven more years; he became a prominent activist, making music that confronted the crisis with humor and pathos. “Living in Wartime,” “Love Worth Fighting For,” and “Two Men Dance the Tango” became anthems of both the epidemic and of gay pride. Callen understood his affliction as a motivating gift as well as a harsh reality. “I’m happier now than I’ve ever been,” he said to a New York Times reporter in 1987. “Though everything I write seems somehow to be informed by living with disease and death.”8
The paper of record, like most of the mainstream press, lagged behind in its coverage of AIDS. Rolling Stone, remarkably, ran a feature on the new “sexual cancer” in February 1983, illustrated with a moody portrait of Callen and his lover and musical collaborator, drummer Richard Dworkin.9 For the most part, the media and the music industry responded hesitantly. The Dionne Warwick–led charity single “That’s What Friends Are For,” with its oblique message of support, was an early fundraiser in 1985, and the New Wave innovator Cyndi Lauper wrote and recorded her memorial to a lost friend, “Boy Blue,” in 1987; beyond that, music confronting AIDS was mostly segregated within the gay community before the 1990s.