Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco
Page 8
Despite all of the marches on the Capitol, all the flag burnings and bra burnings, all the sit-ins and the be-ins, the most radical social change that occurred in the 1960s was wrought not by hippies, yippies, or civil rights marchers, but by chemists. With the possible exception of the airplane and the personal computer, no twentieth-century invention had such a profound impact on American life as the birth control pill. Hitting the market in 1960, the Enovid-10 pill swept through a nation of bluestockings and Puritans with the force of a category-five hurricane. “The widespread use of the Pill at the beginning of the sixties made sex simpler, more accessible and seemingly less consequential,” wrote gay historian Charles Kaiser. “It also encouraged public acceptance of a truly radical notion for a prudish nation: the idea that sex might actually be valuable for its own sake. The idea represented a sea change in the way millions of Americans of all orientations thought about copulation.”3
The full ramifications of this revolutionary new attitude were felt in the early ’70s. The first few years of the decade saw an explosion of sex in mainstream heterosexual popular culture: It was the era of the suburban swinger and wife-swapping parties; Dr. Alex Comfort’s best-selling erotic manual, The Joy of Sex, was first published in 1972; Erica Jong’s roman à clef, Fear of Flying, was published in 1973, and its shockingly frank depictions of female sexuality and casual sex incited huge debate; the first “big-budget” porn flick, Deep Throat, caused a sensation in January 1972 when it was released and has allegedly grossed hundreds of millions of dollars since; the slightly more respectable Last Tango in Paris (1972) and the Warren Beatty bedroom farce Shampoo (1975) both brought controversial sexual practices to mainstream cinema. But it wasn’t just hetero heart-throbs like Beatty who were enjoying all the benefits of looser sexual mores. As Kaiser wrote, the birth control pill and the attitude it fostered “was the fundamental philosophical leap, the indispensable step before homosexual sex could gain any legitimacy within the larger society.”4
While the Continental Baths was a debauchee’s paradise, legitimacy was the operative word there. Perhaps because Ostrow was a bisexual with a wife and a daughter (who both helped out at the club), the Continental Baths never quite became as truly wild as later bathhouses like Man’s Country, St. Mark’s Baths, or First Avenue Baths did. Ostrow’s entertainment program ensured that sex was never the only focus of either the club or its patrons, much to the chagrin of clubgoers like writer Edmund White, who complained that when Midler performed “everybody stop[ped] their sexual activities to listen to her.”5 With the success of the shows (aside from Midler and Manilow, performers like LaBelle, Peter Allen and, umm, Wayne Flowers and Madame attracted notoriety from their appearances there), Ostrow decided in 1971 to turn the dance floor into a discotheque when there was no one on stage. The first DJ was Don Finlay, who was soon replaced by Bobby DJ Guttadaro, whose mixes of uptempo but highly polished soul helped make the club into the hottest nightspot in New York. When Guttadaro left the Baths for the super-hip Le Jardin, the Baths became something of a DJ academy with Joey Bonfigilio and future dance music legends Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles manning the wheels of steel.
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With the aroma of musk and spunk perfuming the air so strongly in the ’70s, it was perhaps inevitable that the Continental Baths was eventually resurrected as a swingers’ club. Plato’s Retreat opened on September 23, 1977, in the same basement location and re-created the Baths’ notorious hedonism for straight people. While the swimming pool remained—Plato’s Retreat even followed New York City regulations and had a lifeguard on duty—the glory holes in the showers were filled in, the saunas and steam rooms were replaced with a Jacuzzi big enough for sixty people, and the exercise room was transformed into the “Orgy Room,” whose floor was covered from wall to wall in mattresses. While numerous celebrities—Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Dreyfuss, Rodney Dangerfield, Wolfman Jack, ex-Yankee Joe Pepitone, the who’s who of the ’70s porn industry—dropped by to check out the scene and usually remained clothed and chaste (aside from the porn stars, of course), most of the clubgoers followed the old Baths tradition and walked around in nothing but a towel.
The club was presided over by portly, middle-aged divorcé Larry Levenson, who could often be found mud wrestling with some of the waitresses. He usually sported a jacket emblazoned with “King of Swing” on the back and he boasted that he bedded some twenty thousand women during his reign. While most of the action was happening in the side rooms and the Orgy Room, there was a dance floor—presided over by former Le Jardin DJ Bacho Mangual—and one of the city’s best sound systems. However, dancing wasn’t really the order of the day, and certainly no opera singers ever performed at Plato’s Retreat. In 1980, when the owners of the Ansonia Hotel wanted to turn the building into luxury condos, the club was forced to relocate to an old warehouse at 509 West 34th Street. Then, in 1981, Levenson was found guilty of skimming the receipts and evading income tax and was sentenced to prison, where he was visited by porn star Ron Jeremy, who showed up with a bevy of starlets. The writing was on the wall for the club, however, and with the emergence of the AIDS crisis it was finally shut down in November 1984.
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The charged atmosphere on the dance floor and the growing fame of the performances6 meant that heterosexuals wanted to join in the fun. Of course, that meant the intrusion of women into this beefcake Eden. In late 1972, women were allowed into the club on Saturday nights, but they had to remain fully clothed—there was no women’s locker room. While “slumming it” had existed since at least the 1920s, when the Cotton Club became all the rage, the Continental Baths was perhaps the first gay venue to be ferociously cruised by the cultural tourists. The craze reached its peak in 1973, when the Metropolitan Opera’s Eleanor Steber gave a “black towel” concert at the Baths and the souvenir towels were available for purchase at Bloomingdale’s. By the following year, much of the hard-core gay crowd that the Continental Baths originally attracted had fled to bathhouses that didn’t feel the need to put on shows to attract a more upscale clientele, and Ostrow was forced to close his club.
With its rapid rise among the sexually voracious club cognoscenti, explosion into mainstream prominence, and subsequent detumescent fizzle into commercial blandness, the Continental Baths encapsulates in a way the history of disco in miniature. The wild, unbridled carnal energy that characterized the Baths buzzed throughout New York nightlife and lit up the discos that followed in the Baths’ wake. Disco’s surging bass lines and pulsating rhythms carried this sexual dynamism out of the back room, onto the dance floor, and into the streets, where it filtered into style, community action, and protest.
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The Stonewall Inn wasn’t the likeliest of places to host a revolution. The dingy Mob-run firetrap at 53 Christopher Street in the West Village didn’t even have running water. It was the kind of place where instead of repairing the disconcertingly regular fire damage, the owners of the bar would just put up a new coat of black paint to hide the smoke burns. The establishment, which was frequented by drag queens and students, was so dirty and dingy that it was the suspected source of a hepatitis epidemic in the winter of 1969.7 Nevertheless, this unlicensed “bottle club” seemed to be a bit of a celebrity hot spot. The bar’s log, which, according to the law, everyone had to sign, showed that Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland visited several times each night.
“Judy Garland” even visited on Friday, June 27, 1969—the night of her funeral. So too did half a dozen policemen under the command of Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine. Although the Stonewall had been raided by the cops on numerous previous occasions, this night was different. The standard practice was that the owners would be notified in advance of any raid (the Stonewall forked over two thousand dollars a week in payoff money to the local precinct8), but no one was warned that night that the NYPD would be enforcing the state’s archaic laws regarding the fraternizing of homosexuals. Even though the raid was a surprise, they still manage
d to flash the warning lights in time for people to stop dancing, and the cops arrested only a few drag queens (out of the two hundred or so patrons) for violating the statute that bar-goers’ attire had to be gender-appropriate.
The scene outside the bar was initially festive, with a crowd “composed mostly of Stonewall boys who were waiting around for friends still inside or to see what was going to happen. Cheers would go up as favorites would emerge from the door, strike a pose, and swish by the detective with a ‘Hello there, fella.’”9 Soon enough, though, the mood turned darker when the police got rough with some of their prisoners. Instead of the docility that usually accompanied such incidents, the crowd started throwing both pennies and insults at the cops. “Limp wrists were forgotten,” Lucian Truscott IV wrote in The Village Voice. “Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows, and a rain of coins descended on the cops.”10 Or, as the New York Daily News reported it, “Queen power exploded with all the fury of a gay atomic bomb. Queens, princesses and ladies-in-waiting began hurling anything they could lay their polished, manicured fingernails on … The lilies of the valley had become carnivorous jungle plants.”11
The riot lasted until about four in the morning, with four policemen getting injured and thirteen protesters arrested. The numbers might not have been any worse than a typical Friday night punch-up at a rowdy bar in Brooklyn, but Stonewall served as a catalyst for political awakening as surely as Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus in Alabama. Just as soul music came to voice the pride and assertiveness that accompanied the civil rights struggle, disco quickly became the sound of this new movement. As the cultural adjunct of the gay pride movement, disco was the embodiment of the pleasure-is-politics ethos of a new generation of gay culture, a generation fed up with police raids, Victorian laws, and the darkness of the closet. That this new movement was born on the night of Judy Garland’s funeral couldn’t have been more appropriate.
Of the numerous political groups that formed in the immediate wake of the Stonewall uprising, perhaps none was as important to the history of disco as the Gay Activists Alliance. Founded on December 21, 1969, by Arthur Bell, Arthur Evans, Kay Tobin Lahusen, Marty Robinson, and Jim Owles, the GAA operated under the slogan “Out of the closet and into the streets.” In accordance with their slogan, the GAA pioneered direct action techniques (called “zapping”) in the quest for gay rights: members shouted “Gay Power” during a speech by Mayor Lindsay on April 13, 1970, they staged sit-ins at Harper’s Magazine after it ran an article by Joseph Epstein that declared, “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth,” they hosted one of the first shows on public access cable television, and they blockaded the George Washington Bridge. After a prolonged campaign launched by the GAA, in December 1971 the superannuated laws that regulated homosexual admissions and ratios at New York nightspots and restaurants were changed.
However, almost as soon as the GAA won its campaign to allow gay men to dance together as couples, couple dancing became as old-fashioned as the Judy Garland camp of the preliberation era. Mirroring the backroom and bathhouse bacchanals that accompanied liberation, the ability to dance with a single partner was immediately skipped over in favor of an orgy of multiple partners. Ironically, one of the first places this dance floor debauch occurred was at the GAA’s Firehouse. Opened on May 6, 1971, in an old fire station at 99 Wooster Street in SoHo, the Firehouse was Manhattan’s first gay and lesbian community center. Painted bright red, the Firehouse was famous for its intense and frighteningly earnest political meetings, but a hint of frivolity entered into the premises when it hosted dances from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. on Saturdays. Typically, the politicos didn’t really get music, and the first few parties were fairly stolid affairs despite the $2 admission price, which got you free drinks for the evening. When Barry Lederer (who was not affiliated with the group or particularly involved in gay activism) was hired as the DJ, however, the parties took off, and even though the Firehouse had four floors, it got so crowded that there were safety fears. Lederer was playing what he calls “heady, drug-oriented music”12—slightly dark funk records like the Equals’ “Black Skinned Blue-Eyed Boys,” Bill Withers’s “Harlem,” and Billy Sha-Rae’s “Do It.” The new gay dance floor wasn’t just interested in mirroring bathhouse promiscuity, it also wanted a longer, more intense, more trancelike experience, something different from the old three-minute jukebox chop-and-change routine. “I was mixing records,” Lederer remembers. “However, since I was new, I was not the greatest. Luckily, the music transcended my mistakes.”13
In 1972, Lederer left and was replaced by Richie Rivera, who played until the dances began to fizzle out in 1973 when the GAA came under heavy criticism for being overwhelmingly white, for marginalizing its lesbian contingent, and for targeting too heavily Mayor Lindsay, who was generally liked in the gay community. On October 8, 1974, the Firehouse was destroyed in an arson attack that still hasn’t been solved.
In part, the GAA lost momentum because, in a sense, the rise of the discotheque made activism largely irrelevant. It was never going to change discrimination enshrined in law, but disco culture was the most effective tool in the struggle for gay liberation. Disco didn’t have to hit anyone over the head with slogans or bore you into submission with earnest missives; its “message” was its pleasure principle. Disco was born of a desire that was outlawed and branded an affront to God and humanity, so its evocation of pleasure was by necessity its politics, and by extension its politics was pleasure. The percolating sexual energy and communitarian spirit of the early discos were the perfect antidote to the lingering ’60s hangover—the gay-derived sense of theatricality and refusal to peer beneath the surface were instantly understandable to anyone tired of the denim solemnity of the Woodstock Nation.
Even more than winning friends and influencing people, though, disco was emblematic of a new kind of political resistance, of what French theorists and psychoanalysts Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Guy Hocquenghem call a “revolution machine.” As opposed to the individual expressions of desire in capitalist societies that necessarily force one to view the world in either/or structures, Guattari and Delueze proposed a collective linking of libidos and desires that would open up innumerable possibilities for sexuality other than the oedipal death drive of capitalism.14 Liberated from social, economic, and political forces, desire is set free and humans become pure “desiring machines” that interface with any and every other “machine” with no hang-ups, no repression, no constraints. The group grope of the disco dance floor, the anonymous antics of the back room, and the heedless hedonism of the bathhouses were probably as close to such a polymorphously perverse paradise as humans will ever get.
We are all pied pipers, tempted to gather here by irresistible things.
—Tarjei Vesaas
When you conjure the image of a disco fleshpot in your mind’s eye, a rural, coastal, carless idyll of rolling sand dunes, big surf, and sassafras trees teeming with sapsuckers probably aren’t the first things that come to mind. Add to that the fact that this fairy-tale locale is reachable only by ferry and didn’t even have electricity until the early ’60s and it would seemingly rank right up there with Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, as a hotbed of dance music. Nevertheless, if disco had a second home outside of New York City, it was here in Fire Island, a tiny strip of land off the coast of Long Island about fifty miles from the Big Apple.
For centuries, Fire Island was little more than a lighthouse and a refuge for smugglers, but in the 1920s it became a bohemian enclave when writers, musicians, and showbiz types started to congregate on this relatively isolated barrier island to escape the clutches of Prohibition. Most of their activity centered around the tiny community of Cherry Grove, which quickly became a popular resort for gays and lesbians thanks to the bohemian atmosphere and lax policing. In the 1940s, Cherry Grove was populated in the summer by such prominent figures as Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, W. H. Auden, Car
son McCullers, and Patricia Highsmith, and the Grove’s outrageous theme parties, drag theatrics, and camp aesthetic made it the most famous gay and lesbian resort in the world. By the 1960s, much of the community’s social life revolved around the Sea Shack hotel and restaurant. Owner Jimmy Merry added a dance hall to the hotel when his establishment finally got electricity, and people would dance the lindy to old rock-and-roll records.
After the 1969 summer season, the Sea Shack was sold to Ted Drach and Tiger Curtis, who enlisted the help of former Broadway dancer Michael Fesco in transforming the old dance hall, which was nicknamed “the Boom Boom Room.” Fesco stripped out the Boom Boom Room’s old stereo system, lightbulbs, and Christmas lights in favor of mirror-paneled walls (perhaps the first nightspot to use them), a DJ booth, and a lighting system that was synchronized with the music. Named after Tarjei Vesaas’s novel of the same name, the Ice Palace opened on Memorial Day weekend in May 1970 and was an instant success.
Word spread fast about the Ice Palace, and its format was copied two weeks later by Ron Malcolm and Gene Smith, the owners of the Sandpiper restaurant in the Pines, another predominantly gay community located across the sand dune from Cherry Grove.15 The Pines was a newer community and attracted a much more affluent, less bohemian crowd than Cherry Grove. And true to the Pines’ upward mobility, the Sandpiper, a restaurant that would turn into a disco at 11 p.m., soon trumped the Ice Palace thanks to DJ Don Finlay, who started playing records like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” there in 1971. “It was pure magic,” Barry Lederer says about that summer. “It was just the height of dancing, especially knowing the condition we were in [i.e., drugged up to the gills] … Don was absolutely incredible. Everyone could not wait to go out on Friday and Saturday to dance. It was one of those magic summers, and I consider it a highlight of music in my life.”16