Now is the Winter of Our Discotheques: The Erased LGBTQ Roots of Disco

When people today hear the word “disco,” it conjures up images of outlandish outfits complete with an excess of polyester and platform shoes, wild drug abuse, flashing lights, and John Travolta twirling around in his Saturday Night Fever regalia. Though this word association is not necessarily inauthentic, it belies the underground queer history and aftermath of disco as a genre and a cultural phenomenon. From disco’s beginnings in the early 1970s at David Mancuso’s gay house parties in the New York apartment he called The Loft, to the…