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 commercialized phenomenon of The Village People, disco has always been primarily by and for the LGBTQ community, especially the LGBTQ community of color.

On the dance floor, queer and heterosexual people alike had agency to explore their bodies, their presentation, and their sexuality through the medium of music while they moved to the throbbing, repetitive rhythm and the sultry voice of Donna Summer. Clubs like Studio 54 and The Paradise Garage hosted drag queens, gay DJs, gender-bending singers, and same-sex couples all beneath the same roof in a time where the LGBTQ community had just thrown the first bricks at Stonewall. Disco asserted, “we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re allowed to enjoy our lives.” As Arwa Haider writes, “Disco enabled female, gay, black and Latin artists to define their identities in increasingly fluid ways.”[1] While disco was highly commercialized and catered to the heterosexual, indulgent aesthetic of Saturday Night Fever by the late…