How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [59]
I was about twelve years old when he came to Philly on his Serious Moonlight tour. I was young and kind of small, so I got swept away in the sea of people rushing for their seats and the stage. I didn’t know where I was heading. Bowie was already into his second song, “Heroes,” when the sea of people parted and I found myself in the front row, staring practically face to face with David Bowie.
I felt the same way about it as people who claim to see angels or the Virgin Mary. Bowie seemed more other-worldly than human, blindingly bright. His hair was platinum blond and he wore a canary yellow suit. I was hooked from that moment on.
Disco Music, a Gay American Art Form
If you need evidence that gay dance-music culture has forever influenced straight America, just stop by any wedding reception to watch grandmothers perform the Village People’s disco hit “Y.M.C.A.” while gyrating suggestively. After my mother enjoyed herself dancing to that tune at my fortieth birthday party, I asked her if she thought of it as gay. Her reply was a blank stare.
I shouldn’t be so snooty. I was in high school in the seventies; the idea that disco was gay never crossed our minds, although I did notice that a few of my effeminate male friends enjoyed dancing to it more than others. (Ah, the stereotype of the terrific gay dancer. Roseanne Barr once said, “Thank god for gay men. Without them, fat women would have no one to dance with.”)
In the late seventies, straight people took to disco like ducks to water. But that was a kind of death knell for the form. Soon the disco craze resulted in crossover movies such as Saturday Night Fever (1977), which spawned a polyester tight-suit fashion look that was decidedly gay yet was sported by millions of straight guys on dance-club dates all across America. The Bee Gees’ soundtrack for the movie dominated America’s airwaves and sold millions of copies. Yet the incredible disco cycle—from straight to gay to straight again—remained fairly hidden. The majority of heterosexual disco fans never knew that the form was virtually invented by a gay man—or, I should say, “adapted.”
In the late 1960s, gay bars began playing almost exclusively black soul music and rhythm and blues. In 1971, a former male model, Tom Moulton, was vacationing on Fire Island when he went to a bar and noticed that the black music playing didn’t last long enough for the dancers to enjoy the dance. Seeing that the dancers were frustrated by the three-minute running time of the songs, Moulton created the first disco mix tape, which featured a DJ instrumental break and a blended, longer running time. His disco mixes became an industry standard, and he is credited with inventing the twelve-inch disco record essential to the dance club throughout the seventies.
Perhaps the campiest gay disco act to worm its way into the straight world was the Village People. The group was created by producer Jacques Morali, who scouted Greenwich Village dance clubs and Broadway shows to develop a group that contained virtually every gay icon of the time, although they were officially described as being “from various American social groups.” There was the fireman, the policeman, the motorcycle driver, the mustachioed leatherman, and the Indian chief. Astoundingly, the Village People had such crossover appeal, many heterosexuals never caught on that they were gay. Or never wanted to. Call it the classic Liberace Syndrome. Along with “Y.M.C.A.,” their hits included the heavily ironic “In the Navy” and “Macho Man.” It’s hard to remember that the words “macho” and “machismo” had been little used popularly until the 1980s. Suddenly everyone talked about being macho. It’s interesting to think that a group of gay singers gave new vocabulary to a world where “manly men” were running around not eating quiche and generally having a good time bashing