July 1, 2005

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 13

Tracing the beginnings of the dance club culture

by Anthony Glassman

Before Babylon on Queer as Folk, before Axis and Bounce and the Grid and the Dock and Bretz, before the word "circuit" was used by people who weren't electricians, people were already dancing.

The underground swelled and swayed to the rhythms put out by producers and DJs like Giorgio Moroder, David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Frankie Knuckles and

MICHAEL GOMES

While Love Saves the Day has some incredible photos from the seventies, Maestro contains some rare footage from the major clubs of the disco era, as well as continuing the sociological examination past the end of the decade.

Ramos not only compiled sensational

love saves the day

countless others, people who could keep a dance floor packed past sunrise.

"These were the men and women, many of them gay, who took the music from small venues and created the discotheque culture, giving birth to the Paradise Garage, the Gallery, the Loft, Studio 54 and scores of imitators.

From DJs meeting at the Continental Baths,

Nicky Siano and Larry Levan, two of the fathers of dance music culture, often got really campy when in each other's company.

where Bette Midler got her start, to raves packing hundreds of thousands of people into valleys in Europe, these were the people who started it all.

A trio of offerings sheds light on the underground dance culture as it evolved from the early 1970s to the modern day.

The first of these is Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture 1970-1979 by Tim Lawrence (Duke University Press, trade paperback, $23.95), perhaps one of the most exhaustive examinations of the creation and downfall of the disco era.

Lawrence meticulously documents the major happenings of the decade and the people who were behind it all, providing some of the most telling proof of the influence of black gay men on dance music. One name that

appears again and again is Larry Levan.

"The first place I played at was the Continental Baths. I was doing lights and the DJ walked out," Levan told Collusion magazine in the early '80s.

Levan was the house DJ for the SoHo Place, a popular black gay club, as well working at the Ministry of Sound and Studio 54. In fact, he worked just about every major club on earth, it seems, before dying of an inflammation of the heart in 1992.

Levan, described by producer Nicky Siano as "not exactly the most masculine guy, especially around me, we would camp it up a lot," is also a major figure in the documentary Maestro by openly gay director Josell Ramos, due out on DVD on July 26, along with a soundtrack CD.

Lawrence provides some of the most telling proof of the influence of black gay men on dance music.

archive footage, he also interviewed some of today's most influential DJs, like Danny Tenaglia, Derrick May, Sven Väth and others, to examine the interactions between society and the music.

While many in the gay community are now fairly tired of songs like "I'm Coming Out" and "We Are Family," the fact that the songs became so anthemic is a suitable illustration of the power of music in society.

As producer Nile Rodgers (of “We Are Family" fame) noted a few years ago, the "Death to Disco" movement was inherently both racist and homophobic, a knee-jerk reaction to a musical movement that was about freedom and liberation and was comprised to a great extent by queer people and people of color, if not actually queers of color like Larry

Levan.

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