Disco queer dance club culture

RON DOUD'S life reads like a film, but with a tragic ending. Doud grew up and studied interior design at Seattle, graduating in 1970. Decades before Grunge rock, Seattle did have an active counter-culture in the 1960s but for young Doud by the early Seventies, another city was calling... New York and bright lights beckoned and he moved here in 1972. By the mid-1970s he was in independent practice and in 1977 Doud rose to fame as the interior designer of the most famous nightclub of all time: Studio 54. Fame even lead to an interior designer advertising luggage for Samsonite. During 1977-79 Doud consolidated his position as 'a leading New York interior designer' (The New York Times, 1983). We might know what Studio 54 looked like but what was the rest of Doud's work like? This is the first profile of this much overlooked designer: Doud would probably be well-known today if he was still alive, able to speak up for himself but alas his life was snatched away from him as a quite early victim of AIDS, dying aged only 35 in 1983, several months before Klaus Nomi and Glam Rocker/cabaret artiste Jobriath's death in the same year. Best known for his Studio 54 work, by the time Doud-openly gay at a time when this was highly unusual-died in February 1983 he was treated like a leper.

This chapter explores the architectural impact of the Palladium, a nightclub designed by Arata Isozaki in New York in the 1980s. The Palladium became the epitome of discotecture: a continuous performance and a collection of assemblages that render visible the construction of bodies, technologies, media, and environmental ideas. In the interaction between designers and citizens, DJs and dancers, technologies and regulations, architecture plays a fundamental role. The Palladium’s architecture reveals that what happened in New York’s nightclubs had wide-ranging ramiications throughout the city, which proliferated in all directions and generated instability, emancipation, and dissidence in the streets, in homes, and in the City Council, impacting on governmental decisions.

BUSHWAACKING is the invention and creation of Cape Town's First Lady of Live Drag; ODIDIVA - The African Queen
Supported by fresh faced singer/dancers from Cape Town’s ghettos embodying the sneering essence & playful attitude of fagulosity in a hostile environments.

BUSHWAACKING is a direct response to the increase of homophobic legislation and hate crimes on the African continent.
Especially the gender violence in South Africa, dubbed "Corrective Rape".
A shocking phenomenon considering South Africa is the only country in the African Diaspora that has a constitution prohibiting discrimination according to sexual orientation.

LBTI youth are not making themselves visible enough and the world they live in conspires, usually unintentionally, to make them invisible.

LBTI youth face challenges that are peculiar to their community and need specific attention - but they also confront the hardship experience by all young South Africans and share their needs.

LBTI youth are finding support in the community and where it does not exist, creating it for themselves.

LBTI youth have a sense of agency and see themselves as contributing to a future South Africa characterised by respect for diversity and human rights for all.

This essay reconsiders the constituencies of fans and detractors present at disco's 1970s prime and subsequent bursting. It argues for a more gender-inclusive conception of disco's multiracial ‘gay’ revellers and for a particular convoluted conception of ‘homophobia’ as this applies to the Middle-American youths who raged against disco in midsummer 1979. Their historic eruption at Chicago’s Comiskey Park came just weeks after the chart reign of Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’, today a classic emblem of gay culture in the post-Stonewall and AIDS eras and arguably disco’s greatest anthem. Disco inspired lovers and haters, too, among music critics. Critical adulation and vitriol are conjoined in the present reading of musical rhetoric, which explores disco’s celebrated power to induce rapture in devotees at the social margins while granting anti-disco critics’ charge of inexpressivity in its vocals. In ‘Survive’ musical expressivity is relocated in the high-production instrumentals, where troping of learned and vernacular, European and Pan-American, sacred and profane timbres and idioms defines a euphoric space of difference and transcendence. The use of minor mode for triumphant purposes is also a striking marker of difference in ‘Survive’ and is among the factors at work in the song’s prodigious afterlife.

Art has the capacity to host, to entertain and to distribute the weak political power that is in effect within collective ways of going on to do things for the pleasure of getting better regardless of how good anyone is. If art can have a liberating effect today, it is by virtue of a strategic weakness. Rehearsing collectivity on the occasion of art exhibitions, performances, interventions, we will become in time familiar with the fact that
the effectiveness of organising collectively does not follow energy equations: weak powers can be responsible for some of the strongest collective effects.

I want to tell you about my origin stories.  About the women who made me want to dance.  And the reason I want to tell you this is to recognize their labor and instruction that has given me the creative tools to survive as a brown boy navigating a racist and femmephobic America.  I want you to know that (some of) my queerness—the strange ways I like to move on a dancefloor, to exhibit my body on stage and in public—comes from a time before my queerness had clotted into identity. So much of what is queer about me comes from my aunties.

A campy, lesbian "minimagazine" : during three years of the late 1990's, Housewife was produced by Dana Wyse and Axelle Le Dauphin for the [in]famous "Pulp" Club in Paris. Along with the schedule of events, it delivered monthly a constellation of words and  images, of commonplaces, citations, collages and gossips, which drew a queer community in the the manner of a "cut up", to quote Gysin and Burroughs.  This text was produced for the anthology "Miroir/Miroirs ‑ Numero 4 Plus Gouine La Vie ? Politiques Des Representations ", edited by Natacha Chetcuti & Nelly Quemener in 2015.

When it comes to evaluating socially engaged arts practices amongst artists and their collaborators in communities, the politics of cultural measurement and the cultural value debates more to the forefront. Spectres are haunting the arts – competing value frameworks from diverse stakeholders that support the arts (health, youth, justice, urban planning, etc) can instrumentalize collaborative practices. In what ways can the evaluation of socially engaged arts become a useful conversation and exchange of value and values? How can these processes extend creative development and be integrated in collaborative processes? How can we pay attention to negative value and potential for harm when assessing value? This chapter explores both the politics of measurement and possibilities of value creation through the examination of participatory evaluation methodologies developed in research partnerships with two dance projects in Australia: The Coming Back Out Ball (All the Queens Men, Melbourne) and the Indigenous Traditional Dance Project (Artback NT, Borroloola). These very different projects primarily engage older people in co-creation, but also have much broader audiences and significance socially, aesthetically, and politically.

Disco is associated commonly with the highly commercial and socially regressive Studio 54 and Saturday Night Fever. However, the movement that preceded, ran parallel and ultimately outlasted these articulations of the culture was queer in terms of its refusal of both straight normative and gay normative articulations. The queer make-up of disco culture was grounded in its sexually mixed demographic base in New York private party and public discotheque venues, which constitute the focus of the article. Four key areas of queerness are considered in turn: disco's break with traditional couples dancing as the basis of social dance, and the queer recasting of the dancing body as a site of affective intensities that underpins a form of collective sociality; the DJ practice of cross-generic sounds and creating a musical set in conjunction with the dancing crowd; the sonic make-up of disco music, and in particular its polymorphous component; and the alternative experience of temporality and space on the dance floor, as well as the destabilising impact of a range of dance floor technologies. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Richard Dyer and Judith Halberstam is considered. The article concludes with an analysis of the politicized backlash against disco in the late 1970s.

There was a time, during the latter part of the ‘90s, when the travesti reached a privileged moment of visibility in pop culture. Coming from the ghettos and the underground, the travesti, through their drag queen version, was incorporated into the constantly growing clubber culture, arriving to fashion shows around the world, to MTV and Hollywood, not to mention television variety programs, talk shows, and more or less serious journalistic news series in particular—creating media personalities. In Brazil, it was the same. Joining the long tradition of Brazilian carnival travestimento, Roberta Close became a sexual symbol and the television presence of travestis was no longer a theme exclusive to police programs or exotic attraction. It must not be forgotten that it was through the travesti—perhaps due to being the most visible facet of a gay subculture, though not constrained by it—that many of the issues of homosexuality entered the social sciences, particularly
anthropology, ranging from the classical studies of Harold Garfinkel
and Esther Newton on drag to recent works on the Brazilian travesti. Then that drag style seemed to return and stabilize almost as a cliché, leaving fad aside, it was time to rethink the travesti not as a social group to be studied and observed, nor as a metaphor of transitive possibilities in contemporary sexuality, a position enshrined by North American gay and lesbian studies as a result of the controversy caused by the release of Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning (1990). The travesti isn’t simply
an intellectual construction that places artifice as a central category in
our society of images, in which performative identities are constructed,
well in advance of actual debates about body and technology. It is not a
question of speaking about the Other, stigmatized and/or spectacularized, but rather speaking about travestimento—as
something that penetrates our desires and emotions, our uncertainties, and our place in the world. As such, here—in
this mixture of testimony, autobiographical critique, and disidentificatory
performance, incorporating dangerous or contradictory elements
of an identity , constructed by fragments of texts and images—here a travesti speaks.
1. Originally published as Denilson Lopes, “E eu não sou um travesti também?,”
in O homem que amava rapazes e outros ensaios (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2002), 67–88. Translated by Raquel Vieira Parrine, Lauren Darnell, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the impact of city policy changes and the processes of gentrification on 1980s nightlife subculture in New York City. As a consequence of the city's positive economic trajectory and gradual revanchism of neighborhood properties, the self-destructive nature of this after-hours sector ultimately led to its own demise.

Translator’s introduction: In this article, Heuguet provides a deep semiotic reading of Boiler Room’s online remediation of underground dance music events. In particular, he examines closely a handful of webpages, video streaming frameworks, and social media interfaces related to a specific Boiler Room event in 2012, drawing upon a nuanced notion of mediation (Hennion 2015) and of the “media event” as a genre of cultural happening designed to be mediatized (Dayan and Katz 1994). The analysis has a range of foci, including event design, videographic staging, website design, and social media integration. In this manner, Heuguet tracks how Boiler Room’s organizers navigate a careful path between the tensions that arise between the two experiential modes they strive to connect: “underground” exclusivity and subcultural specialization versus mass audiences and open accessibility; televisual staging versus realist-candid static camera shots; financial dependence on brand sponsorship (i.e., indirect advertising revenue) versus anti-corporate counterculture; face-to-face corporeal intimacy versus online social media. Ultimately, this article returns repeatedly to issues of authenticity and artifice, demonstrating how Boiler Room has developed an evidently successful compromise between the two. Guillaume Heuguet’s article first appeared in French in 2015 as “Quand la culture de la discothèque est mise en ligne”. Culture et Musées 24: 107–124.

Introduction to Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails. 

In the tradition of the Latin American testimonio, this is the story of Juan Rivera, aka Juanito Xtravaganza, a Puerto Rican Latino runaway youth who ends up homeless on the streets of New York in the late 1970s and becomes partner of the internationally famous 1980s Pop artist Keith Haring, as told to the author and retold by him.  A hybrid text--part testimonio, part linguistic and cultural analysis, and part art criticism--this is also a history of New York Latino neighborhoods during this period of devastating disinvestment and gentrification, as well as personal, heart-felt meditation on the art of listening and the ethical limits of representing queer Latino lives.

This document consists of slides from a two hour talk given to students at MMU in February 2019 with added notes from a forthcoming book chapter on drug dealing in the 1960s and 70s. In some respects this is opportunity to upload slides with images of some of the newspaper articles that helped to inform the chapter.
The talk focused on the way amphetamines moved from being a socially acceptable and legal substance regularly consumed as a pick-me-up without prescription to a drug that was subject to heavy handed policing. I have written enough about the impact on the northern soul scene elsewhere, though it was only on finding the magnitude of the police activity following criminalisation of amphetamines in 1964 that I appreciated the full extent of the policing effect. The forthcoming chapter (2023) deals with the impact on supply, this offers a snapshot of the process leading to what I called 'internal criminal exploitation' of a subculture of amphetamine users. The use of internal is to distinguish the criminal activity as that committed by members of the subculture from the external exploitation by those outside the grouping driven solely by profit. Again, this is explained in the chapter.

The goal of this project is to conceptualize the space of the underground dance club in terms of aesthetic experience - one that is often queer - by going beyond notions of subculture in order locate the primarily aural space of the club in the landscape of affective, synaesthetic, sensual phenomena. Using two historically significant clubs as my point of departure, I will follow trajectories emerging in media and cultural studies in order to understand the temporalities and subjectivities embodied by these sonic spaces, and how these locations of technological innovation and artistic creation take part in the project of the political.

Playwright, actor and director Charles Ludlam (1943–1987) helped to galvanize the Ridiculous style of theater in New York City starting in the 1960s.  Decades after his death, his place in the chronicle of American theater has remained constant, but his influence has changed.  Although his Ridiculous Theatrical Company shut its doors, the Ludlamesque Ridiculous has continued to thrive and remain a groundbreaking genre, maintaining its relevance and potency by metamorphosing along with changes in the LGBTQ community. 
Author Sean F. Edgecomb focuses on the neo-Ridiculous artists Charles Busch, Bradford Louryk, and Taylor Mac to trace the connections between Ludlam’s legacy and their performances, using alternative queer models such as kinetic kinship, lateral historiography, and a new approach to camp. Charles Ludlam Lives! demonstrates that the queer legacy of Ludlam is one of distinct transformation—one where artists can reject faithful interpretations in order to move in new interpretive directions.

This dissertation attempts to answer the question “Why has falsetto been systematically excluded from normative modes of western masculine vocality?” Or, in simpler terms: “Why doesn’t falsetto seem to ‘fit’ the male body?” More broadly, this project examines how the voice became an organ of identity, supposedly capable of revealing the furtive truth of a subject’s
being through vocal sound. I explore these issues through a series of case studies.
Chapter 1 examines how the discourses on singing, physiology, race, and gender all converged in late-Victorian England to produce our modern notion of vocal subjectivity. Both the sound of the voice and the structure of the vocal organs became sites where the boundaries of class, race, gender, and health were policed, and where the aesthetics of normative vocality were learned, embodied, and ultimately naturalized. Within this environment, male falsetto came to signify a wide range of “otherness,” including effeminacy, racial inferiority, and illness.
Chapter 2 explores the intersection of national musical identity, gender identity, and historically informed performance practice through an examination of the early career and reception of countertenor Alfred Deller. Deller rose to prominence singing the music of England’s past with a falsetto-dominant singing technique. I trace the audile techniques that
arose around Alfred Deller’s voice, which offered the listener strategies for attending to the claimed historicity of the countertenor voice while quelling—or at least quarantining—long ingrained anxieties regarding falsetto singing, thus maintaining the symbiotic relationship between “Englishness” and “Manliness.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Chapter 3 discusses how the performance artist Klaus Nomi used falsetto to create a persona founded on disjunction and artificiality, and how his unique aesthetic sensibility emerged from gay male subculture, the East Village (New York) art scene, and New Wave pop. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the representation of countertenor bodies on the operatic stage in repertoire written specifically for the voice type since 1960, especially in the operas of Benjamin Britten, Philip Glass, and John Adams.
This dissertation traces how the link between voice, body, and identity was forged, and how that negotiation plays out in the case of male falsetto. Ultimately, this project offers a critique of the way we currently think about our voices and ourselves.

El libro despliega un estudio musicológico desde las teorías de género, que analiza los cambios en la danza y en la música del tango en Buenos Aires durante la primera década del siglo XXI. Específicamente, Liska focaliza en el tango queer, tipo de danza que propone repensar los movimientos heteronormativos del tango y los tradicionales papeles masculinos y femeninos (sexualmente determinados) como líder y conducido, respectivamente. Desde una etnografía sociomusical, este libro describe nuevas experiencias corporales, diferentes subjetividades y cambios en los patrones de identidad de género y ofrece, así, una mirada sobre transformaciones culturales más generales en la sociedad argentina contemporánea.

The following text is excerpted from a chapter of my undergraduate thesis, completed in 2014 at Harvard University for my degree in Art History and LGBTQ studies. I present it here with some editing for clarity and continuity. This is the first time that my thesis has been reproduced in any form, and, three years after the fact, I think a short introduction is in order. Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) was a central figure in the New York City punk scene, the gay scene, and the history of photography in the 1970s and 1980s.

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In the first half of the 1990s, Western popular culture experienced an infusion of drag. The success of Jenny Livingston’s seminal but highly problematic documentary of the Harlem Ballroom drag scene, Paris is Burning (1991), signaled an intrigue from popular and critical circles alike. The dance form “voguing,” born of the same Harlem Ballroom scene, appeared before and after the film’s release in music videos for Liz Torres, Taylor Dayne, Malcolm McLaren, and Queen Latifah. Madonna’s song “Vogue” and its accompanying video and live performances capitalized on the dance’s underground chic that had begun to bubble over into the mainstream. RuPaul’s “Supermodel (You Better Work)” and the clean and relatable image she created for herself around it soon after catapulted her from the Queen of Manhattan to legitimate stardom. In doing so, she and her team of collaborators turned her into a household name, musical performer, model, actress, and host of her own talk show. RuPaul’s rounding off of the edges of the drag queen image led drag characters to take center stage in the films Mrs. Doubtfire (Columbus 1993), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Elliot, 1994), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (Kidron, 1995), and The Birdcage (Nichols, 1996). Lady Bunny’s Wigstock festival also became a documentary focus in Wigstock (Shills, 1995) during the height of drag queen visibility in film. This dissertation traces the emergence of drag into the mainstream culture of the 1990s. I argue that three separate subcultures dramatically altered the aesthetics and aims of drag: Downtown New York new wave, Harlem House Ballroom, and London New Romantic. I explore how each of these artistic nightlife cultures incorporated drag and queer performance as well as the ways that each garnered increasing attention for drag from new audiences and media outlets. Susanne Bartsch’s role as a purveyor of drag to the worlds of fashion and art are also explored. Lastly, I examine the Hollywood films mentioned above and how drag and sexuality are treated in each, reflecting the approaches major studios, directors, and actors took in seeking a heterosexual audience for drag.

Today we take remixing, DJ culture and dance club culture for granted. They have become an inextricable part of the modern urban scene and music’s mainstream pop-culture. However, it was only a few decades ago when early DJs broke new territory with what they were doing. Hidden away in obscure underground clubs in New York City back in the late 1960s/early 1970s, dancefloor music and the DJ were regarded nothing more but strange novelties belonging to a thriving subculture that was yet too small to be noticed.

Turn Up The Bass is a book about this new genre of dance floor music that emerged from the DJs’ turntable experimentations in underground clubs in New York City between the late 1960s and early 1980s. Exhaustively researched, the author walks us through the pioneering days of a fresh, new musical style. In the first part of the book, Klein examines the complex interaction of music, dancers and DJ, sheds light on how technical developments and new DJing techniques influenced the formation of a new, distinct style, and how the art of remixing, new recording formats and the establishment of record pools all of a sudden turned the DJ into one of the most important figures in the music industry, who had the power to shape the musical taste of millions.

In the second part of Turn Up The Bass, Klein breaks down the sound of New York City’s dance clubs into every single element and thus allows us a glimpse into how the DJ makes our bodies move. What musical characteristics define underground dance music recordings? What are the musical roots of underground dance music recordings? What instruments are used? How are they used? What is the formal musical structure of dance floor songs? How do dance floor songs of that time work with the concepts of tension-release and musical spacing? More than 50 transcribed examples of music and references to corresponding audio tracks make it easy for the reader to follow Klein’s astute observations.

When invited to create a retrospective of her sculptural works, the artist Janine Antoni preferred to ask herself what her works would look like when interpreted by other artists and translated into movement. Together with the choreographers Anna Halprin and Stephen Petronio, Antoni created unique performance artworks whose main focus is corporeality, revealing the enormous potential that lies in the combination of sculpture and dance. Published in cooperation with the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, and featuring critical essays by a diverse array of writers and art theorists, ALLY shows how these artists have worked together to create a new pictorial language. Editor, Adrian Heathfield.

Wotever World invites you to enter into that very space of connection. Over five consecutive weeks audience members will be given the opportunity to explore the relationship between sameness and difference, of desire and needs and to ultimately question how the growing into and shaping of our bodies provides a reading of who we really are.

‘Wotever Sex’ as part of ‘Hot August Fringe’ is five Tuesdays based on the well-known and celebrated platform of Bar Wotever. For this festival some of the smartest, sexiest and best queers, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transfolk, lovers and people have been invited to help find or provide answers. The intention of this series of events is to inspire and attempt to nurture a shameless and guilt free appreciation of Wotever Sex is, has been and will be in the future.

Each Tuesday evening mixes performance, music, visuals and words intended not only as entertainment, but also as education – learning in and around contemporary social and cultural issues.

This essay explores the work of contemporary artist, Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw/Cherokee), and it's connections to the past, present, and future. In 2019, it won the "Award for Excellence – Best Article, Essay, or Extended Catalogue" from the Association of Art Museum Curators & AAMC Foundation.