Things changed in the early ’80s when the U.S. Yes, there were exceptions: Larry Levan - the influential gay Black DJ at New York’s legendary and largely Black/LGBTQ Paradise Garage - adored Cher’s “ Take Me Home.” But gay DJs and their audiences mostly favored underground divas and obscure orchestral maestros they discovered and popularized, not successful pop acts plucked from AM radio. (He’s since regretted this.)įrom the earliest subterranean clubs to Studio 54, the LGBTQ-friendly discos of the ’70s were powered by Black and Latin grooves.
Disco’s top mixer, Tom Moulton, considered “Dancing Queen” perfect as is, so he turned down the chance to remix it. Back when Donna Summer reigned as indisputable dancing queen, ABBA didn’t get much gay club play, not even you-know-what. While even icons like Madonna polarize opinion, nearly every color of the gay rainbow agrees on ABBA. This week releasing “Voyage,” its first new LP since 1981 and a teaser for next year’s London concerts featuring 3D avatars, ABBA is to many gay fans what the Rolling Stones are to straights - archetypes whose appeal transcends time, place and age. Ostensibly cheerful but packed with drama and peppered with Scandinavian melancholy, the Stockholm mixed-gender quartet’s pop has blueprinted the glitz of countless gay and gay-friendly acts from Kylie Minogue to Lady Gaga, Adam Lambert to Lil Nas X - a singular achievement for a band that hadn’t completed an album in 40 years. Thanks to multiple stage and screen incarnations of “Mamma Mia!,” fabulously garish costumes from gay designer Owe Sandström and consummately crafted songs more retroactively popular than in their ’70s and early ’80s heyday, ABBA has for decades been the bull’s-eye of the LGBTQ musical universe. Donald Trump and his followers may have for a time claimed the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and “Macho Man” for themselves, but there’s no way they’ll take this one from us. It’s our variation on what fans do at ballgames when their team is winning, but with a camp exuberance ignited by the song’s brassy harmonies and handy references to feminine royalty. Gay revelers (and their lucky straight friends) are waving their arms, striking ingenue poses and shamelessly singing along to the sugary 45-year-old pop standard that’s become synonymous with queer nightlife. The boundaries of the self loosened.Somewhere, right now, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” is playing at an LGBTQ club, bar or house party. The act of entering a darkened space, dancing to amplified music and becoming part of an undulating crowd - often for hours on end, often under the influence of perception-enhancing substances - disturbed the everyday consciousness of participants, including those who identified as straight. participants played a pivotal role, shaping a culture with a queer potential open to anyone who ventured into its vortex. The age-old convention that social dance should revolve exclusively around straight couples imploded.
Two key party spaces - the Loft and the Sanctuary - positioned New York City at the epicenter of the new phenomenon as countercultural revelers flung themselves into a dynamic, participatory and expressive ritual that made Woodstock seem conservative. Constrained and faddish during the 1960s, D.J.-led dance culture discovered its kinetic, kaleidoscopic potential in the space of a few transformational months in early 1970.