In Philadelphia in 1975 Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo, two Morocco-born but Paris-based business partners, were looking to secure their first major hit. Private gay dance parties in Philadelphia and DJ and club promoter David Mancuso’s legendary LSD-laced New York loft parties were giving rise to a new sound, influenced by European pop, soul and glam rock, and the duo had been drawn to the City of Brotherly Love in search of ‘the next big thing’. The music they heard was music to dance to, music for all classes and all colours, at odds with the guitar-heavy sounds that dominated the US airwaves but not a million miles away from the string-laden pop sounds Morali had been associated with back in Paris. With records mixed together to provide a continuous soundtrack, disco dominated gay clubs years before it went mainstream. The first disco hits that crossed over into the pop charts – the records of Barry White, George McCrae, Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer – had already proved themselves to be huge successes in LGBT clubs and had helped fill the basement dance floor of New York’s notorious Continental Baths, where a young gay DJ called Francis Nicholls, known professionally as Frankie Knuckles, was making a name for himself.
One of the regular performers at the Continental Baths was the Bronx-born, Puerto Rican singer Joseph Montanez Jr, alias Sir Monti Rock III. Monti had one of the first crossover disco hits when, as the glitter-plastered, feather boa-wearing frontman of songwriter Bob Crewe’s studio band Disco Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes, he made the charts with ‘Get Dancin’’ (released in November 1974) and its follow-up ‘I Wanna Dance Wit’ Choo’, although he had in fact issued his first 45 (‘For Days and Days’) in 1965. Thrown out of home at 13 for being gay, he worked as a male prostitute before making a name for himself as the hairdresser to the stars. Operating out of a salon in department store Saks Fifth Avenue, Rock became something of a minor local celebrity, appearing on The Merv Griffin Show and Tonight with Johnny Carson dozens of times. His sexuality was no secret: in 1966, while on Merv Griffin with Jayne Mansfield, comedian Henny Youngman referred to Rock as ‘Lawrence of Fire Island’ (in a reference to New York’s well-known gay resort) and made several crude jokes at his expense. ‘I was gay, but people didn’t mention “gay” in those days,’ he says. He was sacked from Saks for appearing nude in a gay magazine’s photo spread. Not that it mattered: in 1969 he was cast in the Hollywood movie 2000 Years Later with Terry-Thomas and Edward Everett Horton. Surely stardom beckoned?
Back in Philadelphia, Morali and Belolo assembled a studio group and recorded an album, Brazil, one side of which contained all but instrumental disco versions of classic 1940s songs including ‘Brazil’ and ‘The Peanut Vendor’. Needing vocalists for the project the duo pulled in three women, Cassandra Ann Wooten and Gwendolyn Oliver of the girl group Honey & the Bees, and Cheryl Mason Jacks – and The Ritchie Family was born. The group, which took its name from arranger and assistant producer Richie Rome, took ‘Brazil’ to Number One in the US dance charts. The following year The Ritchie Family scored again: ‘The Best Disco in Town’, a medley of recent disco hits, was an international smash, going Top Ten in the UK, Australia, the Netherlands and Norway, and providing them with a second US dance chart-topper.
Unfortunately, things were not going so well for Monti Rock. Following his two hit singles, he put together an outrageous stage show, but his time in the spotlight was up almost as soon as it had begun. His second album, Manhattan Millionaire, stiffed and with no records to be made he tried his hand at acting once again, appearing as the DJ in Saturday Night Fever and in a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ cameo in the dreadful Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the 40 years that have passed since then, Monti has attempted several comebacks, issued a one-off single in Germany (1982’s ‘In Havana’) and has become an ordained minister, offering marriage ceremonies in Las Vegas. Name-checked by both Elvis Costello and the Pet Shop Boys, he’s still trying to make it big today. ‘I’m not a singer. I’m not an actor. What I am is somebody who believes so much in myself that I can make you believe.’1
While our Parisian pals were holidaying in New York, the gay Morali (who, after an abortive attempt at a solo career with the 1967 EP Elle Aime, Elle N’Aime Pas had moved into writing and production) spotted a man on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village wearing a full Native American costume. The pair followed him into the Anvil, West 14th Street’s notoriously sleazy pick-up joint, where they soon spotted him. They could hardly miss him, for the man they would soon discover was called Felipe Rose had climbed up onto the bar and was shaking his stuff with wild abandon. Inside the Anvil that night the two men saw just about every macho man stereotype they could think of; the bar was full of construction workers, cops in uniform, leather-clad (and heavily moustachioed) bikers, GIs in full fatigues and jolly Jack Tars who had probably never set foot on a ship. Inspired by their visit, Belolo and Morali placed an advert in the Village Voice: ‘Macho types wanted: must dance and have a mustache’. Around sixty guys showed up at the ‘audition’; not one of them made it into the studio for the first Village People EP – four songs each depicting an aspect of gay life in the US. The vocals would be handled by Victor Willis, a straight actor Morali discovered in the Broadway production of The Wiz: ‘I had a dream that you sang lead vocals on my album and it went very, very big,’ Morali told him.2 Felipe, as ‘Indian from the Anvil’ won himself a small credit for playing ‘bells’; he was also the only member of the group to appear on the sleeve. A cheap video was shot for ‘San Francisco’: of the seven men featured dancing and singing along to the tune only Rose and Willis made Morali and Belolo’s final list. At the same time, just a 10-minute walk from the Anvil, at a club called Century 21, a young gay DJ by the name of Walter Gibbons was making a name for himself as a genius on the turntable, stretching out beats and splicing them into other songs to create his own exclusive mixes. Soon he would become the first star DJ commissioned by a record company to create a remix from the original multi-track recording and, with Loleatta Holloway’s Hit And Run, produced the first proper disco-mix 12" single.
Casablanca, who had already tasted huge disco success with Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, signed the new act to a multi-album deal: all Morali and Belolo had to do was find the rest of the singers for the project. Through a further casting session they found Glenn Hughes (the leather man), Alex Briley (the GI) and construction worker David Hodo. Morali found Randy Jones, his cowboy, dancing with Grace Jones. The classic six-man line-up was in place, and Morali and Belolo wasted no time in getting them in to the studio to record the vocals for the first full-length Village People album, Macho Man. Everyone involved in the project, bar Morali and Belolo, was surprised when, in September 1978, the title song became a hit, making the Billboard Top 30.
In their first two years together, the Village People hit Number One in the UK (and Number Two in the US) with ‘Y.M.C.A.’, made the UK and US Top Three with ‘In The Navy’, had a Top 20 hit with ‘Go West’ (later covered by the Pet Shop Boys), and were awarded six gold and four platinum records, selling over 20 million singles and 18 million albums worldwide. They filled major concert venues, caused near-riots when they appeared in public and were featured heavily on television, in the press and on radio. You simply could not escape them. According to celebrity photographer Mick Rock, Queen singer Freddie Mercury ‘was never the same again’ after seeing an early Village People performance at the Anvil: ‘Freddie was “utterly mesmerised” by the sight of Glenn Hughes. The Anvil experience was presumed to be the inspiration for both the “leather” and “gay clone” looks which Freddie would adopt’.3 Their massive success with straight audiences and their knowing nod to the gay scene that begat them made them seem subversive: young girls and grandmothers could dance to their non-threatening disco-pop 45s, and gay men could enjoy the scarcely veiled double entendres which filled the group’s celebrations of LGBT life. The Village People were fun. ‘It’s not important who we are and what we are,’ Randy Jones claimed. ‘Only that people have a good time listening to us’.4 Then Victor Willis, who co-wrote all of their hits, decided to leave.
Although most members of the group had been guarded about their sexuality (‘I never took this job with the idea of becoming a professional pervert or a public sleaze’ David Hodo told reporters),5 the man who struggled the most with the group’s gay image was the married Willis, and he was not happy when Morali came out in the press in 1978. ‘The group has never performed gay. Nobody has ever come out in drag. The group performs a masculine show. Gay people like us, straight people like us. But we’re not a gay group,’ he told whoever would listen,6 although few took his protestations seriously: after all, this was the man who had co-written ‘Hot Cop’ and ‘Macho Man’, and had fronted the band’s Cruisin’ album. His departure came just as the group were preparing to star in their first (and, so far, only) movie, the ultra-camp Can’t Stop the Music, and although Ray Simpson would replace Willis, the Village People would never have another substantial hit. The film’s title track failed to chart in their home country and the movie itself, co-starring Caitlyn (then publicly known as Bruce) Jenner, was a box-office bomb. It shouldn’t have been: the Village People were hot, the cast was filled out with accomplished talent, it was directed by the award-winning comedy actor Nancy Walker and produced by Alan Carr, who just two years before had backed Grease. Unfortunately the Village People themselves stank: ‘it’s dumb, but great fun … musically they are terrific. So what if they can’t act?’ was one of the kinder reviews.7
Willis would return briefly, after the group released their disastrous (and virtually unlistenable) new wave album Renaissance, but to no avail. Soon the Village People’s original police officer would run afoul of the real cops: in February 1997 he was arrested at Reno’s Flamingo Hilton hotel on robbery, drugs and false imprisonment charges and, unable to raise the $56,000 bail, was jailed.8 Charges for false imprisonment were later dropped but he was arrested again in July 2005 when Californian police found him in possession of ‘a .45-calibre handgun as well as rock cocaine and drug paraphernalia’.9 After several years out of the spotlight, and a number of line-up changes (only Felipe Rose and Alex Briley remain), the band did achieve a renaissance of sorts and – by finally embracing their status as gay icons – have become a staple of LGBT Pride events around the world.
*
If you wanted to meet a member of the Village People then the best place to go – if you were glamorous or famous enough to get past the uppity door staff – was Studio 54. Co-founded in 1977 by gay entrepreneur Steve Rubell, Studio 54 was the place to be seen for every hip New Yorker. It was housed in a former TV studio on Manhattan’s West 54th Street; on any given night you could see Grace Jones (one fan went so far as to handcuff himself to her ankle during a performance),10 Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Sylvester and Two Tons O’ Fun, The Village People, Klaus Nomi or any one of dozens of other LGBT favourites on stage while you rubbed shoulders with Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Mick and Bianca (or Mick and Jerry), Elton John, Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Salvador Dali, Donald Trump and just about everyone who was anyone who happened to be passing through the city. Infamous for its excesses (Bianca Jagger rode a white horse into the club on her birthday), the sex and the obscene amount of drugs being snorted in every dark corner, the fun and frolics were short-lived. In 1980, after a disgruntled employee reported the club’s shady financial goings-on to the IRS, Rubell and business partner Ian Schrager were jailed for tax evasion and the club was sold.
After a period in Los Angeles, where he ‘lived as a woman for a few years’11, in 1970 Sylvester James moved to San Francisco and became a member of the city’s outrageous cabaret collective the Cockettes, occasionally performing a drag tribute to Billie Holiday. Preferring to run his own show, he took on a pair of female backing singers, Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes, who at that time were known as Two Tons O’ Fun but who would later find everlasting fame as the Weather Girls and enjoy a huge international hit of their own with ‘It’s Raining Men’. Openly gay throughout his career (he had left the church to pursue a career in secular music as the congregation disapproved of his sexuality), he said that it was his grandmother – who herself had been a blues singer in the 1930s – who encouraged him to embrace his sexuality. ‘She’d met quite a few gay men, and so she saw the signs in me early in my life,’ he told journalist Alan Wall. ‘When I was in my teens she told me to live the way I wanted to, not to pretend. So I took her advice and did exactly that.’12 So identified was he with the city that 11 March 1979 was declared ‘Sylvester Day’ and the singer was awarded the keys to the city by Mayor Dianne Feinstein.13
Forever known for his 1979 hit ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’, Sylvester’s gay anthem only became a hit after his friend Patrick Cowley, inspired by the electronic disco created by Giorgio Moroder for Donna Summer’s epic ‘I Feel Love’, offered to remix what had been, until then, a mid-tempo gospel tune. Cowley’s bouncing synthesiser style became synonymous with Sylvester, and the duo’s signature sound has been cited as an influence by the Pet Shop Boys and New Order: in issue 30 of their fan club magazine Literally, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe discussed how their song ‘Psychological’ (from the album Fundamental) was inspired by Cowley’s productions.
Like Victor Willis, trouble seemed to follow Sylvester. In 1980 he was arrested and charged with armed robbery and grand larceny after taking part in a swindle involving $55,000 worth of rare coins.14 He claimed he was the victim of a frame-up, and that the crime had been perpetuated by a lookalike, but he still spent time in jail: ‘Sylvester spent his first night in the slammer with an accused murderer and the next few nights with six transvestites accused of prostitution before he was finally set free’.15 Two years later he sued his (by then former) manager for having had his hand in the till. Sylvester had been signed to Fantasy Records by Harvey Fuqua, a former member of the hit group the Moonglows, who had previously been a talent scout for Motown: soon Two Tons O’ Fun were also signed to a separate deal. Yet despite healthy sales and a number of huge hits on the US dance charts, neither act was seeing much financial return and both began to suspect that not everything was right with the deal that Fantasy had given them. Sylvester left Fantasy and in November 1982 filed a lawsuit against them, alleging that the company had failed to pay him all of the money that he was due from the sale of his records. Although it was discovered that Fuqua and Fantasy had withheld more than $218,000 from his star, he was unable to pay more than $20,000 back. Sylvester signed a new deal with Megatone Records, a company that had been co-founded by his old friend Patrick Cowley. Megatone aimed its releases squarely at the gay market, its roster featuring a number of out-gay artists including San Francisco-based singer Paul Parker.
As the demand for disco abated, Sylvester, who had been as noticed for his outrageous, feminine attire (which earned him the nickname ‘the Queen of Disco’) as he was noted for ‘bringing disco to its roots, bringing with it aspects of Rock ’n’ Roll, gospel and blues,’16 dropped the dresses and toned the campery down: ‘People used to leave my concerts commenting on the costumes, the make-up, the lights – anything but the music,’ he told Gay News. ‘I was more into being a performer; now the music is first and foremost’;17 but as many other acts had found, his straight audience deserted him.
Shortly after Sylvester terminated his involvement with the Cockettes, Harris Glenn Milstead, better known as John Waters’ leading lady Divine, also passed through their ranks. Born in Baltimore into a conservative, upper-middle-class family, Harris became the breakout star of Waters’ Dreamland set-up, appearing in cult cinematic hits including Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Hairspray, and – around 1974 – in several avant-garde performances alongside the Cockettes. In 1980, as Divine, Milstead recorded his first single, ‘Born To Be Cheap’. It wasn’t a hit, but it managed to get some attention. Soon Divine could be found, squeezed into a far-too-tight animal print dress, strutting her stuff around gay clubs in Britain and America, and this exposure helped the second single, ‘Native Love’ become a minor dance hit. Divine became a surprise star of Britain’s nascent Hi-NRG scene, thanks to her work with dance producer Bobby Orlando, who would also work with the Pet Shop Boys at the start of their career.
Although Milstead saw Divine as a role he played as a character actor, it was Divine the public – and the media – wanted. In 1987, fed up with not being taken seriously, Milstead decided to refuse to do any further media appearances in drag: ‘I stopped doing the interviews after I appeared on a show in the States. Tom Schneider was the interviewer’s name. He said, “Are you a transvestite?”, I said no, not at all … he then said, “why are you sitting here in a dress?” I of course replied that “well, you insisted that this was the only way I could come on the show”!’18 A hit act in the UK with seven charting singles, Divine failed to spark as a singer in her home country. In London, Divine appeared at the Hippodrome, riding on the back of a baby elephant. The night she appeared on the British TV show Top of the Pops (19 July 1984, lip-synching to ‘You Think You’re a Man’) the country experienced a small earthquake. No doubt veteran morals campaigner Mary Whitehouse would have linked the two seemingly unrelated events. Described by People magazine as the ‘Drag Queen of the Century’, Milstead died from a heart attack in March 1988. He was in Los Angeles to appear, as Uncle Otto, in an episode of the hit US sitcom Married … With Children, one of the few male roles he had been offered during his career.
John ‘Smokey’ Condon’s life reads like the script to a John Waters movie, full of sex, drugs, prostitutes and wild music. Maybe that’s not so surprising when you discover that he – like Waters and Divine – was raised in Baltimore and hung out with the actors from Water’s fabled Dreamland stable. Thrown out of his abusive family home for being gay, before he was 16, John was living ‘above a nightclub called the Bluesette. I rented a room for $40 a week. I used to hang out with a lot of musicians, jam with them and what have you, and I started hanging out at the bars at a place called Fells Point in the harbour with all kinds of people from Baltimore, all the John Waters people, and partied with them mostly every night of the week.’19 He continued to attend school, intent on graduating. ‘I went to High School whenever I could; it was important for me to graduate. I got suspended four times in my senior year for wearing outrageous clothes and things like that. They just didn’t know what to do with me. They said, “you need English to graduate” so I took an English course and I washed dishes in a coffee shop to pay my rent and I graduated.’ For a time, Condon dated Waters’ leading man David Lochary, the outlandish star of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble (who sadly died in mysterious circumstances in 1977), but Baltimore was becoming a bit too small for him. He explains:
I hooked up with a guy named Larry, and we started living with a drag queen named Christine. I was like 16 or 17, and I didn’t know she was a drag queen! She would go out at night and prostitute so we would sleep all day and stay up all night and party, but she finally had enough of Larry and asked us to leave, so we hitch-hiked up to New York. We got a ride in the back of a vegetable truck. Life is very strange sometimes. We got a ride to the outskirts of New York and we walked for blocks and blocks and got to this nightclub, and this limo pulled up and a friend of mine got out. He took one look at me and said, “Oh, we’ve got to go dancing!” I had been sleeping with the manager of Hair in Baltimore, and the friend from the limo had been the star of the show, so we lived with him and we partied in New York.’
John Condon arrived in New York a few weeks before the Stonewall Riots. ‘The night after Stonewall they had a march,’ he explains. ‘I made it to the first bar and thought, “That’s it; I’m not going any further”!’ He quickly decided that New York wasn’t for him. ‘I went back to Baltimore and I was just hanging out. The Doors were playing at the Civic Centre; I was just hanging outside, and Vince Treanor, their road manager came up to me and said “Do you want to go to Europe with us?”’
After the tour, he moved to LA and met E. J. Emmons. ‘E. J. had been a sound engineer for The Doors. I was just part of the entourage, I just hung out with them. I got to meet a lot of musicians, but it was all a bit bigger than life. Vince was in this really crappy apartment and I went out and I got a job as a bartender-slash-go-go boy. I would get in around three in the morning and E. J. used to come over and take pictures of me while I was sleeping! We were partners for eight years.’
And he still had not reached his twentieth birthday.
Now living in Palm Springs, California and working as an account executive for a lighting company, Condon’s past life as an outrageously out-gay musician had been consigned to the briefest of footnotes until he was rediscovered by the independent Australian label Chapter Music. Founded by Ben O’Connor and Guy Blackman (himself a musician with several albums to his name), Chapter included Smokey on the 2012 compilation Strong Love: Songs of Gay Liberation 1972–1981 (which also included tracks by Blackberri and Lavender Country) before, in 2015, they compiled all of his available recordings on the album How Far Will You Go. Blackman explains:
Everything Chapter Music does is a labour of love. The Strong Love compilation sold reasonably well but not in huge numbers, and didn’t quite get the critical response we were hoping for. Maybe we were year or two too early? When the Lavender Country album was reissued a couple of years later people seemed just that little bit more ready to recognise pioneering queer voices. We always wanted to do a full Smokey reissue, as John was one of the wildest and most fascinating artists on Strong Love: we even named the album after his song. The five singles, plus all of the unreleased tracks that Smokey’s partner/producer E. J. sent through, were incredible and we knew that there was an amazing story behind the music. How Far Will You Go? is one of the Chapter releases I’m proudest of having helped to make happen.’20
‘I had always wanted to sing,’ Condon explains, ‘Ever since I was three years old. But I never considered myself a gay artist. I sang and did things that came naturally to me, whether that was in the way I dressed and or in my lyrics. The labels came when I hit Hollywood.’ When no record company would touch them, Condon and his manager/band mate/lover Emmons started their own label – the provocatively-named S&M Records, whose logo featured a muscled forearm decorated with studded leather and bearing an ‘S&M’ tattoo. Song titles included ‘Piss Slave’, ‘Leather’, and ‘How Far Will You Go …?’ ‘I came to Los Angeles in 1971 and I think we recorded “Leather” later that year.’ Condon remembers:
E. J. asked me what I wanted to do and I said, “Well, I want to sing” and he asked me “Can you sing?” I said, “I don’t know!” so we went in to the studio he had been working in. E. J.’s deal was to get a gig at a recording studio only if he got free studio time; he always wanted to be a producer and I always wanted to make music. He said, “what do you want to sing” and I said, “I don’t know”, so he said, “well, sing about something you know about” so that’s why I wrote “Leather” and why I wrote “Miss Ray”. He had been working with a guy named Gordon Alexander, who had a contract with Columbia, so I went in and I recorded “Leather” with Gordon’s band. “Leather” was going to be the B-side because we thought that “Miss Ray”, a song I wrote about this drag queen that I had lived with in Baltimore, was the A-side. We went in and we did them basically in one take.
It was a time when everybody was handing out cassettes, and saying “listen to my demo”. The record people would just throw these cassettes into a big basket and they wouldn’t listen to them. E. J. knew about this pressing plant down the street, a really funky place where they pressed Mexican records – it was like an auto shop actually – and so he said, “Let’s press up a hundred records and give them out”. I think it cost us about $45. We just started giving them out and it started to take off, and before I knew it a guy named Nickey Beat (Nickey Alexander) who was a drummer who went on to play in several other bands after my group came up to me and told me that we had a gig booked: “Oh, we’re going to play at Rodney’s club on Friday”! I didn’t even have a group at that point and he had set up everything!
Condon and Emmons quickly pulled together a live band, which they dubbed Smokey after John’s childhood nickname (not to be confused with the British pop band Smokie, who styled themselves Smokey until a certain Mr Robinson threatened to sue). ‘Nickey drove a limo for a hire company,’ Condon remembers, ‘So I rolled up to Rodney’s in this limo! We had maybe six songs practised, and we played and that’s how it started. And it just kept going after that. It was very strange.’
The band landed a regular spot at the English Disco on the Sunset Strip, run by the legendary music industry publicist Rodney Bingenheimer, and although the line-up changed constantly, musicians who came and went into Smokey’s orbit included Randy Rhoads, Adrian Belew (King Crimson), James Williamson and a teenage Joan Jett, who at one point ran Smokey’s fan club. Joan wanted to play with Smokey, but Condon felt she was too young. Later she would join all-girl rock band The Runaways before fronting her own successful band, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Joan is an enigma in rock ’n’ roll: despite many attempts to out her over the years, she has steadfastly refused to discuss her sex life.
‘The thing that made it happen was Rodney,’ Condon admits. ‘Rodney had a radio show and he played my songs, and he was at every show I played whether it was at his club or any other club. Rodney was always there; he was a big contributor.’ Like all of their recordings Smokey’s first 45 was laid down in spare studio time. Featuring Williamson on guitar, the semi-autobiographical song tells the tale of a young man who moves from Baltimore to the big city in search of a new life. Pressed in small quantities as and when funds allowed, by 1976 the 45 had started to gain some notoriety, with reviews in fanzines and healthy sales via the Tower Records store on Sunset Strip. ‘I think they ordered 500 copies, so we had to get them pressed. We went in every week to see how they were selling. I did an in-store signing at Tower and there was a busload of Japanese girls who went nuts over me!’
Life was fun but it wasn’t easy; Condon and Emmons were barely scraping by. ‘Elton had my records on his jukebox. We did a TV show called Tomorrow with Tom Snyder (filmed at Bingenheimer’s club in 1974): I was wearing a dress and I had on green eye shadow and Beatle boots and at that time my hair was down to my waist, I was in the DJ booth doing the cancan and they were interviewing Rodney and talking about how David Bowie is really big and he said, “Yeah, Bowie is big but my number one artist is Smokey” and the camera panned to me doing the cancan!’ Ironically, it was Bowie who suggested to Bingenheimer that he open a nightclub: the pair had met when Bingenheimer was an intern at Mercury, Bowie’s first American label, and remained friends. ‘We had a ball. I sang all 18 voices on “Dance The Night Away”, we were the first people to use a harmoniser [a piece of studio equipment usually used to process vocals]which has just come in from Europe … can you imagine standing in front of nine black dudes singing “Piss Slave”? It was hysterical! These were Jehovah’s Witnesses! And we did that in one take! They were really fun times.’
For a time, Condon and Emmons were managed by Dan Bourgoise, who also managed the career of Del Shannon. Condon was enjoying life, rubbing shoulders with stars and partying with David Geffen at Linda Ronstadt’s beach house, but things were not right. The reaction he was getting from live appearances, coupled with healthy record sales and a bulging contact book, should have guaranteed him a contract with a major company, but it didn’t happen:
There were several thousand people there at my last gig, at a club called Osko’s [the club that was used in the movie Thank God It’s Friday]. I had to have three bodyguards; people were just clamouring to touch me and feel me – it blew my fucking mind, yet I was going home to a garage with nothing in it but a motorcycle and a bed,’ he explains. ‘I couldn’t understand it … New Wave was just starting to hit, and big-hair bands like Mötley Crüe, so I don’t know if that was the reason it didn’t happen for us – by then I had cut my hair and what I was doing was more punk.’
‘I got called a fag by record executives: “we like his music but he’s gay” and all that kind of shit. I played for Seymour Stein before he signed the Talking Heads and Madonna, but nobody would take a chance. I couldn’t understand it. I put my heart and soul into this music and we went from these hole in the wall studios to the best in the world, the Record Plant. In the studio next to me was Fleetwood Mac or Quincy Jones or Bad Company, and it was just weird, because they would all come in and listen to my music and ask, “What label are you on?” And I’d tell them, “I’m not on a label”. We kept releasing more and more singles in the hope that somebody would pick it up. I watched people plagiarise me and copy my ideas – it was hard … I thought, “Fuck this industry. I’ve given this everything I had. If you want to copy something and if you want to steal something from me, here, steal this!” We recorded ‘Piss Slave’ and with that I walked away from it – I’d had enough. It had been ten years, I’d been living in a garage in Hollywood, all I had was my motorcycle and the clothes on my back. I didn’t even have running water. I was tired, really tired and I had to pick myself up and move on.’
In Britain, Paul Southwell, leader of gay trio Handbag, was having similar issues: ‘I think at that time there was a gay mafia in the music business, and they weren’t ready for it. A lot of the record companies wouldn’t touch us; it was very disappointing. The music industry was still run by gay men in the 1970s; there were a lot of influential gay people in the music industry and they wouldn’t touch a gay act. That was the problem; they didn’t want to be dragged out of the closet’.21
As innovative as it had been in the 1960s, by the mid-1970s, Motown had become a much more conservative conglomerate, with head Berry Gordy more concerned in pursuing his dreams of making it big in Hollywood than with pushing boundaries with his record releases. Yet surprisingly others within the Motown set-up were still interested in making changes. In 1975, the company issued a pair of genre-defining discs that announced to listeners that even though Hitsville USA may have moved from Detroit to Los Angeles, they still had their finger on the pulse. The Miracles grabbed most of the intention, when the track ‘Ain’t Nobody Straight In L.A.’ (from the platinum-selling album City of Angels) issued in September 1975 caused controversy not just for addressing the subject but for insisting that ‘homosexuality is a part of society,’ but first off the block was a young gay man calling himself Valentino and his song, ‘I Was Born This Way’. Billy Griffin, lead singer with the (now Smokey Robinson-free) Miracles, was happy that their record was proving such a hit in the discos. ‘When I came to Los Angeles to live,’ he told Gay Times ‘I was exposed to homosexuality. I didn’t give it another thought. I’ve male friends who are very close to me but I’ve never thought about having a homosexual relationship with them. At least not at present.’ He admitted too that he was flattered by the attention the group were receiving from their gay audience: ‘Oh yes, It’s nice to talk to them. They come up and ask me to go to bed with them all the time. I’ve become a bit of a gay hero. It’s cool. It makes me feel good.’22
Press advert for ‘I Was Born This Way’
Covered two years later on Motown’s main label by Carl Bean (and 35 years before Lady Gaga had a worldwide hit with the similarly titled and themed ‘Born This Way’), ‘I Was Born This Way’ (backed with ‘Liberation’) was Valentino’s first record and the only 45 issued (in both the US and the UK) on Gaiee records, set up by the song’s co-author, a heterosexual woman by the name of Bunny Jones – a former beauty salon owner who had a number of gay employees: ‘I named the label Gaiee because I wanted to give gay people a label they can call home,’ she told The Advocate’s Christopher Stone. ‘If they’re really talented I want to break my neck for them’.23 After the disc proved to be a hit on the dance floor, and after Bunny had sold a reported 15,000 copies from the back of her car, Motown bought the rights to her label and, more importantly her song.
Advertised as ‘the first gay disco single,’24 with its chorus ‘I’m happy, I’m carefree and I’m gay; I was born this way,’ the song was a hit in discos but failed to chart on either side of the Atlantic, and a proposed album failed to materialise. Reviewing the disc in February 1975, Billboard magazine’s Tom Moulton noted that ‘feelings on the disc are mixed, as some think it is offensive; others feel it is a great cut. Without a doubt it’s a strong disco record.’25 Born in Alabama in 1952, the man christened Charles Valentino Harris began his career as a dancer and actor, appearing on stage in Hair and on television in the crime drama Madigan. ‘It’s not a protest song,’ he told Gay News’ Jeff Grace. ‘It’s just music with a message. I’m not forcing anyone to turn gay and in the same way no one is trying to turn me straight.’26 As Charles Valentino, he is still acting today, appearing in the 2015 movie About Scout.
Gay rights activist and singer Carl Bean, formerly with gospel outfit the Alex Bradford Gospel Troupe, was singled out by Bunny and Berry as the man most likely to make the song a hit, and that’s exactly what he did in early 1978, and again when it was reissued in 1985 (and remixed the following year by Bruce Forrest and Shep Pettibone). An outspoken advocate of safe sex in the gay community, Carl is now an ordained minister: in 1982 he founded the Unity Fellowship of Christ Church in Los Angeles, an inclusive church that actively encourages LGBT members of the African American community. Motown also issued Thelma Houston’s ‘One Out Of Every Six’, taken from the soundtrack of the gay-themed film Norman … Is That You?, and the company would continue to have a number of high-profile disco hits, including Diana Ross’ parting shot to the label she had been with for two decades ‘I’m Coming Out’. Composed by Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards and directly influenced by the LGBT scene, the song would become an anthem in LGBT clubs around the globe.
In Britain, discos popped up in every town and city. In a country where the economy was in freefall, where we were getting used to power cuts and three-day working weeks, disco offered people a place where they could – for a few hours at least – forget their troubles and just dance. ‘I remember the first time I ever went to my first grownup club,’ Jimmy Somerville told journalist Gregg Shapiro:
I wasn’t yet legally allowed to go to a club. I think they liked the look of me at the door. They took one look at me and thought, “What the fuck?” and they let me in. The club was split into two sections. The top part was general kind of chart music and down in the basement it was all disco. I got downstairs and the first thing I danced to was Donna Summer’s “A Love Trilogy”. As soon as I got on that dance floor I thought to myself, “There is no turning back! Who needs Toto? I’ve got disco”!27
What began as an underground musical movement among blacks, Latins and the LGBT community had become a corporate, antiseptic behemoth, packaged for the masses, fronted by the rictus grins of the Bee Gees and their ilk: even Frank Sinatra and Barry Manilow, who had played piano for Bette Midler at the Continental Baths (but who remained tight-lipped about his sexuality for decades) released disco records. Disco went from a joyful expression of freedom among otherwise-repressed communities to closeted gay white men making anodyne black music for straight audiences. No wonder then that there would be a massive backlash that saw piles of disco records set on fire and – at Disco Demolition Night (12 July 1979) – 50,000 people fill Comiskey Park in Chicago to see radio DJ Steve Dahl use dynamite to explode crates full of them. But the final nail in the coffin was just around the corner, and if the hedonism of Studio 54 and the other hyperdiscos could be compared to the revelry that filled the cabarets of early 1930s Berlin, then the AIDS crisis would prove to be as devastating as the fall of the Weiman Republic, bludgeoning the life out of the party.
On 8 May 1982 at the St Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, George Harris, better known as Hibiscus and one of the founding members of queer performance troupe the Cockettes, died from what was reported as ‘a growing threat to the health of gay men: Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. Kaposi’s sarcoma is not well understood by medical scientists, but one of the most frightening aspects of the disease is the swiftness with which it kills its victims.’28 Gay men, sex workers and intravenous drug users had been dying of this mysterious disease in increasing numbers ever since, in 1969, 16-year-old Robert Rayford became the earliest North American victim (Rayford’s death wasn’t confirmed as being AIDS-related until 1987).29
Hibiscus was the first in a long line of musicians to die from the as-yet-unnamed disease. One of his closest friends, Jim Fouratt, an early member of the Gay Liberation Front, a participant in the Stonewall Riots and the former co-owner of New York’s mammoth Danceteria nightclub, visited Hibiscus in hospital shortly before he died. ‘No one wants to acknowledge that there is an epidemic in the gay community,’ he told the Gay Community News. ‘It seems that it’s only when someone famous dies that people care’. Wearing glitter in his beard 35 years before it became ‘a thing’, Hibiscus left the Cockettes to set up gay cabaret act the Angels of Light before, in 1981, touring the US and Europe with glitter rock act Hibiscus and the Screaming Violets, which featured his sisters Jayne Anne, Eloise and Mary Lou and their brother Fred’ Hibiscus was once famously photographed inserting a flower into the barrel of a rifle held by a soldier at an anti-war protest in Washington DC. Three days after Hibiscus died, The New York Times ran one of the first articles on the ‘new homosexual disorder’.30 They reported that ‘the cause of the disorder is unknown’ and that it had ‘now afflicted at least 335 people, of whom it has killed 136’. Health practitioners briefly referred to the disease as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency) before, in July 1982 they gave it a new name: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS.
Studio 54 reopened in September 1981, with original business partners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager initially contracted as consultants, but the heady days were over. Rubell, closeted for most of his life, died from AIDS-related complications in 1989. Although he would continue to enjoy hits on the dance charts, Sylvester would never have another mainstream hit after 1979. He died from complications arising from the HIV virus in 1988, leaving all future royalties from his work to San Francisco-based HIV/AIDS charities. His influence can still be seen today: Jimmy Somerville had a Top Five hit in Britain in 1990 with his cover of ‘Mighty Real’, and the fierce drag persona adopted by RuPaul (who later recorded with Elton John) echoes Sylvester’s own outrageous performances. Patrick Cowley died in San Francisco on 12 November 1982, another early victim of AIDS; he was just 32 years old. After his success with the Village People, Jacques Morali continued to write and produce, co-authoring Eartha Kitt’s hit ‘Where is My Man’ among others, before he too died from AIDS in 1991. When Donna Summer, disco’s reigning queen, was widely quoted as saying that ‘AIDS has been sent by God to punish homosexuals’ she was forced to send a letter to leading gay rights group ACT UP to try to explain the ‘terrible misunderstanding’.31 Three years later, on 29 September 1992, Summer’s former collaborator Paul Jabara, the actor and songwriter who had supported her on tour, duetted with her and wrote her hits ‘Last Dance’ and ‘Enough is Enough’ (and who also wrote ‘It’s Raining Men’ for the Weather Girls) died at the age of 44 from AIDS-related complications after a long illness. The pioneering DJ Walter Gibbons, who spent much of his short life in turmoil trying to reconcile his fervent religious beliefs with his sexuality, died from AIDS-related complications in September 1994, aged just 40.
Dance music would continue, and the blueprint laid down by people like Cowley and Gibbons would lead to Hi-NRG, a harder dance music dominated by LGBT musicians and producers that, in turn, would be a direct influence on the Stock, Aitken & Waterman (SAW) Hit Factory sound. Dominating the UK singles charts for the second half of the 1980s, SAW’s first entry was ‘You Think You’re a Man’, a Top 20 hit for Divine in August 1984. Producer Ian Levine was a huge influence on the sounds being played in discos in the 1980s and 1990s: the self-confessed Northern Soul nut pioneered American-style mixing in British clubs and was the first resident DJ at London’s gay super-club Heaven, the first British gay nightclub to seriously rival those of New York, which opened for business in December 1979. ‘It became the biggest gay club in Europe virtually overnight,’ Levine told dmcworld magazine in 2008. ‘The first record I played was Dan Hartman’s “Relight My Fire”.’
After Heaven, Levine helped found Hi-NRG label Record Shack in 1983. Record Shack’s first release, Miquel Brown’s ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’, sold two million copies and topped the Billboard chart, and while Levine was at Record Shack the label sold 12 million records and had had major hits in almost every country in the world. He went on to work with Bronski Beat, Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys. Hartman, who scored a huge hit with ‘Instant Replay’ was gay but never came out. Sadly, the disco superstar died of an AIDS-related brain tumour in 1994. ‘Dan was an elemental force of nature,’ says his friend Tom Robinson. ‘He was happy to come in and write with me and have songs that reflected the emotional truth of the time. It’s such a tragedy that he died when he did and in the way that he did, but Dan Hartman was a real hero, gone but not forgotten.’ Ian Levine suffered a crippling stroke in 2014 but is still working today and has been instrumental in helping the BBC restore or recreate many of its missing Doctor Who episodes.
Disco and Hi-NRG would spawn house, Chicago house (helped along by Frankie Knuckles, who relocated to Chicago club The Warehouse), acid house (Heaven’s Mark Moore, one of the first UK DJs to play Chicago house in London, had Britain’s first acid-flavoured Number One with ‘Theme From S-Express’), techno, EDM (Electronic Dance Music), Italo house and Eurodisco – flashy, trashy and ridiculously catchy keyboard-led pop influenced heavily by Bobby O, Giorgio Moroder and the Eurovision Song Contest. The influence of Eurodisco was soon felt in America, where Moroder provided Blondie with their biggest US chart hit (‘Call Me’), and Laura Brannigan would also hit Number One with a cover of the Italian pop hit ‘Gloria’.
Perhaps the most celebratory of all gay dance acts – at least until the Scissor Sisters came along – was Sweden’s Army of Lovers. Formed in 1987, the three members of Army of Lovers had all previously worked together in the group Barbie. Songwriter, philosopher and author Alexander Bard, singer and actor Jean-Pierre Barda and model and singer Camilla Henemark (aka La Camilla) clocked up more than 20 hits across Europe including the Number One hit ‘Crucified’. The band’s über-camp look, over-the-top videos and infectious beats kept the flag flying for gay disco during the early 1990s, and although they disbanded in 1996 after five albums together, they have reunited on several occasions over the last two decades. In 2013 they attempted to have their song ‘Rockin’ the Ride’ chosen as Sweden’s entry for the world’s annual celebration of global campery, the Eurovision Song Contest.
