Welcome to the DFH Freaky Friday weekly music series
Because Team DFH operates more or less like a herd of cats, we’re here at roughly 9PM Eastern, every week. So take off your shoes, plop down on that beanbag chair over there, let your hair down, and get some groovy on. |
One of the issues in the very early years of the gay liberation movement concerned the issue of who could dance with whom. Social dancing, after all, is a time-honored human tradition. People dance in the Bible, although certain groups of fundamentalist Protestants think dancing is sinful (their loss). Americans have also been very inventive -- the square dance, the reel, the Charleston, the jitterbug, the twist. From the
Digital History site, we learn how things were when two people of the same gender wanted to dance with each other in New York (and, by extension, in public establishments throughout the country):
Raids on gay or cross-dresser bars were common at the time. State law threatened bars with the loss of their liquor licenses if they tolerated same-sex dancing or employed or served men who wore women's clothing.
Stonewall was in part about this sort of repression. Fortunately, the French had invented the discotheque, and soon, gay men and women had adapted it to their own uses. It is to this adaptation I pay tribute tonight: dance music from the early 1970s to, well, now.
So yes. Dance bars. I met my current spouse on a dance floor in Boston 41 years ago, and the music being played wasn't disco. It was music like this:
Soon, some of the Motown artists began to experiment in their solo careers. This is Eddie Kendricks, from his first solo album after leaving the Temptations, trying to imitate the social consciousness of Marvin Gaye. It's catchy enough, but listen to what happens at about 2:58:
By 1974, "real" disco was being played, and by 1977, what you danced to at a gay dance bar was entirely disco. One example from the comments from a previous Freaky Friday, from the late and incomparable Donna Summer:
It's said that after Steve Dahl's "Disco Sucks" promotion at Comiskey park in Chicago during the summer of 1969, disco had died, but, really, do we not still have a wealth of dance music even today? This is from 2000.
So post your favorite dance music, especially the one song that always impelled you onto the dance floor, especially if the song still has that effect.
It's Freaky Friday! Bring some tunes, whatever you got! Feel free to comment with just a song-link and your thoughts, or try for the embed, for however long that works for us. Either way, we're just chillin' here, so c'mon and join in.
Here's HOW: To add vids in comments (from Youtube only): Click on "share"; then the "embed" button; change the size of the video graphic too, so when it posts, it is smaller. Use 300pixels in the custom parameters (last one on the right) under the embed code. {h/t joanneleon}
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