Wallace Baine, Baine Street: When Gay Pride was all about 'Staying Alive"

Wallace Baine, Baine Street: When Gay Pride was all about 'Staying Alive" In 1977, in the teeny tiny fingernail-sliver of a space where the vast Venn-diagram circles of the fans of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the fans of the Bee Gees intersected, there stood one scrawny, zit-faced, long-haired, slope-shouldered teenager. In the summer of 1979, for instance, some knucklehead decided to stage a "Disco Demolition Night" to destroy disco records at Comiskey Park in Chicago between games of a White Sox double-header. I got to see something similar happen even before that at an outdoor rock show when the lead singer of some deservedly forgotten rock band started bad-mouthing disco on stage, feeding on the roars of the crowd, while bringing out a bunch of vinyl LPs to break one by one. As Gay Pride comes upon us again -- the first, we should note, since a sitting president affirmed the universal right to marry -- I hope that during all those parties and barbecues that someone might raise a glass to Donna Summer and Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees, two greats of the disco era who died recently, and remember disco as an important cultural moment when gays first tentatively stepped out into the pop-culture mainstream. If you do not remember, disco first emerged out of the New York underground "discotheques" in the early 1970s, mixing thumping electronica beats with Rty and bullying animosity. I was too thick to notice that the most virulent anti-disco sentiments were often liberally sprinkled with the range of gay-baiting slurs commonly used in those days. Of course, in those days, you didn't broadcast your love for disco too loudly when among the rockers. Of course, as a straight white male, I was, demographically anyway, part of the outgroup who was supposed to resent the rise of disco. I was just a music nerd at the time, genuinely puzzled on why battle lines had to be drawn between these two styles of music. . Wallace Baine, Baine Street: When Gay Pride was all about 'Staying Alive" Trade News selected by Local Linkup on 04/06/2012