The voice that sings this body electronic offers the gay man a different form of identification. Wayne Koestenbaum has explored some of the relations between gay identity and female vocalization in The Queen's Throat; the disco diva presents a related but special case.? The fact that a heterosexual woman singing about her desire for men can become a vehicle for gay male identification is clearly the foundation for the institution of the disco diva, but this possibility is complicated by the role of race. Disco music performed by black women often evokes the stereotypical constructions of the dominant culture, particularly those of the black woman's utter powerlessness. In the news media, she is blamed and pitied as the welfare queen, the addict. the teenage mother and the prostitute. In disco music, she is celebrated as what Donna Summer calls "the bad girl," the type of unabashed sexual expression, who freely vocalizes her powerlessness before her own desire. Disco music recirculates this racist construction to a different effect from, say, gangsta rap, by urging gay men to identify with rather than lust after or despise the" bad girl": "Now you and me are both the same/ But we call ourselves by a different name." In both the delirium of "It's Raining Men" and the desperation of "Don't Leave Me This Way" the black disco diva, offers a kind of dare; can a man, even or perhaps particularly a white one, possibly identify with this supposedly degraded subject position? Just as it coerces him to abandon the privileges attendant on masculine identity, the disciplinary beat compels him to occupy the position of the racial and sexual other, to accept. as an almost ascetic gesture, her" minority" status. As in the example of the machine, submission and identification are simultaneous, even synonymous in the discotheque,

The rhetoric of minority-group oppression and liberation was often explicitly incorporated into the lyrics of songs like "Ain't No Stopping Us Now" or "We are Family," as if implicitly offering the African-American liberationist model represented by the singer to her gay audience. Other songs made the parallel still more forcefully: Machine's "There but for the Grace of God" applied the upper-middle-class condescenSion of its titular phrase against the upper-middle class itself, who are represented as saying "Let's find a place that's safe/ Somewhere far away/ With no blacks, no Jews, and no gays." To this the chorus emphatically responds "there but for the grace of God go I." Minority status, like God's grace, can free us from being trapped in miserable, straight. white, Christian enclaves, just as the disco beat compels us to contemplate new forms of social and personal integration.