ABSTRACT
Disco, it is commonly understood, drummed its drums and twirled its twirls across an explicit gay-straight divide. In the beginning, the story goes, disco was gay: Gay dancers went to gay clubs, celebrated their newly liberated status by dancing with other men, and discovered a vicarious voice in the form of disco's soul and gospel-oriented divas. This chapter examines how disco producers, responding to the mainstreaming of disco culture from the mid-1970s onwards, took the genre in fresh and unsettling directions. Disco's core gay dancers took to these female vocalists because they related to their tales of hardship, pain, and emotional defiance in the face of adversity. Eurodisco emerged in the mid-70s and revolved around a simplification of early disco's polyrhythmic percussion, which it reduced to a pounding bass beat. Nicky Siano was arguably the most influential DJ of all when it came to breaking divas.
