Fortunately, I spent my lockdown writing and co-producing a mini-documentary about Sylvester, who for me has always embodied LGBTQ liberation, the kind that nudged me from the sidelines of the parade to the thick of the dance. That's what social media feels like nowadays: You're doing it wrong, and you're going to die. You couldn't always trust your own doctor: After confessing to mine that someone had given me a blow job, he calmly replied, as if he said this to every patient, "Do you have a death wish?" They involved me in the conversation, and so those rules were incredibly real to me. Working for the Voice meant befriending the earliest journalists to interview the physicians who figured out the do's and don'ts of safe sex. Since this year's pandemic began, I've thought about how I survived the earlier one. Soon I was living the very life I'd read about in the same publications for which I was now writing. Within a few weeks, I started working at the newly opened and monumental Tower Records, which led to launching my journalism career at the Village Voice. POOF! All those years spent worrying about disappointing my family, my friends - and, worst of all, myself - suddenly didn't matter because I was now dancing down Fifth Avenue past thousands of onlookers to Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money." This was my message to NYC: I'm putting myself in your gay hands, so you better treat me right. Here's all I remember, and it's all that matters: The disco truck arrived, and I jumped in. Now I was ready for my first Pride parade. I had feared coming out to straight pals, so before I left Fordham, I interviewed Edmund White, the era's top gay novelist, and let that do the talking.
I'd just moved to Alphabet City within drug-dealer-dodging distance from NYU, Danceteria, the Ritz and St. It was the summer of 1983 between college and grad school. In this entry, music journalist Barry Walters reflects on the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic and the legacy of disco music - and in particular, of the singer Sylvester. You can read yesterday's entry, by NPR Music's Cyrena Touros here. Each writer will discuss their relationship to Pride in this current moment and the role music plays in it, which will be gathered in a playlist at the end of the week.
To help us unpack Pride 2020, we started a conversation among a group of music critics and scholars from the LGBTQ community. But Pride looks different this year under the constraints of quarantine, even as it feels more informative than ever for a community that suffered through the AIDS pandemic and as the echo of Stonewall rings through today's protests in support of Black lives. Music has always played a crucial role in the movement for LGBTQ+ rights, as gay clubs and dancefloors provided space for queer people to come alive through movement and artists pushed social boundaries with the power of performance (through camp and showmanship or simply by writing a damn good song ). Since then, Pride has evolved: from that small commemoration to community gatherings in progressive enclaves like New York and San Francisco to corporate-sponsored parades and ticketed events across all 50 states from a space where people on the margins created fragile alliances to a mainstream festivity.
For writer Barry Walters, Donna Summer's "She Works Hard for the Money" soundtracked a joyous moment of Pride.ΔΆ020 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Pride march, in recognition of the Stonewall uprising of 1969.