"70% of the discos are gay "

[remicks]

******

Sometime back in the nineties before having access to this wonderful site .....I used to find some time to get into the library at SFSU and review the old Billboards . I'd chicken scratch titles I didn't recognize or write little notes from articles.

So I've found one of those papers tucked in my Joel Whitburn TOP 40 HITS book and on it I noted that in the May 17 , 1975 issue of BILLBOARD Magazine somewhere within it ... it was stated:

"70 per cent of the discos are gay".

Now I don't know who said it or about where specifically or anything else .... but if someone has that issue , maybe they can review it further .....or I will one time when I make it back in there ....


*****

[canadiantire]

It is just recent that I have realized how much Disco music was of a Gay interest.
No offense to anyone here!

What could explain that?

This fact was actually a revelation to me.

Based on the experience of my Disco years, there were only a handful (J) of discotheques in Montreal that were officially posted as Gay clubs.

The remaining ones were to me “straight” but the sexual orientation is not always stamped on the forehead of everyone...

Maybe I was too busy staring at the demoiselle’s to really have a subjective opinion.

On the same tangent, I have yet to figure the proportion of people from the Gay community who are subscribers to this forum.


- Marcus

[pepper1dancer]

Back in the day I was at work and listening to my 8-track (dont laugh) and someone comes in and says "Disco?, you must be gay". I was taken back and I was surprised i was labeled because of my taste in music. Duh, it was 1979 but I was listening to some Hardcore Disco. That day i labeled Disco as gay also. Sadly, i was a closeted young man back then and soon I got rid of tons of my 12" singles and my Disco albums because i was afraid I would be "outed" just because of my music.(you can laugh). 70%? Find that hard to believe. Back then we had maybe 4 gay discos compared to 40-50 "straight discos" Interesting.....

P.S. this was my 200th post. Yeah for me.

[eddieo]

another great thread (I REALLY have to check these boards more often!)

Back in the day (I started spinning in 1976), there were two kinds of disco: black and gay. Note the little d in disco, as I remember this as the period before Disco became a bad word (there may some disagreement on these boards, as the Disco period---for the most part from Saturday Night Fever on---is when a lot of you may have come to the art form. No offense intended, but the pre-SNF period differed from what followed in a lot of ways, but we'll save that for another thread ;o)
A DJ played black or gay, and often was neither, at least here in Boston. To a certain degree, it had to do with BPM, but the "gay" stuff was swishier and the "black" stuff funkier. We actually identified with these labels, as I might tell another DJ that I played gay, without either of us thinking about sexual orientation at all.

That said, a lot of my colleagues were gay (though some played 'black'), and I made a lot of great friends and learned a lot about gay culture. I'll tell you that my Billboard contact when I reported (briefly) in the 90's was gay, and I would assume that everyone writing about disco was. And, if you hung around with gay guys, you heard them constantly overestimating how many people were gay (sometimes looking around the room, or counting off well-known celebrities: gay, gay, gay, gay....you get the idea). I still have lots of gay friends, and I can't wait to tell them a condensed version of this conversation. Y'know how a gay guy would respond to that "70% of the discos are gay "
comment?: "Yes; and the other 30% are lying!!!"

[Simon White]

Originally Posted by remicks

******

Sometime back in the nineties before having access to this wonderful site .....I used to find some time to get into the library at SFSU and review the old Billboards . I'd chicken scratch titles I didn't recognize or write little notes from articles.

So I've found one of those papers tucked in my Joel Whitburn TOP 40 HITS book and on it I noted that in the May 17 , 1975 issue somewhere within it was stated:

"70 per cent of the discos are gay".

Now I don't know who said it or about where specifically or anything else .... but if someone has that issue , maybe they can review it further .....or I will one time when I make it back in there ....


*****

Remicks, you may want to re - edit your post because your point is not very clear..are you looking for the May 17th Joel Whitburn book or do you already have it with the quote?

[Videoskooter]

Originally Posted by eddieo

if you hung around with gay guys, you heard them constantly overestimating how many people were gay (sometimes looking around the room, or counting off well-known celebrities: gay, gay, gay, gay....you get the idea).

I think that's the whole point of this thread or another traditional dish served by the House Of Remicks!

I really don't see another point in his vague and unbelievable quote, but hey, that's just me

[Simon White]

Originally Posted by Videoskooter

I think that's the whole point of this thread or another traditional dish served by the House Of Remicks!

I really don't see another point in his vague and unbelievable quote, but hey, that's just me

Well the quote itself is clearly ridiculous taken out of any context like this.

And this is priceless-

" Now I don't know who said it or about where specifically or anything else .... but if someone has that issue , maybe they can review it further .....or I will one time when I make it back in there ...."

errr what??

Come on Remmy, get your ass out of that closet....and tell us... what is your point?

[Videoskooter]

Off-Topic: As some of you may have noticed, the server is acting weird so don't be surprised if your posts show up twice or if it takes a long time to connect! I've notified Bernie about this.

Thx 4 da patience!

[Graham_Start]

Originally Posted by canadiantire

Based on the experience of my Disco years, there were only a handful (J) of discotheques in Montreal that were officially posted as Gay clubs.

Disco was also much more popular in Québec than elsewhere in North America. From my own observations, at least 80% of Canadian disco is from Québec, with THP being the only notable exception.

[thommy2458]

Originally Posted by eddieo

another great thread (I REALLY have to check these boards more often!)
To a certain degree, it had to do with BPM, but the "gay" stuff was swishier and the "black" stuff funkier.

Hmmmmmm-I'm sure you don't mean to offend by this
narrow generalization,eddie but really,the best gay clubs
were able to play both "swishy" and "funky"-And my experience as a member here is that there are alot of
straight members who listen to traditional eurodisco
and gay members that listen to Funkadelic.Like the original spirit of club culture,this forum is able to reflect
diversity without labeling people...

Thom

[thommy2458]

double post1

[remicks]

Originally Posted by Videoskooter

I think that's the whole point of this thread or another traditional dish served by the House Of Remicks!

I really don't see another point in his vague and unbelievable quote, but hey, that's just me

Always do my best to serve up only the tastiest of delectables ! ...Sorry you're having trouble swallowing it though VS

Also sorry to be vague ... but seriously ....this piece of paper was just folded within my book and once I glanced it over , it included that delicious little scribble of a comment so I thought I'd pass on this morsel hoping maybe someone has that Billboard . ( I can't wait to find out the exact details myself)


What I find most interesting is when particularly this was written .....Spring of 1975 . That's very early in the disco story ....discos hadn't exploded mainstream yet ....discos hadn't opened in big numbers ..... and YES later ... by 1978 every cruise ship, every Hyatt/Ramada/Hilton/Holiday Inn , every vacation resort , every shopping mall, every "fancy" restaurant/bar had a disco ....and of course by then the ratio of those going to discos who did sleep with similar body types vs. those that didn't changed dramatically ....

After all once discos were popularized by the masses ( straights/whites) you'd expect the straight clubs to outnumber the gay ones proportionately reflective to real life .... 10 to 1 or so .... right?


So I would ask you Canadiantire for instance ... are you speaking about your clubbing years of 1975 ? or much later ?


******

Enjoy your meal everyone ! Cheers !

[EricHG23]

Well I have read some gay disco fans were annoyed at how many straight peopel started going to clubs after S Night Fever lol. Of course the biginfamous discos like 54 were pretty notoriously mixed--and often the "better" smaller discos were primarily gay but...

Dance music trends in general have nearly always come out of gay (and ethnic) clubs, no?

For the record I'm gay--and from Montreal but was too young for any of the discos :(

[buckaroo]

Originally Posted by Simon White

Come on Remmy, get your ass out of that closet....and tell us... what is your point?

Excuse me for asking a silly question, but why do people "...cum out of the closet"? Why not, "come out from behind the sofa"? Or, "jump out of the car"?.

Don't slap me, just asking.

[eddieo]

Originally Posted by Simon White

Well the quote itself is clearly ridiculous taken out of any context like this.

And this is priceless-

" Now I don't know who said it or about where specifically or anything else .... but if someone has that issue , maybe they can review it further .....or I will one time when I make it back in there ...."

errr what??

Come on Remmy, get your ass out of that closet....and tell us... what is your point?

I think Remicks is perfectly clear here, and, in case his 'clarification', above, still isn't clear to you:
a. he used to scribble notes while reading old Billboards
b. he came across some of his old notes
c. he wonders if anyone has the issue of Billboard from which his notes were written ('cause he doesn't have it; he looked at it in the library)
d. if nobody has the issue, he'll try to get back to the library

Originally Posted by thommy2458

Hmmmmmm-I'm sure you don't mean to offend by this
narrow generalization,eddie but really,the best gay clubs
were able to play both "swishy" and "funky"-And my experience as a member here is that there are alot of
straight members who listen to traditional eurodisco
and gay members that listen to Funkadelic.Like the original spirit of club culture,this forum is able to reflect
diversity without labeling people...
Thom

hmmmmm, indeed. of course I didn't mean to offend; what could have been deemed offensive? Labels, in and of themselves, aren't a bad thing, even if I was labelling people (which I wasn't; I was labelling music, or, more specifically, defining what we used to use as labels: black and gay). Should I be offended if someone refers to my car as "silver"?
Again, in 1976 (in Boston at least), we as DJs refered to records with those terms, and described our styles in those terms. There were 'black parties' and 'white parties', usually at gay clubs (which were open to mixed crowds) that had everything to do with the style of music and nothing to do with race. I fear that extreme sensitivity to any label is political correctness run amok. Should I be offended that my political leanings are labelled "left"? Why can't my views be "right"? Of course, that viewpoint means I buy into the idea that "right" is a better word than "left".
I came to disco music when the other alternative was rock (I actually took all my rock records to a used record store and traded them for disco records, jumpstarting my DJing inventory). Rock guys said "disco sucks" and put bumper stickers stating so on their cars. When my close friends that remained rock fans (thus despising disco) would ask me, sincerely, if I was afraid I might be thought to be gay for enjoying disco, I said no. Why would being thought to be gay bother me? I had (and have) no problem with the label "gay"; I loved (and love) the music, the fashion, the tolerance, the attitude, the grooming, and so much else that I found in the gay community. Hell, save for a carnal attraction to other men, I am gay! Of course, now we call that metrosexual, or is that another negative label?

Please look for my upcoming thread, lamenting the way Saturday Night Fever opened my world up to a large segment of the population that helped add a divisive quality to labels that were heretofore only informative, not pejorative.