A liberating booty-shaking

It’s both inevitable and ironic that a photograph of the Village People adorns the back cover of “Turn the Beat Around,” Peter Shapiro’s scrupulously researched, deliciously witty “Secret History of Disco.” Inevitable because knee-jerk iconography is so tempting when it comes to this subject, and ironic because the pop novelty act, rather than epitomizing the dance craze that galvanized the 1970s, signaled its decline and fall.

“Disco,” Shapiro sagely observes, “wasn’t about the stylized romantic love of classic pop or even soul, but overwhelming ecstasy, the complete and utter joy of being able to take pleasure from something that only a few years before was forbidden.”

Before the uproar begun on that historic evening in 1969 when the patrons of an exceedingly louche Mafia-run snake pit called the Stonewall Inn revolted against the police raiding the place, it was against the law for “acknowledged” gays and lesbians to congregate in public. Dancing was nothing if not even more forbidden, as poet Frank O’Hara knew back in 1955 when he wrote “At the Old Place,” his tribute to a dance speak-easy that used to exist alongside the theater where “The Boys in the Band” premiered the year before Stonewall changed everything.

O’Hara’s poem is one of the few touchstones not mentioned in “Turn the Beat Around,” which explains how discotheques took hold in 1960s France as a medium of mainstream self-entertainment, migrated to England and then crossed over to America when the twist became the rage -- a dance whose importance proceeds from the fact that it had moves that “anyone from a three-year-old to your grandmother could learn to do.” But class issues were also at play in tandem with terpsichorean egalitarianism at New York City’s Arthur, the first U.S. discotheque of note, where ribbon clerks frugged alongside Liza Minnelli.

As the decade turned, leaving all manner of social and political unrest in its wake, the “theque” was dropped and “disco” became “all about breaking the bonds of shame that had imprisoned gay men for centuries.” It also supplied a means of musical integration as disco became the spectacle of white gay men grooving to the sounds of black straight women. And with Sylvester, the black gay man whose rich falsetto made “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” the disco national anthem (until “I Will Survive” came along), the form found its perfect blend. Add sex, drugs and muscle worship and you’ve got quite a socio-sexual stew.

Shapiro carefully details the look and feel of such fondly remembered New York clubs as the Saint, Flamingo, Crisco Disco, Le Jardin, Sanctuary, the Loft and my personal favorite, Tamburlaine -- where on one memorable evening Jackie O (accompanied by a pair of gay men of advanced age and more than advanced “attitude”) dropped by. We were all pleased to see her at first. But that pleasure turned sour once we realized she was merely there to gawk and “slum.” We therefore ignored her and she quickly steamed off in a huff.

The celebrity hangout Studio 54 was clearly created to cater to the “tude” she exhibited, and it quickly became the stamping ground of closeted gay men such as disgraced lawyer Roy Cohn -- who like the recently same-sex-married Republican super-consultant Arthur Finkelstein -- was eager to enjoy the privileges won by those they otherwise disdained. And that’s not to mention the omnipresent Liza, spinning dizzily as ever.

“Disco,” Shapiro declares, “was never really about celebrity; it was about the comforting anonymity of belonging to a community, the freedom of having a shared identity that could be shouted across a dance floor.” But that’s not what happened when mass consumption struck. It became a product, a brand name via the film “Saturday Night Fever” and the Village People, who were “the greatest media prank ever perpetrated on the American public” in that their mainstream-perceived wholesome images were forged out of an evening their creator Jacques Morali spent at the Anvil in New York -- a gay bar of no small sexual notoriety.

However, what truly spelled disco’s doom was the AIDS epidemic, whose initial effect so devastated the dance floors that for awhile it was known as “Saint’s Disease,” named after the legendary beauties of that disco. And Studio 54 followed suit, AIDS felling the less desirable (both physically and morally) likes of Halston and Cohn -- thus leaving Liza nowhere to dance. The desiccated corpse of disco still twitches periodically at “circuit parties,” with crystal methamphetamine taking center stage over talented DJs.

“Disco in a sense was liberalism’s last hurrah, the final party before the neocon apocalypse,” writes Shapiro. And that may be true. But if dancing is the form of protest that he shows it was in the past, there’s every reason to believe that sooner or later all of us -- gay and straight -- may have a new recourse to get up and “get down.” *