CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

For many faithful fans, this year’s “Idol” has exactly one contestant: Adam Lambert. Others might impress, but compared with the 27-year-old former chorus boy with the unearthly vocal range, they all fall somewhere between “average” and “decent.” America may love Danny Gokey like a brother and think Allison Iraheta is pretty cool, but in Lambert, audiences confront something never before seen on the show: the kind of pop star who can change people’s lives.

I’m not saying that Lambert is the greatest “American Idol” ever, though his mad singing skills and confidence as a performer put him in the top tier. What makes Lambert special is the world that made him: a web of subcultures that includes the musical theater that previously earned him his keep, but also the freaky burlesque of Hollywood revue “The Zodiac Show”; the anarchy of Burning Man, the annual festival that builds temporary utopia in the Nevada desert; the confrontational hedonism of glam rock, which he created with his band, the Citizen Vein; and the sensuality of the club, which he tried to conquer with experiments like the house music-flavored “Oh My Ra.”

The life-changing pop stars Lambert emulates, including David Bowie, Prince and Madonna, as well as lesser lights such as Pete Wentz and Lady GaGa, open up the doors to these alternative universes. Through their music, their style, their way of moving through the world, admirers can dream of a life beyond the confines of their “normal” lives.

The dream space Lambert opens up is one in which sexuality is fluid. Whether or not he ever publicly confirms his sexual orientation, he’s forever associated with the androgynous, exploratory spirit of the scenes he’s inhabited. Yet the viewer must assume that it’s his choice to foreground or underplay his multifaceted identity. Which brings us to his nondisco turn on “Disco Night.”

Aware of America’s affection for his slow jams, Lambert abandoned disco’s cowbell and kick drum in favor of a reworking of Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You,” from “Saturday Night Fever.” The judges praised him, as always, but Simon Cowell did make one dubious aside. “I would have bet $10,000 you would have done Donna Summer,” said the judge, in a statement as beholden to type as Randy Jackson’s insistence that Lil Rounds, who was eliminated this week, must be the next Mary J. Blige.

Yet Simon’s assumption contained a grain of insight. Not only is Lambert the only “Idol” striver left with gifts on par with disco’s legendary divas, but as an emissary from a more sexually diverse realm than this family show can ever present, he had a chance, this week, to do his community proud. Real disco fans (like myself) prayed he’d perform a song by the genre’s sanctified drag queen, the late, great Sylvester. Or he could have chosen Gloria Gaynor’s parable of strength in adversity, “I Will Survive.” Or even Bronski Beat’s 1984 disco-revivalist coming-out anthem, “Smalltown Boy.”

Should he have? Lambert has no obligation to be a role model or a representative of a certain subculture. More to the point, the persona he embodies is one whose connection to classic disco is fairly fraught.

For young gay men (and those, like “Idol” judge Paula Abdul, who love them), disco presents a complicated legacy. It’s the music of liberation, of communal pleasure and pride. But it’s also linked to an era of abandon that preceded the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic. Plus, it’s hardly hip and young. Though club kids keep reinventing beats and finding new divas to adore, they have distanced themselves from their elders; to many, the tight T-shirts of the Castro Street clone are as trite as the love beads of the old hippie or those pictures in the family album of Mom marching bra-less on Washington.

This generational shift has been happening for decades. AIDS mobilized many in the 1980s and gave rise to “queer” culture, which blended punk attitude with street-activist grit. That movement pulled down many closets and allowed for a new paradigm to emerge: the integrated gay man or woman, embodied today by Elton John and Ellen DeGeneres, who maintained connections to more separatist gay and lesbian traditions but ultimately “fit in” with a mainstream that, at least on the surface, was largely heterosexual.

In a widely read 2005 article in the New Republic, “The End of Gay Culture,” Andrew Sullivan noted that openly gay people were everywhere: the legislature, the arts, the Olympics. For many in the public sphere, sexuality became “a central, but not defining, part of their identity.”

Central, but not defining: For more insistently progressive gay men and women, this new attitude posed a threat. Like older feminists who lament their daughters’ rejection of that term, or people of color who worry that hip-hop culture may have lost touch with the spirit of the civil rights movement, some witnessing the waning of drag, Judy Garland worship, and, yes, the discos of West Hollywood and Fire Island, N.Y., thought that a crucial sense of being might be lost.

Adam Lambert’s rise is part of the way these traditions did survive, transformed. Gay culture, always as varied as the men and women who created it, now has many public faces. Post-punk stars like John Cameron Mitchell and Justin Bond have taken drag in bold new directions. Rufus Wainwright confronted the “gay icon” Judy Garland in a series of performances, and now he’s writing an opera. Hercules and Love Affair, with Antony Hegarty on vocals, reaches out for the glory of 1970s disco while acknowledging the melancholy that was also part of that world.

Disco was never just a gay thing. It’s just as crucial to the development of African American music and European pop.

But disco is music about freeing your sensual and sexual sides, and about trying on different shades of male and female -- about “shopping in the women’s department,” as Abdul said Kris Allen did by playing a Donna Summer song, or knowing, as Anoop Desai did, that “real men wear pink.”

Adam Lambert chose to not take that kind of chance on disco night. But then, he has been taking chances all season long, and probably all his life.

Next week we’ll turn our attention to the stylings of the Rat Pack. Maybe Adam will stretch the show’s parameters again, and find his own way into that very traditional masculine world.

He’d surely have no problem with Sinatra’s songbook, but I’m hoping for some Elvis. Viva Las Vegas!

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ann.powers@latimes.com