1.1 Homosexual Panic

In most North American cities in the mid twentieth century, dancing with a person of the same sex was practically – and in some cases explicitly – prohibited. In the eyes of respectable citizens, police, politicians, and religious leaders, same-sex social dance was vulgar and dangerous. As an overt and public manifestation of illicit sexual desires and gender behaviors, homosexuals convening on a dance floor and moving their bodies to music was perceived by many people in positions of authority as a threat to acceptable forms of morality and, ultimately, a threat to the proper functioning of society.

Following the disruption of the Second World War – including the mobilization of soldiers on the warfront and laborers at home – the vast majority of North Americans were keen to return to an idealized normalcy in which ostensibly happy heterosexual families served as the building blocks of their nations. A widespread reinvestment in and glorification of heteronormative patriarchy after the war was also a response to the way gender-segregated spaces of warfare fomented previously undiscovered queer possibilities. Paul Jackson (Reference Jackson2004, p. 17) argues that “the war was a time of sexual self-discovery” for many young people who found freedom away from their hometowns and the watchful eyes of family and friends. For many young people coming of age during the Second World War, the disruption to their conventional life trajectory alongside the intimate bonds they made with others during wartime potentialized queer desires and behaviors. John D’Emilio (Reference D’Emilio, Snitow, Stansell and Thompson1983, p. 24) argues that the Second World War “created a substantially new ‘erotic situation’ conducive both to the articulation of a homosexual identity and to the more rapid evolution of a gay subculture.” The budding possibility of queerness provoked by the cultural shifts in the wake of the war was widely seen as a remnant of a disruptive and painful time that many wanted to leave in the past. Collective same-sex social dancing was particularly galling in this context, as groups of deviants gathered and flaunted their perverse lifestyle in embodied, erotic, and joyful ways.

In the years after the Second World War, both Canada and the United States experienced economic booms that enabled a different way of living for many of the nations’ citizens: leisure time and disposable income increased, and affluent white families moved out of cities’ downtown areas to chase the American Dream in newly constructed suburban developments. While the shifting realities of cities across North America are locally distinct, there are broad trends that set the stage for the development of lesbian and gay subcultures in urban spaces in the 1960s and 1970s. Many downtowns in cities across the continent emptied out and buildings in certain parts of urban spaces were abandoned. The deterioration of downtown communities resulted in cheaper rents that enabled the development of spaces for marginalized collectives – including spaces that would bring together gays and lesbians. The postwar development of urban spaces in many North American cities provided more anonymity to individuals who enjoyed queer desires than suburbs and small towns might have allowed. At the same time, the development of urban apartment buildings allowed for single and shared nonfamily occupancy. Taken together, shifts in demographics and organization of urban spaces enabled the formation of collective queer life in spaces that had only recently been populated by heterosexual families.

General awareness of homosexuality increased in North America in the decades after the Second World War. Visible homosexual subcultures developed in cities and received significant and sensationalized attention from the tabloid press; popular novels that incorporate nonnormative desires, experiences, and themes introduced homosexuality to mainstream literary audiences; and claims made by Alfred Kinsey and other sexologists turned homosexuality into a talking point throughout the United States and Canada, sparked by the shocking claims that significantly more people had participated in or desired same-sex erotic experiences than one might imagine and that it’s not always possible to identify a homosexual simply by looking at them. These social changes coincided with structural shifts that refined homosexual behaviors into homosexual identities: the aforementioned increase in disposable income and construction of multiunit apartment and condominium buildings meant that people (especially men) with queer desires could move away from the demands of the heteronormative family structure and live a “gay life” in the big city.

While the possibility of life structured around homosexual identity was exciting for some, it was perceived by others to be catastrophic. At the federal level, both the United States and Canada developed campaigns against homosexuals in the Armed Forces and civil service. David K. Johnson (Reference Johnson2004, p. 16) notes that many members of the United States government saw homosexuality as the root of a variety of evils: “Homosexuality, [Senator Joseph R.] McCarthy asserted, was the psychological maladjustment that led people toward communism.” Reflecting the broader “homosexual panic” of the moment, both nations explicitly banned immigrants suspected of being homosexual. Locally, police forces were creative in how they used laws to surveil, harass, and arrest individuals engaging in improper sexual and gendered behaviors. Police in the United States would use “masquerade” or “three article” laws to punish anyone thought to be cross-dressing or presenting in an inappropriate way for their perceived sex. In Canada, police relied on similarly archaic legislation to harass homosexuals in the mid twentieth century, regularly citing “vagrancy” or “gross indecency” laws to detain individuals they perceived as deviants. This history shows that, regardless of the legality of certain behaviors, individual police officers have the power to decide the permissibility of acts. In his unpublished memoir, for example, playwright John Herbert writes about being detained by police when dressed in drag in downtown Toronto in the 1950s. The officers told him he was being arrested for appearing in public “disguised by night” – an antiquated law that was included in the 1892 Criminal Code of Canada to deter house burglars who wore masks. These are just some of the legal (and legal-ish) methods through which local police forces targeted individuals they perceived as being homosexual in the twentieth century. For local and national governments, homosexuality was considered a social evil that needed to be contained and eradicated.

In the discursive battle over the meaning of homosexuality, social morality, and the acceptable public behaviors related to gender and sexuality that took place in American and Canadian cities in the second half of the twentieth century, collective same-sex dance to popular music played a pivotal role. As archival materials from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s show, lesbian and gay liberationists in major North American cities were preoccupied with collective dance, which was simultaneously held up as a method (for fundraising, community building, exploring erotic desires, claiming public space, exhibiting pride in an allegedly abject identity, and more), as well as an ultimate goal. “If I can’t dance,” posters, pin buttons, t-shirts, and tote bags held at LGBTQ2+ archives in Canada and the United States declare, “I don’t want your revolution.” D’Emilio (Reference D’Emilio2014, p. 166) writes that “in discos, at women’s music festivals, on college campuses, and at street fairs, queer folk looked as if we were dancing our way to freedom.” For many homosexuals in these decades, dancing was an aspiration; for agents of the state, it was a target. The fact that repressive governments and self-proclaimed agents of morality were so tormented by same-sex dance throughout these decades should draw our attention to the profound political potential of such collaborative, embodied, and queer acts. To put it bluntly: there were very good reasons that so many people committed to upholding the heteronormative, patriarchal status quo were so concerned about homosexuals dancing together. And for homosexuals, there were even better reasons to fight to make it happen.

1.2 Where Do We Go?

Across North America in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, spaces where homosexuals convened faced sustained surveillance and harassment. Marc Stein (Reference Stein2019, p. 27) argues that bars that permitted homosexual patrons faced multiple simultaneous threats: “straight men targeted them with acts of hate and harassment. Local police conducted raids, demanded payoffs, and engaged in sexual entrapment practices (in which undercover officers enticed men to commit sex crimes and then arrest them) … State liquor regulators acted against businesses that served ‘homosexuals’ or permitted ‘disorderly,’ ‘indecent,’ or ‘lewd’ behaviors on their premises.” Same-sex intimacy (and its often severe consequences if witnessed by the wrong person) was a primary concern of proprietors and employees of bars and taverns across North America. D’Emilio (Reference D’Emilio2014, p. 166) writes that bars and taverns with homosexual clientele in the 1960s onward “did their own serious policing not just of dancing but of any form of touching. An arm around someone’s shoulder or a playful squeeze of someone’s butt could be enough to send lurking plainclothes officers into action.” This ever present threat of police action meant that bar owners and workers carefully controlled what behaviors were permissible in their venue.

In the grim reality of the 1960s, collective dancing among homosexuals seemed practically impossible. In the unlikely event that homosexuals managed to find a venue that tolerated them – especially one with music and a dance floor whose employees allowed them to move their bodies to the music and where they were allowed to touch or be oriented toward the bodies of others – the threats of a police raid and of being seen and attacked by gay bashers still remained. Despite the risk of violence, of possible arrest and imprisonment, of being taken advantage of by proprietors, and of being outed and shunned, homosexual individuals fought for spaces where they could dance with others.

In February 1970, Chicago Gay Liberation members hosted their first dance at the University of Chicago. According to D’Emilio (Reference D’Emilio2014, p. 167) organizers were pleasantly surprised when over “600 liberated people danced freely to live music.” More than one thousand attendees showed up a few months later for another dance on campus. D’Emilio (Reference D’Emilio2014, p. 167) argues that in the early years of lesbian and gay liberation organizing, “the dancing bug was proving contagious.” He quotes a newsletter published by Mattachine Midwest that emphasized the political importance of the desire to dance, claiming that “the revolution has just begun, and dances are part of it” (p. 168).Footnote ²

Archival documents, published accounts, and the memories of queer elders indicate that collective social dance was a fundamental component of early lesbian and gay liberation organizing. Indeed, some of the earliest issues of Come Out!, the publication of New York City’s Gay Liberation Front (GLF), identify collective dance parties as a key element of the group’s political activism: “The purpose which we set out for the dances,” Kathy Braun (Reference Braun1970, p. 3) writes, is “to provide an alternative to the exploitative gay bars in the city, to raise money for a GLF Community Center, and to politicize the homosexuals hanging around this town.” Lesbian and gay dances of the 1970s were often used as fundraisers for the burgeoning community and perceived as a means through which the burgeoning collective could forego exploitative private venues (see Figure 2). But, as Braun makes clear, this is just one function of these dances. In politicizing homosexuals, same-sex dance transformed North American cities during the second half of the 20th century.

Figure 2

“Lesbiantics” published by E. Bedoz (Ellen Shumsky) in the Dec/January 1970 issue of Come Out! A Liberation Forum for the Gay Community shows how community organized dances challenged the dominance of exploitative private bars and taverns.

2.1 Spinning Historical Records

The story of the Stonewall Riots is well known within LGBTQ2+ communities and in the broader, straighter world.Footnote ⁵ The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City, was a social hangout for a diverse collective of individuals marginalized by sexual desire and gender expression, including people we would now identify as street-involved and homeless youth, trans and gender-nonconforming individuals, and gay men and lesbians belonging to various categories of age, race, and class. Like most bars that permitted such clientele, the Stonewall Inn was frequently raided by local police (despite the generous payoffs they received from the venue’s owners). In the early hours of June 28, 1969, undercover and uniformed officers served a warrant as per their usual practice of harassment. According to Stein (Reference Stein2019, p. 3), “there were approximately two hundred people in the bar” when this raid began and police “detained several bar employees, patrons without identification, butches, transvestites, and people who talked back or fought back; they told everyone else to leave.” Many of the patrons who were pushed out of the venue milled around on Christopher Street and, as the police continued their work inside, the crowd outside the bar grew both in size and agitation. When police attempted to leave the Stonewall Inn, the crowd refused safe passage and the officers were forced to retreat into the bar. Eventually, a tactical squad arrived and attempted to clear the large, angry crowd that had convened. As Stein (Reference Stein2019, p. 5) describes: “over the next several hours, thousands of people rioted in the streets with campy courage and fierce fury.” This first night of the riots lasted a few hours, but it sparked something larger that sustained activists. Riots took place over the next several days and, as the story goes, the gay liberation movement was born.

While we collectively risk overemphasizing its role in the formation of the gay liberation movement – after all, it was not the first time that queer people had rioted in response to police violence – the Stonewall uprising had a profound effect on life in New York City and beyond. Within months of the riots, gay liberation newspapers (including Gay Power, Out, and Gay) were started and political blocs (most famously the GLF and the Queens Liberation Front) formed. As Michael Denneny (Reference Denneny2023, p. 5) argues, publications and organizations in this moment were a direct response to the Stonewall Riots, representing various “attempts to establish a public forum for the gay community … and evaluate what was happening to us and around us.”

In his impressive work titled The Stonewall Riots, Stein (Reference Stein2019, p. 14) identifies several “interpretive frameworks” that “help us to understand why the Stonewall Riots occurred when and where they did.” He points to the homophile movement of the mid twentieth century and its radicalization in the late 1960s; a long history of resistance at bars and similar venues; other social movements of the era (including women’s liberation, Black power politics, and antiwar movements); and “the combination of heightened expectations and dashed hopes that many felt as the country transitioned from a period of liberal reform to one of conservative backlash” that included “a new wave of police raids, violent killings, and local vigilantism” (pp. 14–15). These are all important lenses through which we can better understand the Stonewall Riots and their broader context. However, the music and music cultures of the Stonewall Inn are unmentioned – an unfortunate oversight because music participation offers another interpretive framework to better understand the Stonewall Riots and the conditions under which they occurred.

The Stonewall Inn was, by most accounts, a foul space run by a management team that had little respect for customers. As Stein (Reference Stein2019, p. 3) writes: “patrons complained about high prices, watered-down drinks, dirty glasses, and unclean facilities.” Despite this, the Stonewall Inn was hugely popular with a diverse group of queer patrons who were marginalized by broader cultural ideologies around gender, sexuality, race, and class. One reason why this bar was well-attended, despite its obvious shortcomings, is that it was widely known as a bar that permitted gender play, subtle acts of sexual deviancy, and queer dance.

Several memoirs by lesbian and gay liberation activists identify the Stonewall Inn as the city’s prime dance location. Puerto Rican actor and singer Holly Woodlawn (Reference Woodlawn1991, p. 110) writes about the venue in her memoir, noting that “inside it was very dark, with a long bar to one side and go-go boys in bikinis dancing on either end. It had a dance floor and a jukebox. The place attracted an eclectic bunch: butch guys, preppy boys, older men, a few lesbians, and a few so-called straight men sprinkled in between.” Trans activists also claimed space on the venue’s dance floor. Edmund White (Reference White2009, p. 51) writes of the “long-legged, fierce-eyed antics of the STAR members (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries)” who often danced at the venue. Historians have also noted the appeal of the dance floor at the Stonewall Inn. Martin Duberman (Reference Duberman1993, p. 225) argues that what made the Stonewall “the most popular gay bar in Greenwich Village” in the late 1960s was that it “was also the only gay male bar in New York where dancing was permitted.”

The Stonewall Inn had two dance spaces, demarcated by the type of music played and the forms of bodily participation that the music encouraged. David Carter (Reference Carter2004, p. 73) writes that a jukebox in the front area of the bar “offered more mainstream performers such as the Beach Boys.” In his book Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, Carter (Reference Carter2004, p. 73) quotes Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, who explains that “some people called the front room ‘the white room’ because of its racial makeup and its music.” Patrons that Carter interviewed referred to the back room as the “Black” or “Puerto Rican room” because the jukebox there was stocked with dance-oriented music structured around repetitive grooves. Carter (Reference Carter2004, p. 73) argues that this back room was the favored space of “homeless youth, as well as young Blacks and Puerto Ricans” who would dance the night away at the Stonewall.

Musicologists, scholars of sound, and cultural geographers have shown how sound creates social space. Brandon LaBelle (Reference LaBelle2010, p. xxi), for example, emphasizes the power of sound to demarcate space, condition individuals in certain ways, and connect people in the sonic register; he argues that sound forms “links, groupings, and conjunctions that accentuate individual identity as a relational project. The flows of surrounding sonority can be heard to weave an individual into a large social fabric, filling relations with local sound, sonic culture, auditory memories, and the noises that move between, contributing to the making of shared spaces.” Simultaneously, music can initiate collectives, elicit new forms of relationships, and produce spatial understanding.

It’s the back room at the Stonewall Inn that I’m most interested in, the one filled with enthusiastic dancers who find their way to the rear of the bar and, in the process, alter their relationships to their bodies and the world they inhabit. The music of this room, with its repetitive groove-induced sense of presentness, allowed dancers to suspend everyday temporality and access a sense of belonging and freedom. In this space, we can imagine the beautiful queer encounters that Muñoz (Reference Muñoz2013, p. 103) encourages us to reach for: those sparked by “a visceral desire to want something else within a field of ossified social relations.” Dance floors can foment something else – something more.

The Stonewall Inn was the place to dance in Greenwich Village in 1969, but it was not a utopian or consistently safe dance space. While the venue offered dancers and drinkers feelings of blissful possibility, it also regularly conveyed how quickly that sense of possibility could be shattered. Like most bars that allowed lesbian and gay patrons, the Stonewall Inn had an elaborate alarm system to warn staff and patrons of an impending police raid. Duberman (Reference Duberman1993, p. 231) writes that the Stonewall’s main dancing area was “lit only with black lights.” While this provided a trippy ambience for the dance floor, the light was more practical: when uniformed police arrived – or when someone suspected of being a plainclothes undercover police officer entered the club – “white bulbs instantly came on in the dance area, signaling everyone to stop dancing or touching” (p. 232). A visual warning sign was a common practice in venues that permitted homosexual clientele as a change in lighting was the quickest way to signal dancers to separate and straighten up.Footnote ⁶

A few days after the riots, in a New York Post article, Jay Levin (Reference Levin1969, p. 36) writes that the Stonewall Inn was “the mecca of gay night life. Behind its blacked out windows, the gay young men drank, danced, and made attachments with confidence that, at last, they had found sanctuary.” According to Stonewall regulars, the place really did feel like a place of refuge. Lanigan-Schmidt tells Jason Baumann (Reference Baumann2019, p. 106) that he and his friends felt “safe and sound” at the Stonewall; he recalls that “the jukebox played a lot of Motown music. We danced … Here the consciousness of knowing you ‘belonged’ nestled into that warm feeling of finally being home. And home engenders love and loyalty quite naturally, so we loved the Stonewall” (see Figure 3).

Figure 3

A group of patrons in front of the Stonewall Inn.

Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah/MUUS Collection.

Because it permitted same-sex dancing, the Stonewall Inn attracted a cross-section of queer patrons that might not have otherwise been brought together. For Michael Warner (Reference Warner1999, pp. 35–36), this is one of the hallmarks of a queer scene that allows a special kind of sociality: “queer scenes are the true salons des refusés, where the most heterogeneous people are brought into great intimacy by their common experience of being despised and rejected in a world of norms that they now recognize as false morality.” It was this heterogeneity that imbued the Stonewall with the sense of collective power and that animated the Stonewall Riots. Indeed, one of the most profound aspects of dance floor experience is that it can engender a sense of collectivity without erasing difference – on the dance floor, belonging across difference can manifest and challenge simplistic homogeneous notions of queerness. On the dance floor, queer participants can perceive the ways they are different from heteronormative society (and its ideals) as well as from others moving to the music. On the dance floor, one’s sense of community can constantly be formed, contested, and reformed. Lanigan-Schmidt describes the raids that sparked the riots, writing that “it was not only a raid but a bust … the lights went on. It wasn’t a pretty sight … the music box [was] broken. The dancing stopped … Nobody thought of it as history, herstory, my-story, your-story, or our-story. We were being denied a place to dance together. That’s all” (quoted in in Baumann, Reference Baumann2019, p. 107).

Lanigan-Schmidt makes clear that the police’s violation of this sacred space and their attempt to deny him and his fellow patrons “a place to dance together” was a breaking point. Dancing allowed patrons a way to feel good and a part of something in a world that disallowed this recognition at every turn. As Garcia-Mispireta (Reference Garcia-Mispireta2014, n.p.) argues, queer dance spaces of the 1970s and 1980s “are places where the injustices and indignities of everyday life can be not only temporarily relieved but to some extent redressed … their dance floors … provide concrete sites for the collective envisioning of a different kind of ‘good life.’” Many people thought such feelings, and the venues that sparked them, were worth fighting for.

Archival materials and personal accounts give us a partial sense of the Stonewall Inn’s musical soundscape. The music that played the back room was up-tempo soul (both Southern soul and Northern soul Motown), as well as funk. I’ve previously observed the importance of repetitive musical grooves in this history (Jennex, Reference Jennex2020, p. 420), a device that other musicologists reference as well: Robert Walser (Reference Walser1995, p. 209) notes the “joy in repetition” of African American popular music dance traditions that sustain rhythmic tensions, and Anne Danielsen (Reference Danielsen2006, p. 144) argues that repetitive grooves can “engender an intense, almost euphoric feeling” that is outside of the temporality of the everyday. Through participation in certain music, dancers can be out of time together. A document produced by the Stonewall Veterans’ Association lists the most popular songs on Stonewall jukeboxes during the week of the famous riots and helps to elucidate the function of music in the venue and this history. Number one on this chart is the 1969 hit “No Matter What Sign You Are” by Diana Ross and the Supremes. Duberman (Reference Duberman1993, p. 233) seems to verify this ranking, noting that “the Motown label was still top of the heap” at the Stonewall in the “summer of 1969.” Musicologist Jap Kooijman (Reference Kooijman2002, n.p.) writes that “No Matter What Sign You Are,” “while less popular with mainstream audience … proved to be very successful in the underground gay scene. In fact,” he writes, “‘No Matter What Sign You Are’ was the number-one hit single at the Stonewall Inn … the night that the famous gay bar was raided by the New York police.”

It is not just that marginalized people could dance at the Stonewall Inn; when we examine collective dance experiences of the past, the type of music matters. As I discuss above, collective dance has long been understood as a threat to the moral and social order precisely because of the feelings of embodied sexual freedom and collective belonging that it can evoke. However, to understand the specificity of the way dance encourages feelings of bliss and resistance, we must parse specific musical details. We need to listen closely and feel the groove.

2.2 Good Vibration

“No Matter What Sign You Are” renders audible popular aesthetics of the historical moment from which it emerges, simultaneously referencing traditions of psychedelic music popular in the 1960s, as well as the cyclical rhythmic grooves and symphonic sound of the burgeoning soul subgenres that laid the groundwork for what would become known as disco. While credited as backing vocalists, the Supremes are not heard on this recording. Like many of the songs ostensibly featuring the Supremes, “No Matter What Sign You Are” featured studio vocalists supporting Ross’s lead vocals. In this case, the backup singers heard on the recording are the Blackberries – Venetta Fields, Sherlie Matthews, and Clydie King – an in-demand trio of Black women vocalists who provided support for many of the artists and groups who recorded at Motown’s West Coast studios. Motown’s house band The Funk Brothers, a shifting group of session musicians, provided instrumental backing for the track. The labor of many talented performers makes this song what it is; Ross may be a queen, but this song is a communal endeavor.

“No Matter What Sign You Are” opens with a brief introductory phrase performed on a Coral sitar, an electric guitar designed to mimic the sound of a traditional sitar – a plucked string instrument with a long history in South Asian music performance. Following the sitar’s two-bar opening phrase, played freely without giving a sense of the song’s time signature or rhythmic groove, a snare drum fill demands listeners’ attention and soon settles into a full drum beat that delineates both the song’s tempo and groove. The backing vocals enter as soon as the drummer establishes the song’s regular tempo – the Blackberries sing the twelve-star signs as Ross provides vocal flourishes between their delivery.

Ross sings “the moon shines bright above” slightly in advance of the verse so that her delivery of “bright” is heard on the downbeat of the first bar. Lyrically, the song describes feelings of nighttime connection that resist systems of classification meant to keep people apart: “no matter what sign you are / you’re gonna be mine, you are.” As Ross exclaims, we “can’t let astrology chart our destiny … the beat of the heart, my love / is stronger than the charts, my love.” The song’s lyrics, which encourage listeners to permit themselves forbidden forms of intimacy, make this song easily applicable to the queer connections on the Stonewall Inn’s dance floor. “No Matter What Sign You Are” also exhibits the sound of feminine collectivity, with backup singers supporting the lead singer’s disclosure of prohibited love and desire in a style of collective vocal performance that Jacqueline Warwick (Reference Warwick2007, p. 46) theorizes as “girl talk.” While Ross’s voice is the focal point of the verses, backup singers repeat her concluding lyrics at the end of each phrase and perform audible signals of active listening to the lead – in this way, they simultaneously codify girl group practices of vocal texture and remain present throughout as a support system for the lead.

It’s not just the lyrical content of the song that made it well-suited for the dance floor of the Stonewall Inn. Indeed, “No Matter What Song You Are” encourages collective bodily expression and kinetic movement. The drummer plays sixteenth notes on the hi-hat – with subtle accents on beats one and three – and pounds a backbeat on the snare on beats two and four. In other words, in this conventional sixteenth note rock beat, listeners hear a familiar (straight) rock groove; the drummer is accenting beats one, two, three, and four, in each bar on either the hi-hat or the snare drum. The effect of this is that the drums provide a consistent articulation of the groove and make it easy and comfortable to dance to the music.Footnote ⁷

Ultimately, “No Matter What Sign You Are” is both playful and impactful, articulating the potential of unapproved connections and evoking a dance music collective through sonic properties. This is a particular moment in the history of dance music: one before live DJs became commonplace. The way the music is projected in the Stonewall Inn in 1969 is different from that of other dance floor experiences I unpack in this Element, as music at this venue was played through a jukebox rather than by a live DJ. This means that music stopped at the end of each song as the device readied the next single. Each of these songs, then, was played as an individual piece of music, followed by a few seconds of silence and the faint sounds of the machine preparing the next selection. From the 1970s on, DJs manipulated musical recordings so that this silence was no longer necessary: moving between two turntables meant that a DJ could keep music playing consistently, curating a suite of music that lasted much longer than a single EP or LP. While some artists were playing with crossfading methods in recorded albums of the 1960s to eliminate this silence between tracks and give the sense of a continuous live performance – The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the first and perhaps most famous example – cross-fading during live DJ sets would not become common practice for a few more years. At the Stonewall Inn, environmental sound – patrons chatting, bottles clinking, music from the venue’s other jukebox bleeding into the back room – would fill the silence between songs. Maybe some dancers would continue moving their bodies to keep energized and in the groove before the next song began. Imagine the anticipation in these moments; dancers waiting, expectant and excited for the music to begin again – sharing brief moments of longing for what is to come.

The rhythmic circularity of the vast majority of music heard in the back room of the Stonewall allowed dancers to feel lifted out of the present and into extraordinary musical time. Being out of time can feel like a powerful experience. Being out of time with others can change everything. The transformation of such an experience can make a return to the normative oppressive nature of the everyday difficult to handle. While the Stonewall Inn was a site of regular police raids, Duberman (Reference Duberman1993, p. 239) writes that the one that sparked the infamous riots occurred at “one-twenty A.M.—the height of the merriment, and much later than usual raids.” In other words: the raids that sparked the infamous Stonewall Riots occurred long after dancers had experienced musical time on the dance floor, and after they accessed the hopeful, transformative effects of collective dance to repetitive, groove-based music that binds dancers together across forms of difference. The structures of feeling enabled by intimacy and camaraderie on the dance floor allowed participants to register a different, more free arrangement that they were not ready to relinquish when they lights turned on and police barged in.

As a reevaluation of the narrative of the Stonewall Riots shows, powerful feelings of bliss, belonging, and individual and collective agency can be made tangible through dance. As a result, forms of social dance that challenge conventions of heteronormativity, patriarchy, and white supremacy are so often targeted by those committed to established traditions of morality and the prevailing status quo. Collective dance – perhaps especially when practiced by marginalized communities – can be a spark that ignites feelings of solidarity and the drive to resist. This potential becomes particularly evident in lesbian and gay history in the 1970s as liberatory politics and dance music and culture mature together in cities across North America.

3.1 Meet Me at The Turret

In the early to mid 1970s, the gay and lesbian social scene in the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, was relatively minor. The few spaces that did exist for lesbian and gay sociality in Halifax in the early and mid 1970s were under surveillance by police and largely segregated in terms of gender, race, and class. Robin Metcalfe, a former executive member of the Gay Alliance for Equality (GAE) – the city’s lesbian and gay liberation community group that formed in 1972 – and a historian and archivist of queer culture in Nova Scotia, tells me that he and other white men would spend their time at a bar called Thee Klub, a small venue that did not have a liquor license and was only open two nights a week. Rebecca Rose (Reference Rose2019, p. 28) writes that middle- and upper-class white lesbians preferred private house parties to the few public spaces that did exist, which they perceived as controlled by gay men. DJ and organizer Chris Shepherd explains that Black lesbians and gay men like himself tended to patronize Black-oriented spaces and conceal their queerness. He recalls periodically visiting Thee Klub with some of his gay white male friends and says, “I don’t remember ever seeing another Black person there.”Footnote ¹²

The situation in Halifax exemplifies challenges faced by lesbians and gays in smaller cities outside of major North American urban centers. For one thing, smaller populations meant fewer people to bring together under the banner of “lesbian and gay,” and less chance of anonymity for those interested in doing so.Footnote ¹³ While larger cities in this era may have been able to sustain multiple dance spaces to serve lesbian and gay patrons, this did not seem possible in Halifax.Footnote ¹⁴ In the 1970s, Halifax was relatively isolated in terms of geography and demographics. The nearest major urban center is Montréal, Quebec, which is about 1,250 kilometers (or 775 miles) away. And while, as Will Straw (Reference Straw, Pitrolo and Zubak2022, p. 31) notes, Billboard Magazine named Montréal the second-best city in North America for disco culture in the 1970s (after New York City), a homosexual Haligonian could not simply take a bus or train to the larger, potentially gayer, city to get a feel for the scene through an exploratory meeting, dance, or drink – the bus to Montréal takes about twelve hours and the train nearly twice that. Considering its distance from other major North American cities, it’s impressive how lesbian and gay activists in Halifax were able to actively participate in (and, in some cases, lead) national and international political actions. I describe the GAE’s outsized role in the 1970s liberation politics in more detail later in this section because, like all the political formations I articulate, claiming space where gays and lesbians could dance together is what made subsequent political actions possible.

In January 1976, the GAE opened the doors to 1588 Barrington Street in Halifax’s downtown core for their first dance. The building and the dance floor inside were referred to as “The Turret” because of the building’s prominent spire. The first dance was hugely successful, both in raising funds for the GAE and in providing a space in which lesbian and gay people in Halifax could come together across forms of difference that previously kept the city’s queer scene separate.Footnote ¹⁵ This dance served as the impetus for a significant political shift in Halifax, enabling a pluralistic notion of queerness that binds collective bliss with political action. This is not to suggest the forms of difference that previously kept these queer communities apart disappeared or became insignificant; on the contrary, The Turret became a space for difference to manifest and to challenge simplistic homogeneous notions of queerness. While Metcalfe tells me that the space was physically comfortable – “open, generous” – and served multiple purposes, he also makes clear that this was, at its core, a “contested space” that saw tense debates over its use, appearance, and purpose. Contrasting desires were most apparent in arguments over a mural painted by Rand Gaynor in the late 1970s and, years later, over the question of allowing men to dance shirtless, both of which were considered by some lesbians as evidence of sexism and misogyny within the organization. These examples of internal contestation are not signs of a failed political collective; they are precisely what makes the collective political.

Metcalfe tells me that “we all just felt ‘wow’! It really worked,” as lesbians and gay men convened together on a dance floor framed by an association with gay and lesbian liberation. In the stories that Metcalfe and other GAE activists shared with me, it was apparent to attendees that The Turret was organized and managed by a lesbian and gay liberation collective, as the space was filled with political posters, banners, and murals. It was also clear because of how the dances were coordinated: members of the GAE worked the door, welcomed guests, directed them up the stairs to the dance floor and, before The Turret had adequate refrigeration, they would take turns climbing to the roof to get beer that was being chilled in the snow. The do-it-yourself atmosphere signaled to attendees that this venue was different from for-profit venues in the city: this was a space created by and for members of the lesbian and gay communities in Halifax. As many of the people I spoke with made clear, this made for a welcoming, warm, and accessible space – attendees knew they would be surrounded by other gay and lesbian people and that their own queerness would not be a liability or make them a target for harassment or surveillance as it might elsewhere.

The Turret accommodated a large dance floor and the building’s spire provided space for a DJ booth (and a large collection of records) without separating the DJ from the dance floor. Shepherd, a regular DJ at The Turret in the late 1970s and early 1980s, explained to me that his philosophy was “P.A.R.T.Y! I would throw on a song and jump on the dance floor with everybody. Then rush back to the booth and do it again.”Footnote ¹⁶ Within a few years of opening The Turret, Metcalfe (Reference Metcalfe2014, pp. 29–30) writes, the GAE was “running a licensed lesbian and gay social venue … open [six] nights a week” that made the GAE “one of the wealthiest lesbian and gay organisations on the continent” (italics added for emphasis) with gross revenues averaging a staggering “$300,000 to $600,000 annually.” Archival records show that funds from dances enabled GAE members to connect with the broader liberation movement by travelling to other North American cities for conferences and events. The success of The Turret also meant that there were multiple secure employment opportunities for lesbians and gays in Halifax, fifteen years prior to the amendment of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act that would include protection against employment discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In interviews, members of the GAE explained that the financial success of The Turret was hugely important for the group and its members. However, they all suggested that it was secondary to the dances’ primary function: allowing participants to feel a sense of belonging and collective agency in the city – many for the first time. As GAE members explain all these years later, there is something unique about the way collective dance can make participants feel connected to others and part of something larger than themselves.

3.2 Sounds of Collectivity

While digging through the GAE’s archival materials, I came across an undated, handwritten list of music that includes thirty-four songs from 1976, 1977, and a few from early 1978 (see Figure 5).Footnote ¹⁷ While the songs on this list vary in terms of genre (and modes of structure, tempo, rhythm, instrumentation, and vocal performance), the majority are bound together by the way they tap into the collectivizing sonics of dance music of the mid 1970s and the forms of collective intensity that the temporal arrangement of sounds encourage on the dance floor.

Figure 5

Handwritten list of music found in GAE’s archival materials related to The Turret.

Image appears courtesy of Robin Metcalfe.

The sonic collectivity associated with disco music is audible in Rose Royce’s 1976 song “Car Wash” – a song that appeared on the handwritten music request list and one that Shepherd remembers spinning often during GAE dances. In this song, we can hear disco music’s collective ethos. For one thing, the sound of “Car Wash” is made possible by the collective labor of a large ensemble: electric guitar, bass guitar, drums, keyboards, congas or bongos, and several string instruments. Throughout the song, frequent and multiple handclaps and other forms of bodily percussion alongside a multiplicity of voices provide sonic support to the lead singer and emphasize the song’s collectivity. These sonic signifiers do not just represent a music-making ensemble but also invite listeners and dancers into the musical collective. Participants on the dance floor do not need sheet music or rehearsals to sing and clap along; disco’s participatory ethos are immediately recognizable, accessible, and inviting in this song.

“Car Wash” is also a good example of how disco music often subordinates the forward musical motion that is conventionally signaled through melody and pitch, while prioritizing groove and rhythm: while the song is complex and intricate in terms of rhythm, instrumentation, and repetition, chord changes that suggest forward motion are few and far between. By remaining on one chord for an extended amount of time, the musicians call attention to the musical present and, alongside them, listeners are invited to bask in the moment. This is not to suggest that melody, harmony, and pitch do not play integral roles in disco and subsequent dance music, just that dancers tend to be more attuned to other musical elements.

Another aspect of “Car Wash” that is particularly striking in its collectivizing effects is the way that the tempo fluctuates. At certain moments, the song speeds up and suggests a sense of immediacy and urgency, drawing listeners’ attention to the present. When heard on a dance floor, this shift in tempo alters dancers’ individual and collective sense of temporality. “Car Wash” is a particularly informative representation of the disco genre because the layering of rich instrumentation and the gradual building of musical tempo are maneuvers that disco DJs exhibit over a larger set of many songs to build collective intensity on the dance floor. Here, we experience these genre ideals in the space of one song. Breaks, crescendos, accelerandos, ritardandos – all of these playful shifts in musical conventions “encouraged crowds to express a form of liberationist energy as well as explore new forms of bodily movement, expression, sexuality, and desire” (Lawrence, Reference Lawrence, Pitrolo and Zubak2022, pp. 308–309).

Tapping into the potential signaled by nonnormative aesthetic experience has long been a hallmark of lesbian and gay and, subsequently, queer politics. As many of the members of the GAE that I spoke with for this Element maintained, an aesthetic experience can, and regularly does, alter oneself and one’s relationships. In the fall of 1976, for example, Shepherd organized a group to confront “fag bashers” throughout the city. A “number of us,” he recalls, “had just gotten fed up with the whole gay bashing scene in the city … We put the word out that anybody who was willing and able to stand up and have a fight … let’s get to it” (qtd. in Rose, Reference Rose2019, p. 67). Shepherd, here, is a leader in the movement in part because of his skill as a DJ and his ability to create a sense of community and agency through musical sound. And his leadership role in the space of music participation translated into his leadership role in the community outside of The Turret. In other words, there is a thread of affective responses here that started on the dance floor: as a DJ, Shepherd made people feel good, feel their bodies, feel safe, and feel a sense of community and agency—and these ways of feeling carried over, beyond the dance floor.

In large and small cities in North America throughout the 1970s, dance enabled these visions of collective liberation. As Celeste Fraser Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz (Reference Delgado and Muñoz1997, pp. 9–10) argue, by binding people in “rhythmic affinity … dance incite[s] rebellions of everynight life.” One particular example from New York City demonstrates how collective dance experiences can directly foment rebellion and political action: a particularly effective “zap” – a loud and disruptive political action – by the city’s GAA in October 1971 harnessed dance floor collectivity and bliss for direct political activism.

3.3 Zapping New York

In his memoir, Arnie Kantrowitz (Reference Kantrowitz1977, p. 168) recounts multiple debates over the role of dances within the work of the GAA and the liberation movement more broadly. He writes that the GAA’s aptly named “Pleasure Committee” steadfastly believed that “we could liberate our own heads and our sense of community at these dances, but the political people, believing we were diluting our purposes, accused the pleasure people of trying to ‘dance their way to liberation.’” The factions – and the animosity that grew between them – “threatened to tear the fledgling organization apart.” Fortunately, a specific night on the dance floor showed that collective social dance and direct political action are not antithetical; indeed, Kantrowitz (Reference Kantrowitz1977, p. 201) argues, GAA activists who were critical of dance quickly learned that they “could turn a dance into a new adventure and accomplish their civic mission with the same stroke.”

Early on the morning of Sunday, October 3, 1971, the GAA’s Firehouse on Wooster Street was packed with attendees of a regular Saturday night dance. A brief writeup in an October 1971 issue of Gay Activist notes that the dance was very well attended, and dancers were “in unusually high spirits” (Katz et al., Reference Katz, Connor, Rubin, Apple, Maiscott and Russo1971, p. 1). Buoyed by the collective intensity on the dance floor, a member of the GAA’s Political Action Committee seized the DJ’s microphone to tell the crowd about a problem facing New York City’s gay and lesbian community: City Councilor Saul Sharison.

Sharison, the chairperson of the General Welfare Committee of the New York City Council, refused the GAA’s frequent requests over the previous nine months to hold a hearing on a measure that would outlaw discrimination against gay people in both employment and housing. As luck would have it, the crowd of dancers was told, Sharison lived in a luxury condo a short walk from the GAA’s Firehouse. At 2:30 a.m., after hours of dancing together, “hundreds of homosexuals left the Firehouse for [Sharison’s] door-manned apartment building” and “woke the entire neighborhood with our anger” (Kantrowitz, Reference Kantrowitz1977, p. 201–2). Sharison hadn’t convened a meeting of the General Welfare Committee for over a year, but within weeks of the GAA’s zap “the first public hearings on civil rights for homosexuals in New York City were under way” (Kantrowitz, Reference Kantrowitz1977, p. 202). According to GAA member Marc Rubin (Reference Rubin1999, n.p.), “no one who took part in that zap was left unchanged.” This includes Sharison, whose neighbors organized to “have him evicted as an undesirable tenant” (Echols, Reference Echols2010, p. 51).

I do not mean to suggest that the political force of dance floor sociality is only legitimate when it results in direct political actions like the GAE’s gay community protection patrol in Halifax or the GAA’s angry late-night march in New York City. These are exemplary moments in which collective dance directly leads to political actions that, in turn, directly lead to significant changes in local laws and the lived experiences of lesbian and gay individuals in the cities. Indeed, each serves as an extension of the community and agency already cultivated on the dance floor. As Ramón Rivera-Servera (Reference Rivera-Servera, Hames-Garcia and Martinez2011, p. 259) writes, “my experience in the club not only allows me to feel desire, love, and community, but gives me the confidence and the knowledge to step proudly into other, more dangerous venues and seek, even demand, similar experiences from the world outside it.” With respect to the aforementioned GAA members who were critical of the Pleasure Committee’s commitment to collective dance, history has shown time and time again that we can indeed dance our way to liberation.

4.1 Contesting Community

The dance floor not only served as a site where lesbian and gay liberationists carved out space for difference in the broader heterosexual world, but also where they worked through internal political desires. A site of affiliation, contestation, and imagination, the dance floor was vital to the development of lesbian and gay liberation organizing in the 1970s and 1980s. I have shown that dance floor participation could produce, articulate, and represent how people understood themselves as gendered and sexual beings in the lesbian and gay liberation movement, but it also served as a site where participants could wrestle with notions of community and what lesbian and gay liberation could mean as a collective project.

In these histories, we can see the collective negotiation of community and political goals most clearly in relation to gender and race. This is not to say that up to this point, collective queer dance has been exclusively white and male. It never was, and it never could be. The dance floor was a productive site of liberation politics in the 1970s and 1980s precisely because it was a site where male supremacy and white supremacy could be challenged alongside heteronormativity. This challenge was inevitable because intersecting systems of oppression attempted to constrain the bodies, minds, and dreams of lesbian and gay individuals, and when one was scrutinized, others naturally followed.

The GLF’s previously mentioned women’s dance in New York City was brought to fruition, in part, because of luck and timing. As an organization committed to ending hierarchies and creating a truly collective process, the GLF pulled a name from a hat in January 1970 to choose their chair for the month. Jay’s name was selected. In Tales of the Lavender Menace, Jay (Reference Jay1999, p. 126) writes that a women’s dance was at the top of her list of priorities: “I hoped that by becoming the chair of the GLF, I could shape the dialogue so that there would be … a women’s dance. Many of the men resisted the idea of a separate event … They might have seen it as the first sign of our independence—a step that would inevitably lead to our forming an autonomous group.” Indeed, many published memoirs that chronicle participation in the early years of the GLF reference male members’ trepidation around the idea of a women-only dance. In The Gay Militants, for example, Teal (Reference Teal1971, p. 58) quotes Ellen Bedoz, who explained that “many men voiced strong objections” to the idea of a women’s dance, worried that “the organization was splitting and … that women would usurp GLF’s allotted time at Alternate University for themselves without regard to men’s needs.”

Ultimately, the dance on April 3, 1970, was a resounding success – save for the violent thugs who appeared as volunteers were wrapping up. Bedoz (qtd. in Teal, Reference Teal1971, p. 58) recalls that “what actually did happen was that not only did women continue to relate to GLF with a heightened sense of consciousness, but many new women were introduced to GLF through the dances.” Jay (Reference Jay1999, p. 131) writes, “We started to have women’s dances on a regular basis. Each dance drew more women.” She quotes an anonymous writer published in Rat – a radical underground newspaper started in New York City in 1968 and reimagined as a women’s liberation publication in 1970 – who argues that “Dancing with women is something else … It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life … I am learning to love women, and the dance was a first step” (p. 129). As these women indicate, dance shaped the way they understood their lives and their place within the lesbian and gay liberation movement.

However, within the lesbian and gay liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s, lesbian dancers and DJs had complicated terrain to navigate as even the most ostensibly radical social movements of the era replicated discriminatory logics. Many male activists in the gay liberation movement were uninterested in challenging the patriarchal norms that served them, in the same way that many women’s liberation activists were unconcerned with the homophobic norms that they often replicated and benefitted from. In this context, lesbians and lesbian–feminists faced pressure from feminist separatists to not work with any men – even the super gay ones – as they simultaneously faced pressure from gay male liberationists to temper their critiques of patriarchy and male power. Lesbians and lesbian–feminists used music and dance to intervene in these broader political tensions and, in the process, shaped multiple movements of the era.

In her article “Dykes, Dancing, and Politics,” Joyce Rock (Reference Rock1976, p. 17) critiques Toronto’s lesbian liberation scene. As someone who arrived in Toronto only eight months before publishing the article, Rock reflects on how Toronto’s lesbian culture compares to those in Montréal and New York City – two cities that had flourishing social scenes for lesbians in the 1970s. While lesbian–feminists may appear and convene for political actions in Toronto (including fundraising or benefit events), Rock is struck by how infrequently lesbians get together to “play” – to enjoy those experiences of simply being together as lesbians.

Rock (Reference Rock1976, p. 17) argues that “Forms of congregation—‘playing,’ if you will—are essential to the health of collectivity. They are also the fastest, most economical means by which you can gauge the community within which you find yourself.” She contends that forms of play are particularly important for diverse political collectives because they provide contexts “where I may rub elbows with those whose energies and priorities are not identical to mine.” As the title of Rock’s article suggests, she believes that dancing is a particularly productive form of “play” for lesbian–feminists – a way in which women who love women can develop a more capacious understanding of community and possibilities for their lives. Ultimately, Rock (Reference Rock1976, p. 17) asks: “can those who don’t play together politique together?”

Allen (Reference Allen2009, pp. 319–20) makes clear that this mixture of play and/as politics has long been a reality for those individuals who fall under the label of Black and queer: “From our positions—perched at the bar, twirling on the dance floor, shamelessly flirting, testing our sexual power—we easily found our way to parades and protests and letter writing and workshops and interventions and civil disobedience and consciousness-raising.” Allen (Reference Allen2009, p. 320) argues that “for queers of colour,” participating in play and politics “is not an either / or proposition, but a both / and.” “Both / and” is a particularly compelling way of reframing the politics vs. pleasure binary that haunts lesbian and gay liberation histories. Critiques from Black lesbians and gays and from lesbian–feminists show that politics and pleasure can’t be separated.

Dance floors were sites where Black dancers intervened in broader lesbian and gay political organizing. Indeed, as Allen (Reference Allen2009, p. 315) argues, dance spaces are primary sites where Black queer people imagine and build collectivity and better futures: “The club is the central institution of Black queer communion. Here we assert bodies, putatively dangerously riddled with disease and threat of violence, not only as instruments of pleasure but also as conduits to profound joy, and perhaps spiritual bliss and transcendent connection. Interstices or conduits that connect, perhaps to utopias.” Here, Allen (Reference Allen2009, pp. 316–17) continues, “is a ground for, if not instantly coherent ‘community,’ certainly congregation, which suggests ‘free your ass and your mind will follow’” – a space “in which there is the felt experience of common union, and a nurturing of individual projects and common experience.”

I’ve previously made clear the indebtedness of lesbian and gay liberation dance histories – even those remembered as white – to African and Black musical ideals and genealogies. Indeed, the music called “disco” that was pushed by record labels across North America in the mid to late 1970s were “being recorded to accomplish what DJs in gay black clubs had done earlier” (Thomas, Reference Thomas1989, p. 29). Even when disco went mainstream at infamous clubs like Studio 54, Black dancers and DJs – and those who consciously followed their lead – built networks and sites where they could hold onto the promises of dance music that many considered paramount: bodily pleasure, heterogeneous collectivity, and complex musical rhythms that transport participants to a different psychological state. New York’s Paradise Garage, a parking-garage-turned-dance club at 84 King Street that I discuss in greater detail in the next section, is one such venue that held on to the democratic and collective possibilities of dance. According to Michael Paoletta (Reference Paoletta2000, p. 54), “the Garage placed the spotlight firmly where it belonged: on the entire dance floor experience … unlike the trendier uptown clubs, the downtown Garage didn’t discriminate based on skin color, sexuality, or sexual preference.” Part of what made Paradise Garage such a transformative experience for attendees, according to Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé (Reference Cruz-Malavé2007, p. 81), is that – unlike many gay discos that “by 1981 had become increasingly racially and culturally homogeneous and middle-class” – the Garage was “racially and culturally mixed.” On Saturday nights, heterogeneous queer collectives convened on the dance floor and enacted a better world. Importantly, sexual pleasure was fundamental to musical experience at Paradise Garage: Village Voice columnist Michael Musto tells Cathy Che (Reference Che2001, p. 56) that “Paradise Garage’s DJ Larry Levin would send the crowd into orgasms on the dance floor. People literally got off dancing, which was an ecstatic experience there in and of itself.”

Throughout the 1970s, collective lesbian and gay social dance allowed participants to experience a sense of open and unbound possibility that illuminated the limitations of the present. This hopeful sense of collective potential became increasingly difficult (and important) to hold on to in the following decade. The 1980s saw a variety of challenges that would fundamentally shape the lives of lesbian and gay politics and dance floor collectives. The authors of No Turning Back: Lesbian and Gay Liberation for the ‘80s (Goodman, Reference Goodman, Lakey, Lashof and Thorne1983, p. 1) open their book by writing that “[w]e are facing a time of turbulence and difficulty. A well-organized move from the right is seeking to erase the civil rights gains of the past decade.” It’s going to be a difficult few years, the authors suggest. From our current vantage point, we know that what was to come was worse than anyone could have possibly imagined.

4.2 Dark Days Ahead

Neoliberal ideologies solidified in the early 1980s with market-oriented policies of deregulation, privatization, and austerity and curtailed the burgeoning social movements of the 1970s. Women’s liberation, gay liberation, Black feminist organizing, Black power politics, labor activism, and anti-imperialist movements promised new beginnings and alternative visions of the future. However, right-wing political gains systematically dismantled the revolutionary momentum that once seemed capable of changing the world – rending the 1980s a “denouement” of social change (Duggan, Reference Duggan2003, p. ix) and a time of “revolutionary disappointment” (Allen, Reference Allen2021, p. 120).

The logics and systems of neoliberalism led to rapid gentrification in urban spaces around North America in the 1980s, around the same time the AIDS epidemic began. Gentrification had a profound effect on more than just the physical spaces of urban centers like New York City: gentrification is also a process that works on the mind – the imagination – and the spirit of a space and those living there, most notably through the elimination of difference (Schulman, Reference Schulman2012). Neoliberalism, gentrification, and the AIDS crisis combined to destroy spaces where lesbians and gay men could find collective bodily pleasure and provided conservative cultural critics fodder to close spaces that enabled gay sexual experiences in New York City (Delany, Reference Delany1999). During the AIDS crisis, such spaces were prime targets of urban cleanup campaigns across North America.

Following the first decades of the AIDS crisis, the LGBTQ2+ community engaged in a process of collective forgetting – what Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (2011, p. 9) call “unremembering” and “temporal isolation” – in an effort to distance the community from a generation stigmatized as sexually promiscuous, excessive, and licentious and pursue mainstream or homonormative belonging and acceptance. Narratives of normativity and respectability in the present and past, Roderick A. Ferguson (qtd. in Dinshaw et. al., Reference Dinshaw, Edelman, Ferguson, Freccero, Freeman, Halberstam, Jagose, Nealon and Hoang2007, p. 193) reminds us, are often thinly veiled “attempts to close off prior critical and sexual universes” and limit what seems possible in the present. They are also detrimental to our ability to imagine alternative possibilities for the future.

The AIDS epidemic attacked many of the sexual possibilities that are fundamental to lesbian and gay culture; Douglas Crimp (Reference Crimp2004, p. 140) famously argues that “alongside the dismal toll of death, what many of us have lost is a culture of sexual possibility: back rooms, tea rooms, bookstores, movie houses, and baths; the trucks, the pier, the ramble, the dunes.” Years earlier, in a June 1983 article in the New York Native, Denneny (Reference Denneny2023, pp. 137–38) captured what was on the line for lesbian and gay liberation in early years of the AIDS epidemic:

Gay community, in Denneny’s thinking, is built on physical contact, intimate connection, and sexual possibility. But in the 1980s, spaces that facilitated such experiences faced attacks on multiple fronts: neoliberal ideals and economic policies meant that previously affordable spaces became increasingly inaccessible and eroded the ability for activists, artists, and dreamers to spend time building political movements and alternatives instead of being productive under capitalism. At the same time, the AIDS epidemic (and the refusal of people in power to do anything about it) decimated lesbian and gay communities through illness, death and – for the lucky ones – exhaustion.

The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s radically reshaped lesbian and gay collectives in North America. Activism in this era brought lesbians and gay men together in ways that were both personally and politically transformative (see, for example, Cvetkovich, Reference Cvetkovich2003; Faderman, Reference Faderman1991; and Sullivan, Reference Sullivan2022). The 1980s afforded new possibilities for queer Black communities. Contrary to Lisa Duggan’s (Reference Duggan2003) argument that the 1980s was largely a “denoument” of social change, Allen (Reference Allen2021, p. 8) argues that the 1980s was the decade when “[f]olks first began to dance, fuck, organize, and make art under the banner of ‘Black gay’” – an identity and ideal that emerged “directly out of the political, artistic, and activist work of radical Black lesbians of the 1970s.” Dance spaces were fundamental to the decade’s broader shifts, serving as sites where individuals could contribute to broader social political projects and transformations and intervene in a world ravaged by AIDS.

5.1 Dance and Despair

The title of an article by Lawrence K. Altman that appeared in the New York Times on July 3, 1981, declared, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” A month prior, the US government’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described five “young men, all active homosexuals,” who exhibited a confusing mix of multiple infections. When these reports were published in the summer of 1981, the bizarre condition being described did not yet have a name. Over the next twelve months, it would be named a “gay plague,” Gay Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), and Acquired Community Immune Deficiency Syndrome (ACIDS) by medical professionals, politicians, and activists. Randy Shilts (Reference Shilts1987) contends that individuals associated with specific lesbian and gay communities in New York and Toronto colloquially referred to the virus as “Saint’s Disease” in reference to the popular gay nightclub in New York City where many of the fit young men on the dance floor were falling ill. Eventually, in the summer of 1982, a new name for the virus was proposed at a medical conference in Washington: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

In 1982, little was known about the causes, effects, and proliferation of the virus. Lesbian and gay individuals – and people who loved them – searched for information that could help them make sense of the illness and find methods of protection. Much of the information that circulated in the early to mid 1980s was conjectural. According to Bill Lewis (Reference Lewis1982, p. 38), a Toronto-based scientist and contributor to The Body Politic, “everything gay men did that straight men didn’t was dragged forth as a possible cause. Abundant sex, poppers, fisting, drugs, ingestion of too much sperm, staying up too late—all have been put forward as an explanation.” Tim McCaskell (Reference McCaskell2016, p. 171) writes that “although those with connections to New York, like [Michael] Lynch and [Bill] Lewis, seemed more preoccupied, the general message in Toronto was that this was just more anti-gay hysteria. There was still only one known case of [Kaposi’s sarcoma] in Canada, and U.S. politics seemed more threatening than a gay-targeted epidemic.”

AIDS-influenced homophobia was compounded by profound economic inequality in the 1980s and many politicians and ostensible medical experts were quick to blame gay men’s sexual culture for the development and rapid spread of AIDS. Cindy Patton (Reference Patton1985, p. 69) notes that right-wing politicians regularly argued that “any money spent on AIDS [prevention] was too much, that AIDS was an elective disease created by homosexuals who might just as well die off.” Throughout the early 1980s, it became painfully clear that the communities most directly affected by the disease couldn’t turn to governmental entities to save them – they would need to save themselves. Many took up the mantle: activists became amateur primary care specialists, ad-hoc care collectives, and health researchers chasing new theories on causes, effects, and potential treatments for the disease. Exhausted, grief-stricken, and up against a seemingly insurmountable challenge, these activists faced a “deafening silence” (Gould Reference Gould2009, p. 11) that marked the first years of the AIDS crisis. Maria Murphy (Reference Murphy2018, p. 38) argues that this silence was, at times, “punctuated by laughter.” When the illness was raised in White House press briefings between 1982 and 1985, she explains, Deputy White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes laughed off the reporters’ concerns and regularly teased them for showing interest in a disease that seemed to directly target gay men. During these years, when the White House responded to questions about the AIDS crisis with laughter, there were thousands AIDS-related deaths in the United States accordingly to the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

Dancing in the early years of the AIDS epidemic was complicated. For some people, returning to dance floors where they had previously found joy with friends and lovers who had died was somber and unappealing. As Echols (Reference Echols2010, pp. 151–52) writes, “when AIDS began decimating communities of men who had danced together and loved together, sometimes for more than a decade, it was horrifying and terrifying. As the casualties mounted, the loss and grief were almost too much to bear.” Toronto-based organizer Chris Lea told me something similar, remembering that “people were just dying so quickly and nobody really felt like dancing.”Footnote ¹⁹

Throughout the 1980s, the numbers of dancers on many established lesbian and gay dance floors in urban spaces dwindled significantly. There are multiple reasons for this decline, all of them having to do with AIDS: many people died from the disease and many others were exhausted from caregiving responsibilities and from burying their friends and lovers. Ed Jackson, a founder of the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT) explains that “AIDS had ravaged the community—especially the gay male community that filled the dance floors. People were tired.” Additionally, he notes, the majority of activist energies and fundraising attention went toward AIDS causes throughout the 1980s: “We focused on AIDS and other organizations got left behind; they had a lot of trouble competing because AIDS was so overwhelming.”Footnote ²⁰ For volunteer-run organizations, AIDS meant that volunteer numbers plummeted.

For many queer individuals in the 1980s, AIDS was overwhelming on a broad social level – an apocalyptic and existential threat to the idea of gay life and gay liberation – but also as an immediate material danger in the everyday. Matthew J. Jones (Reference Jones2017, p. 188) argues that “an HIV/AIDS diagnosis brought with it new temporal flows” for sick individuals and those who loved them. Even for long-term survivors, he writes, “sick days, doctor’s visits, hospitalization, unemployment, funerals, sick friends, time spent haggling with insurance companies and hospitals, and participation in clinical trials or activism wrenched the gears of daily life.” The temporal structure of everyday life was transformed by AIDS, even for those who did not personally contract the disease, because its effects were so pervasive and required profound forms of collective care.

Jones’s description of the “new temporal flows” brought on by the AIDS epidemic points toward the political function of dance floor experience in the 1980s. While many people stopped dancing, lesbian and gay dance parties continued and, for many participants who remained on dance floors, served to disrupt the flow of life structured by AIDS. A break in these temporal currents didn’t mean escaping from the social reality bounded by AIDS, but for many it offered a way to return to their body, to be among others whose lives were also framed by the disease, and to perceive the continued strength of the communities of which they were a part. As I have argued previously, music’s temporal nature makes it a particularly effective method for intervening in and reconstructing experiences of time. Garcia-Mispireta (Reference Garcia-Mispireta2023, p. 13) argues that music’s capacity to “play with expectation, anticipation, and synchronicity” is what makes collective musical experiences so promising: “since music unfolds in time … it seems especially well suited to convey the expectant qualities [Ernst] Bloch associates with hope and utopia.”

Indeed, many gay and lesbian people held on tightly to the dance floor as a site where they could feel bliss and pleasure even from within the brutal reality of the AIDS epidemic. For Alan Miller, “dances offered some relief” from the brutality of the everyday. He explained to me that “everything else was just falling apart around us” and dances offered a moment of collective joy that was hard to find elsewhere. Miller’s partner Gram Campbell died on January 17, 1990; they had been together for almost nine years and although “Gram didn’t always feel like dancing,” they would often go out, find a secluded corner of the venue, and dance the night away together. Miller remembers going dancing in the years after Gram died, to force himself to get out of the house and spend time with friends, but also to remember the times he and Gram danced together. “These dances kept me going,” he explains.Footnote ²¹

5.2 Kinship and Care

Describing the feelings of bliss and belonging on the dance floor, Allen (Reference Allen2009, p. 316–18) writes:

For some people, collective dance was also a method through which they could work through difficult feelings, be it rage at governmental bodies or the circumstances of the world more broadly. David Roman (Reference Roman, Hames-Garcia and Martinez2011, p. 305) writes that dancing during the height of the AIDS epidemic “connected me with a history of queer resilience, a kind of reenergizing necessary to get through the week. But mainly … dance was a way to express my anger and feelings of despair brought on by the relentless death toll I was witnessing.” In a historical moment brimming with AIDS-related panic, stigma, and homophobia, many gay men felt compelled to hide their queerness in their everyday lives. As Lawrence (Reference Lawrence2016, p. 436) argues, dance venues that “celebrated gay identity as something positive, even during negative times” served as a lifeline for many people.

For many people, the effect of feeling good on the dance floor sustained them long after they left the venue. Brent Nicholson Earle, whose activism brought attention to the plight of living with AIDS and the need for education and prevention efforts, suggests that his experiences on gay dance floors were foundational to his activism: “[b]eing at the Saint,” he explains to Lawrence (Reference Lawrence2016, p. 437), “being part of a tribe, being part of this glorious community, went hand-in-hand with my becoming an AIDS activist … I would never have dreamt I could become a hero if I hadn’t had that image of transcendent glory, that iconized version of myself, bestowed to me under the dome of the Saint.” For many dancers, experiences of bliss and communitas on the dance floor readied them for battle elsewhere.

Like bathhouses and bars, dance venues served as sites where individuals could access rapidly changing information about the disease. Promotion in mainstream publications or in public spaces such as on billboards or public transit was prohibitively expensive for most community organizations. Accordingly, these groups had to find inventive ways to reach their intended audiences and disseminate important information. In the early years of AIDS, dances had additional functions in the lesbian and gay liberation movement: they simultaneously raised funds to support the work of AIDS organizations while convening the population with whom these groups needed to communicate.

The Gay Community Dance Committee (GCDC), a Toronto-based community coalition, was formed in 1981 with a simple aim: to encourage collaborations among independent gay and lesbian organizations in Toronto and surrounding areas to host dances that would be larger than what any individual organization could hold on their own. Participating groups would sell tickets, provide volunteer labor for necessary duties at each dance, and split the profits. A core management group would take care of all other preparations and arrangements. Lesbian and gay community groups signed on in droves.Footnote ²² Funds raised at dances were distributed among participating groups based on two factors: ticket sales and volunteer hours provided. During the 1980s, the GCDC’s dance floor was a primary source of funding for lesbian and gay liberation in Toronto. A conservative estimate of the funds raised by the GCDC over their nearly twelve-year-long tenure is just over $250,000. But like all the examples I articulate in this Element, the impact of these dances is much broader and more important than their financial successes. What makes these historical dance floors remarkable is the way that they provoke a sense of communal care and kinship that transforms participants and reanimates the world in which they live.

GCDC organizer Rob Stout remembers AIDS organizations distributing pamphlets at dances in the 1980s that included current research on the disease. Many of these pamphlets were designed and produced by the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT), a group formed by lesbian and gay activists in 1983 to provide leadership on the issue of AIDS that became a trusted source of information about AIDS in Toronto and Canada more broadly. This had to do, in part, with the language that they used in their educational material – precise and straightforward sexual language that Toronto Public Health often shied away from. It also had to do with the fact that members of ACT were situated in the communities that they wanted to serve. Many of the founding members of ACT were involved in the GCDC since its beginning. These were not public health officials at a remove from the community – these were fellow activists, fellow dancers.

Jackson recalls the difficulty of getting current and reliable information on the virus to community members, noting that “we always used bars and baths as major outlets to reach people—we saw queer social events as major sites of information dissemination.” The materials distributed at GCDC dances and other social venues around the city outlined services for people living with the virus, information for caregivers, and more. Jackson explains that materials distributed to dance attendees would explain safer sex practices and, in later years, would make important “distinctions between anal and oral sex based on the science … as opposed to saying that all sex was equally risky.” Pamphlets would also promote condom use and provide up-to-date information on testing.Footnote ²³

That GCDC dances attracted attendees from surrounding regions was also an important factor in disseminating information about participating groups, community priorities, and AIDS. For some gays and lesbians, GCDC dances were their only interactions with a broader community that included networks of activists and health service organizations. The educational aspect of these dances is significant: individuals would convene on the dance floor and feel a sense of collective belonging. When they left the dance floor, the effects of these experiences travelled with them to different regions. Disseminating educational materials at GCDC dances was a way to spread this information to individuals from multiple geographic and social communities.

While ACT was widely perceived as producing important and potentially life-saving educational materials, Jackson notes that accessing stable government funding was difficult. As a result, he explains, “fundraising was always a major problem.” At GCDC dances, where profits were distributed among participating groups based on ticket sales and the volunteer labor hours they provided, the AIDS crisis encouraged more fluid ways of understanding associations and allegiances. Ron Merko remembers that People With AIDS (PWA) organizations in Toronto had trouble building a volunteer base to work the dances and, as a result, many people who joined the GCDC through different community organizations would often shift their organizational affiliations to donate their volunteer credits to PWA groups (see Figure 8). Volunteers with Lesbian and Gay Youth Toronto, a participating group with a large volunteer base, frequently donated their credits to PWA organizations in the mid and late 1980s, demonstrating the possibility of affiliative political coalition across difference.Footnote ²⁴

Figure 8

Dancers at a GCDC event in the late 1980s.

Photograph by Philip Share.

The way GCDC members shifted affiliations to support pressing political and social issues of the moment exhibits a type of collective politics and community caregiving that took place during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. So too does this type of community support mimic the embodied experiences that make dance floors so generative for collective formation and belonging: fleeting moments of embodied connection enable new ways of understanding one’s relations, and these experiences of togetherness contain structures of feeling that outlast the moment of connection. The AIDS epidemic intensified awareness of the ephemeral nature of connection and feelings of belonging. According to Patton (Reference Patton1985, p. 16), the persistent threat of AIDS meant building a “community with people who could be dead in two months.” Jack Halberstam (Reference Halberstam2005, p. 2) argues that queer time “emerges most spectacularly” during the AIDS epidemic, as the “constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment and … squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand.”

Allen (Reference Allen2009, p. 317) argues that the dance floor is a space “in which there is the felt experience of a common union, and a nurturing of individual projects and common experience.” This doesn’t mean that differences of identity and desire between dancers are erased, but that shared experiences of music, rhythm, and movement ascend and take precedence. When situated as a temporary collective made through musical sound and bodily orientation to that sound, dancers can more readily recognize shared priorities and the ways that the shared desires of the dance floor community diverge from dominant logics and ideologies. In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, Munuera (Reference Munuera2020, pp. 137–38) argues, dancers shared “an understanding of their relationship with HIV and AIDS different from one embraced by medical authorities, media, and government officials,” and a kinship “across class and race differences with intersecting concerns: what it meant to live with HIV and AIDS.” Alternative ways of understanding ourselves and others surface and take shape on the dance floor. At a time of profound threats to queer ways of life, such alternatives – and their value – become easier to perceive and more compelling.

Dance floor kinship offers an opportunity to reorient ourselves to different pasts, presents, and futures. An orientation toward queer pasts and their potential is perhaps more important now than ever before. In his collection of poetry These Waves of Dying Friends: Poems, Michael Lynch (Reference Lynch1989, p. 6) writes of “the telling mark” of great DJs who can create seamless, seemingly everlasting mixes of music that “don’t conclude but do go round again / one more time.” For Lynch, a Toronto-based academic and activist, this everlasting presentness grants him access to dance floor temporality that gives him the sense “of nothing ended, nothing altered, nothing new / in the only life I count as true: the dancefloor.” “Last night,” he continues (1989, p. 6), “I danced as we did two years ago / Alive with life, with Larry, Vito / Ray and a dozen unnamed others / the virus thinks it has taken from the floor.” Those who died from AIDS, Lynch’s poem suggests, remain part of the everlasting dancing collective because stepping onto the dance floor is akin to stepping into a broader, imagined collective in an alternate space and time.