Even New York gay bathhouses make Lawrence's book. The owner of one remembers that the cops "asked if we would like to buy forty tickets for the Policeman's Ball. It turned out that the tickets cost a hundred dollars, and that there was a Policeman's Ball every week." But he agreed and the raids became token, with the baths notified every time in advance.
Among the names from that era prominent in Love Saves the Day are Village People, The Bee Gees, and Donna Summer (back in the news last week following a court conviction). But Lawrence opts to give most space to the New York DJs and venues of the time, cult leaders such as David Mancuso who opened The Loft in 1970, and is described as a former 1960s mystic who became to many a living god, and in addition just happened to look like Jesus.
There were certainly some sensational incidents. An anti-disco movement got under way at the end of the decade, not unrelated to the disenchantment of the recording companies with 12-inch singles that everyone loved to dance to but few actually went out and bought. An event was stage-managed in 1979 at Chicago's Comisky Park at which 40,000 disco records, donated by baseball fans, were blown up by dynamite between games while the outraged Middle American crowd chanted "Disco sucks!" Lawrence compares it to the Nazis' book burnings.
The sexual implications of the disco years remain their most interesting aspect. Rock-and-roll has been judged an ultra-macho style, with a few token chicks allowed in on the act for appearance's sake. Disco, by contrast, was essentially androgynous, and strongly gay-oriented, despite everything John Trovolta and the movie Saturday Night Fever, made in 1977, could do to modify the image. The extent that rap later re-asserted a masculine ethos, and that techno continued disco's aura of drugged androgyny, are issues that Lawrence examines at the book's close.
There were never many female DJs (the occasional "dyke on the mike" excepted). Mostly the music was for gay men, many of whom seemed to do nothing else than party on a nightly basis.
It would be interesting, in view of Taiwan's current lively night-club world, to know what the scene was like here in the disco era. There's sure to be plenty of material available in Chinese, but it would be good to have it summarized in English, with photos, perhaps for publication in the pages of Taipei Times.
Taiwan in the 1970s was still under the sway of martial law, and things must have been less free-wheeling then they have subsequently, despite occasional glitches, become. Even so, it would be fascinating to know more.
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