You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)

This Pride Month, let me take you back to the Castro, 1978, during the peak of the Disco Era. The great Harvey Milk (screw you, Hegseth) is San Francisco's mayor until his assassination on November 27th. 

Sylvester

It's midnight in a dark club. With the smell of sweat and poppers in the air, Sylvester, a cross-dressing gay male R&B singer known as the “Queen of Disco,” suddenly appears like an epiphany and belts out, in a piercing falsetto, “You make me feel—mighty real.” Over and over again.

Meanwhile, that same year, I spend a month in Paris, where discotheques originated. Dominique Marchand, the daughter of my host family, tells me of her fervent wish to sneak out to a discotheque on the Champs-Élysées.

Studio 54

But I am threatened by a scene where drugs are prevalent and homosexuals dance with each other. It's raining men, but I don't want to be perceived as one of these men.

At the same time, in New York, Andy, Liza, and Truman go out every night to dance and snort white powder at the summit of nightlife, Studio 54. Like the rest of the curious Midwestern suburbanites, I am desperate to see what transpires beyond the velvet ropes on Manhattan's West 54th Street. Mick Jagger's wife, Bianca, rides in on a white horse.

Decades later, when the enormous space was turned into a Broadway theatre for a hypersexualized production of Cabaret, I finally got to step inside Studio 54. The original gigantic disco ball hung over the audience, an iconic reminder of the space's glory days as a boogie wonderland. It made me think of disco's legacy.

Donna Summer

Disco gave us "Shame" by Evelyn "Champagne" King, Donna Summer hits like “Last Dance” and “Bad Girls,” and the Bee Gees’ “Stayin' Alive” and “Night Fever.” It also provided us, Clevelanders, with an alternative to the classic rock (back then, just "rock") that dominated WMMS at the time.

Conforming to the tastes of my high school peers, I spent most of the late ’70s listening to Neil Young, Todd Rundgren, and Jackson Browne. The music of these earnest, straight, white male rockers couldn’t have been further from disco in all its fabulosity. 

Disco Demolition Night
Chicago, 1978

I occasionally listened to disco tunes, but it was a guilty pleasure that carried risk and a bad reputation. This culminated in July (again, 1978) in Chicago on Disco Demolition Night, marked by both rioting and the catchphrase, “Disco Sucks.”

I see now that anti-disco also meant—at least in part—anti-gay. The New York Times, in reviewing a 2023 documentary about Disco Demolition Night, noted “disco’s role as a flashpoint for issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality that still resonate in the culture wars of today.”

Disco doesn't suck. The genre has been reborn repeatedly, most recently with the emergence of Nu-disco in the 21st century. 

Disco just might, in a malevolent, homophobic world of Trumps and Hegseths, provoke and subvert just as it first did in the ’70s.

I proclaim now, loud and proud, it makes me feel—mighty real.

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Note: This post was in part inspired by this bit by the great Sandra Bernhard. Don't miss her gorgeous cover of "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)." 

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