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      ‘The War on Disco’ Explores the Racial Backlash Against the Music

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      “The War on Disco,” a new PBS documentary, explores the backlash against the genre and the issues of race, gender and sexuality that informed it.The plan was simple enough: Gather a bunch of disco records, put them in a crate and blow them to smithereens in between games of a doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers at Comiskey Park. What could possibly go wrong?This was the thinking, such as it was, behind Disco Demolition Night, a July 1979 radio promotion that went predictably and horribly awry. The televised spectacle of rioters, mostly young white men, storming the field in Chicago, sent shock waves through the music industry and accelerated the demise of disco as a massive commercial force. But the fiasco didn’t unfold in a vacuum, a fact the new “American Experience” documentary “The War on Disco” makes clearer than a twirling mirror ball.Premiering Monday on PBS, “The War on Disco” traces the rise, commodification, demise and rebirth of a dance music genre that burned hot through the ’70s, and the backlash against a culture that provided a safe and festive place for Black, Latino, gay and feminist expression. Originating in gay dance clubs in the early ’70s and converted into a mainstream sensation largely through the 1977 movie “Saturday Night Fever,” disco engendered simmering resentment from white, blue-collar kids who weren’t cool enough to make it past the rope at Studio 54 and other clubs. The film details disco’s role as a flashpoint for issues of race, class, gender and sexuality that still resonate in the culture wars of today.“Saturday Night Fever” helped turn disco from a club phenomenon into a mainstream sensation.Alamy, via PBS“These liberation movements that started in the ’60s and early ’70s are really gaining momentum in the late ’70s,” Lisa Q. Wolfinger, who produced the film with Rushmore DeNooyer, said in a video call from her home in Maine. “So the backlash against disco feels like a backlash against the gay liberation movement and feminism, because that’s all wrapped up in disco.”When the Gay Activist Alliance began hosting feverish disco dances at an abandoned SoHo firehouse in 1971, routinely packing 1,500 people onto the dance floor, the atmosphere was sweaty and cathartic. As Alice Echols writes in her disco history book “Hot Stuff,” gay bars, most of them run by the mob, traditionally hadn’t allowed dancing of any kind. But change was in the air largely because of the ripple effect of the Stonewall uprising in 1969, when regulars at a Greenwich Village gay bar fought back against the latest in a series of police raids. Soon discos were popping up throughout American cities, drawing throngs of revelers integrated across lines of race, gender and sexual orientation.Some of disco’s hottest artists were Black women, including Gloria Gaynor and Linda Clifford (who is a commentator in the film). Many of the in-demand DJs, including Barry Lederer and Richie Rivera, were gay. In its heyday disco was the ultimate pop melting pot, open to anyone who wanted to move through the night to a pulsating, seemingly endless groove, and a source of liberation.“The club became this source of public intimacy, of sexual freedom, and disco was a genre that was deeply tied to the next set of freedom struggles that were concatenate with civil rights,” said Daphne Brooks, a professor of African American studies at Yale University who is featured in the film, in a video interview. “It was both a sound and a sight that enabled those who were not recognized in the dominant culture to be able to see themselves and to derive pleasure, which is a huge trope in disco.”Studio 54 in 1978, as seen in “The War on Disco.” The club was famous for its glamorous clientele and restrictive door policy.Alamy, via PBSAll subcultures have their tipping points, and disco’s began in earnest in 1977. The year brought “Saturday Night Fever,” the smash hit movie about a blue-collar Brooklynite (a star-making performance from John Travolta) who escapes his rough reality by cutting loose on the dance floor. Inspired by the movie, middle-aged thrill seekers began dressing up in white polyester and hitting the scene. The same year saw the opening of Studio 54 in Manhattan, which became famous for its beautiful-people clientele and forbidding door policy.“There was this image of the crowd outside the door on the news, with people being divided into winners and losers,” said DeNooyer, the “War on Disco” producer. “And the majority were losers because they didn’t get by the rope. It was an image that spoke powerfully, and it certainly encouraged a view of exclusivity.”At least one man had reason to take it all personally. Steve Dahl was a radio personality for Chicago’s WDAI, spinning album rock and speaking to and for the white macho culture synonymous with that music. On Christmas Eve in 1978 Dahl lost his job when the station switched to a disco format, a popular move in those days. He didn’t take the news well. Jumping to WLUP, Dahl launched a “Disco Sucks” campaign and, together with the White Sox promotions director Mike Veeck, spearheaded Disco Demolition Night.Organizers expected around 20,000 fans on July 12, 1979. Instead, they got around 50,000, some of whom sneaked in for free. Admission was 98 cents (WLUP’s frequency was 97.9), leaving attendees plenty of leftover cash for beer. Located in the mostly white, working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, Comiskey Park had a built-in anti-disco clientele.During the first game of the doubleheader, fans threw records, firecrackers and liquor bottles onto the field. By the time the crate of records was blown up, the place was going nuts, with patrons storming the field and rendering it unplayable. The White Sox had to forfeit the second game.The Disco Demolition Night promotion at Chicago’s Comiskey Park quickly spun out of control, with thousands of people storming the field.Chicago History Museum, via PBSThere were other anti-disco protests around the country in the late ’70s, but none so visible or of greater consequence. As the film recounts, reaction was swift; radio consultants soon began steering toward nondisco formats. “Disco Demolition Night was a real factor, and it did happen very quickly,” DeNooyer said. “And we hear from artists in the film who experienced that.” Gigs started drying up almost immediately.Commercial oversaturation didn’t help. Disco parodies were becoming rampant, including a memorable one in the 1980 comedy “Airplane!,” and novelty songs had been around since Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” in 1976 (followed up by the lesser-known “Dis-Gorilla” in 1977). But the film makes clear that the Disco Demolition fiasco and resultant coverage was a major factor in the death of disco’s mainstream appeal.“The War on Disco” also features a 2016 interview with Dahl, who insists racism and homophobia had nothing to do with that particular display of anti-disco fervor. Demolition Night attendees who were interviewed for the film echo this sentiment.“I would not dispute that is their truth,” Brooks said. “But I think one of the insidious ways that white supremacy has done a number on this country is that it permeates every aspect of our cultural lives. People don’t want to be told that they’re entangled in something that’s not entirely of their control.”It’s also important to note that disco didn’t die so much as its more mainstream forms ceased to be relevant. The music and the culture morphed into other dance-ready genres including house music, which ironically emerged in Chicago. When you go out and cut loose to electronic dance music, or EDM, you are paying homage to disco, whether you know it or not. The beat is still pulsating. The sexual and racial identities remain eclectic. The Who may have bid “Sister Disco” goodbye in their 1978 song, but the original spirit lives on. As Brooks put it, “Its vibrancy and its innovations just continued to gain momentum once the spotlight moved away from it.”The culture, and its devotees, outlived the clichés. Disco is dead. Long live disco. More

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      Who Is Troye Sivan Now?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe pop singer Troye Sivan released “Something to Give Each Other,” his third album — and first in five years — earlier this month to largely positive reviews.But while Sivan, 28, may have grown into his musical and visual identity with a string of recent singles and videos that borrow from 1990s dance music, meme culture and international cinema, he has not yet broken through as the mainstream gay male pop star many expected when his career began.A one-time YouTube vlogger who was born in South Africa and raised Orthodox Jewish in Australia, Sivan came out as a young teenager and has been matter-of-fact in songs and interviews about his sexuality. Earlier this year, Sivan appeared ably as an actor in HBO’s much-maligned music industry satire, “The Idol,” about a pop star and her team being sucked into the dangerous web of a cult leader.Yet despite his rising public profile and artistic confidence, Sivan has found less commercial success with “Something to Give Each Other,” which debuted at No. 20 on the Billboard album chart, than his less self-assured previous two albums, “Bloom,” in 2018, and “Blue Neighborhood,” from 2015.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about this new iteration of Sivan’s sound and persona, where he fits into pop’s growing middle class and the ceilings he may still face as an openly gay male performer.Guests:Harry Tafoya, a freelance writer for Pitchfork, NPR and othersShaad D’Souza, a freelance writer and critic for The Guardian, The New York Times and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      QI.X, a Queer K-Pop Group, Wants to Change South Korea

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      In conservative South Korea, few L.G.B.T.Q. entertainers have ever come out. The young members of QI.X don’t see the point of staying in.At a bar in Euljiro, one of Seoul’s up-and-coming hip neighborhoods, two voices intertwined in a duet. One was high-pitched, the other an octave lower.But there was only one singer, a 27-year-old named jiGook. The other voice was a recording made years ago, before he began his transition and hormone therapy deepened his voice.“I don’t want to forget about my old self,” he told the 50 or so people at the performance, a fund-raiser for a group that supports young L.G.B.T.Q. Koreans. “I love myself before I started hormone therapy, and I love myself as who I am now.”jiGook performing at a bar in the Euljiro district of Seoul.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesLike many other South Korean singers, jiGook, who considers himself gender fluid, transmale and nonbinary, wants to be a K-pop star. So do Prin and SEN, his bandmates in QI.X, a fledgling group that has released two singles.What makes them unusual is that they are proudly out — in their music, their relationship with their fans and their social activism. They call themselves one of the first openly queer, transgender K-pop acts, and their mission has as much to do with changing South Korea’s still-conservative society as with making music.In the group’s name — pronounced by spelling out the letters — Q stands for queer, I for idol and X for limitless possibilities. Park Ji-yeon, the K-pop producer who started QI.X, says it is “tearing down the heteronormative walls of society.”Very few K-pop artists, or South Korean entertainers in general, have ever been open about being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. Though the country has become somewhat more accepting of sexual diversity, homophobia is still prevalent, and there are no legal protections against discrimination.The bandmates saying goodbye after a livestreaming session in Seoul. “Someday, we want to be on everyone’s streaming playlist,” Prin said.For entertainers, coming out is seen as a potential career killer, said Cha Woo-jin, a music critic in Seoul. That applies even to K-pop, despite its young, increasingly international fan base and its occasional flirtation with androgyny and same-sex attraction.“K-pop fans seem to accept the queer community and imagery so long as their favorite stars don’t come out explicitly,” Mr. Cha said.That’s not a compromise that QI.X is willing to make.The bandmates’ social media accounts, which promote their causes along with their music, are up front about who they are. So are their singles, “Lights Up” (“The hidden colors in you / I see all the colors in you”) and “Walk & Shine,” which Mx. Park says “celebrates the lives and joy of minorities.”“Someday, we want to be on everyone’s streaming playlist,” said Prin, 22.SEN dancing before the start of a recording session in Seoul for Q Planet, an online show, as jiGook and QI.X’s producer, Park Ji-yeon, watched. As a producer, Mx. Park, 37, who identifies as queer and nonbinary, has worked on hits for well-known K-pop acts like GOT7 and Monsta X. But she wanted to make music that spoke directly to people like her, with “an artist who could encapsulate our lives, love, friendships and farewells.”She met some of the QI.X members through a K-pop music class she started in 2019, designed with queer performers in mind. (In other classes, she said, “It was assumed that female participants only wanted to learn girl-group songs and male participants only boy-group songs.”)SEN, 23, said that when Mx. Park asked her to join QI.X, “it was as if a genie in a bottle had come to me.”SEN had been a dancer and a choreographer for several K-pop management agencies, including BTS’s agency, Big Hit Entertainment, now known as HYBE. The people she worked with knew she was queer, and they were welcoming.Mx. Park, leaning against the mirror, with SEN and other QI.X members during a rehearsal in June. In the red shirt is Maek, an original member who has since taken a break from the group. But whenever she auditioned to join an idol group, she said, she “never fit the bill for what they wanted.” People would say she was too short or boyish, or comment about her cropped hair.That’s not an issue for QI.X, which doesn’t aspire to the immaculately styled look of the typical K-pop act (and, in any case, couldn’t afford the ensemble of stylists those groups have). Individuality, they say, is part of the point.QI.X often performs at fund-raisers, for L.G.B.T.Q. and other causes, and sees its music as inseparable from its activism. Maek, for instance, an original member who sang on both singles but is on hiatus from the group, works for the Seoul Disabled People’s Rights Film Festival and volunteers for a transgender rights organization.With no support from a management agency, Mx. Park and the group do everything themselves. They handle their own bookings and manage their social media presence, recording videos themselves to post on TikTok and Instagram.Many of the videos are shot at LesVos, an L.G.B.T.Q. bar in Seoul that often serves as QI.X’s studio and rehearsal hall. Myoung-woo YoonKim, 68, who has run LesVos since the late 1990s, grew up at a time when lesbians were practically invisible in South Korea. “I would often think, ‘Am I the only woman who loves women?” they said.Rehearsing at LesVos, an L.G.B.T.Q. bar in Seoul, as its manager, Myoung-woo YoonKim, and Mx. Park look on.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThe QI.X members adore Mx. YoonKim, whom they call hyung, a Korean word for older brother. During a recent video session at LesVos, after dozens of increasingly comical lip-syncing takes of “Walk & Shine,” Mx. YoonKim started to join in. Before long, everyone was bent over with laughter.To a casual observer of K-pop, it might seem surprising that so few of its artists are out. As Mr. Cha, the music critic, notes, L.G.B.T.Q. imagery has been known to surface in K-pop videos and in ads featuring its stars.Some critics see this phenomenon as “queerbaiting,” a cynical attempt to attract nonconformist fans — or to deploy gender-bending imagery because it’s seen as trendy — without actually identifying with them. To Mr. Cha, it suggests that K-pop has a substantial queer fan base, and that some artists might simply be expressing their identities to the extent they can.From left, SEN, Prin, Maek and jiGook livestreaming on YouTube in June. Many of QI.X’s fans live outside South Korea and follow the group online.Mr. Cha thinks the taboo against entertainers’ coming out reflects a general attitude toward pop culture in South Korea: “We pay for you, therefore don’t make us uncomfortable.” (Similar attitudes seem to prevail in Japan, where one pop idol recently made news by telling fans he was gay.)QI.X’s fans, who call themselves QTZ (a play on “cuties”), love the group for charging over that boundary. Many are overseas and follow the group online, leaving enthusiastic messages. “I’m so happy I can finally have an artist in the K-pop industry that I can relate to on a gender level, on a queer level,” one said in a video message to the group. “I’m so excited for you!”The band also gets hateful messages, which its members do their best to ignore. Prin, 22, is optimistic that attitudes in South Korea are changing. (Joining QI.X was Prin’s way of coming out as gender queer, but friends were much more surprised by the news that Prin was in an idol group.)The biggest show of QI.X’s career, so far, was in July at a Pride event, the Seoul Queer Culture Festival. In recent years, it had been held at Seoul Plaza, a major public square. But this year, the city denied organizers permission to hold it there, letting a Christian group use the space for a youth concert instead.QI.X onstage at the Seoul Queer Culture Festival in July.Activists saw that as discrimination, though the city denied it. Conservative Christians are a powerful force in South Korean politics, having lobbied successfully for years to block a bill that would prevent discrimination against gay, lesbian and transgender people. Organizers held the festival in Euljiro.For its set, QI.X had about 20 backup performers, some of whom were their friends (Mx. YoonKim was one of them). They had rehearsed only once together, on the festival stage that morning, because they hadn’t had the money to rent a big studio.Christian protesters were picketing the festival, some with signs that read “Homosexuality not human rights but SIN.” But fans were there, too. As QI.X sang “Lights Up” and “Walk & Shine,” hundreds crowded in front of the stage, many wearing headbands that were purple, the group’s color. There were Pride flags, and signs that read “We only see you QI.X.”A Pride parade was part of the festival. Hours later, the excitement still hadn’t faded for QI.X. “I felt alive for the first time in a while,” SEN said. More

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      When Club Music Went Commercial, Remixes Kept It Real

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      Social justice, romance and gay pride are alive in a sound that would seduce the world.We gathered each Sunday. The place of worship: Tracks, a mammoth warehouse-turned-nightclub in Southeast Washington, D.C. We were a congregation of mostly Black gay men, there to celebrate one another, at a time — the early 1990s — when we were losing so many to AIDS. We danced — many vogued — to the music that endured after the anti-Black, anti-gay “Disco Sucks” movement of the late 1970s. This fledgling genre transformed dance music, through synthesizers, drum machines and the scrappiness of youth, into a sound that would seduce the world. Some would “call it house,” as the duo Mass Order sang on “Lift Every Voice (Take Me Away),” from 1991.So many songs reflected my values and interests: social injustice (CeCe Rogers, “Someday”), romance (MAW & Company featuring Xaviera Gold, “Gonna Get Back to You”), recovering from heartbreak (Ultra Naté, “It’s Over Now”) and gay pride (Carl Bean, “I Was Born This Way”). Other cuts I cherished weren’t songs written for the clubs, but remixes: R&B and pop songs reconfigured for the dance floor.Life is a remix. Or at least mine has been. Like many, I grew up exploring identity through pop culture. But being Black and gay, I felt most mainstream entertainment didn’t affirm my place in the world. I nevertheless sifted through mass media, embracing what served me, discarding what didn’t. This process of fashioning custom-fitted couture from cultural ready-to-wear is epitomized by the remix. “Remix” has a range of meanings, but in general it refers to a practice, with roots in Jamaican reggae, in which D.J.s and producers take a pre-existing song and tweak it for a specific audience. I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music.In the 1990s — when the advances from increased gay visibility bucked up against the backlash triggered by AIDS — remixes attested that the music cultivated in Black gay spaces had larger cultural value. It meant something to me when, say, Diana Ross reached out to a younger generation with “Workin’ Overtime (House Mix),” Jody Watley transformed into a sinister cyborg on “I’m the One You Need (Dead Zone Mix)” and Mariah Carey went on a historical Black music journey, evoking jazz, gospel and soul on “Anytime You Need a Friend (Dave’s Empty Pass).”I also loved many remixes because they offered a choose-your-own-adventure approach to music. Remixes can free a song from the dictates of radio trends, marketability and the pop conventions of boy-meets-girl. For example, Watley’s song “When a Man Loves a Woman” was released with the remixes “When a Woman Loves a Woman” and “When a Man Loves a Man.” One of my favorite remixes is Quincy Jones’s “Listen Up (Chakapella Dub Mix),” by Arthur Baker. Baker uses Chaka Khan’s vocals to create a narcotic soundscape. The mix opens with a low bass rumble, the way a storm signals its arrival. An uncharacteristically raspy Khan starts wailing. Her vocals bring to mind sounds Frederick Douglass describes in his autobiography, music made by enslaved people: “They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone.” She roars, “I’m in love,” over and over and over again. The wildness of the repeated phrase suggests madness, but a relatable kind. It makes me think about what, on the surface, seems so irrational: a Black queer person risking alienation from the larger Black community to shape a distinct identity around the inexplicable wants of the heart.Other remixes form narratives. On the “Every Woman’s Beat” remix of Whitney Houston’s 1993 cover of Khan’s signature song, “I’m Every Woman,” the producers David Cole and Robert Clivillés of C+C Music Factory use Houston’s vocals to create an impressionistic tale that charts the journey from external desire to inner fulfillment, similar to the theme of “The Wizard of Oz.” At the start of the track, Houston repeats, “anything you want” as if she’s compelled by craving. Then she yells, “I got it,” before proclaiming, “I’m the one.” It feels as if a glittery Glinda had just whispered to her: “You’ve always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself.”There is another function of the remixes I cherish most: They instigate precious memories. As James Baldwin wrote: “Music is our witness and our ally. The beat is the confession, which recognizes, changes, and conquers time.” Some remixes remind me of the 1980s and ’90s, when music forged in Black queer spaces began reaching the mainstream. Remixes were one way of preserving Black queer aesthetics amid economic incentives to make club music more commercial.The “FBI Dub” of Janet Jackson’s 1997 hit “Together Again,” by Zanzibar DJ Tony Humphries, takes me back to those days. It’s a reminder of the ferocity of many lost to AIDS. Humphries jackhammers a classic M.F.S.B. groove, breaking it into rhythmic slabs that are the perfect accompaniment to an exquisitely executed pose. It’s house music as hoodoo, conjuring angular apparitions trapped in a fierce dance battle. I listen to these and other remixes from the era to help me cope with a phantom past, the feeling I survived a plague that often seems forgotten. Remixes bring me hope because, by definition, they represent the possibility of change. I’m thinking about a line from Indeep’s 1982 club burner “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life”: “There’s not a problem that I can’t fix/’Cause I can do it in the mix.”Craig Seymour is a music critic and the author of “Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross.” More

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      Romy Madley Croft Is (Finally) Dancing on Her Own

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      The final member of the xx to release a solo album reveals her love of the pop club music of her teenage years, and her wife, on “Mid Air.”As sheets of rain slammed a percussive beat on the skylights above her on a brisk April afternoon, Romy Madley Croft shook her head, smiling with the resignation of a seasoned professional wondering what kind of mess she’d gotten herself into.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      in Theater

      Patti LuPone Performs on Fire Island for Her Most Ardent Fans

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      Last weekend on Fire Island in New York, far from the bright lights of Broadway, Patti LuPone performed at the Ice Palace nightclub for some of her most adoring fans. These die-hards, sometimes called LuPonettes, included a man who had seen Ms. LuPone in the 1979 production of “Evita” and another who had a caricature of her tattooed on his back.Ben Rimalower, who arrived hours before doors opened, stood at the front of the line. “I first fell in love with Patti when I saw the ‘Evita’ commercial,” he said. “I’ve now seen her live hundreds of times, but never on Fire Island. Nowhere else will Patti get an audience that understands her like here.”Opened in the 1970s, the Ice Palace is an institution in Cherry Grove, a Fire Island hamlet known as a summer haven for New York’s gay community. In addition to its Friday night Underwear Party, its stage has hosted Chita Rivera, Liza Minnelli and Alan Cumming.“Patti has played the greatest venues in the world, but for her to play here it’s about connecting with her most fervent fan base,” the club’s co-owner, Daniel Nardicio, said. “Her fans will scream and cry for her here.”Ms. LuPone, 74, put on two sold-out performances of “Songs from a Hat,” in which she sings tunes plucked at random. Accompanied on a white piano by her musical director, Joseph Thalken, she gave her all to staples like “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Meadowlark.” When she did the Sondheim number “I Never Do Anything Twice,” she brandished a riding crop.In the edited interviews below, her fans reflected on why they can never get enough LuPone.Jack SwerdlinAccountantJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhy do you love her? I’m a fellow Long Island girl, just like Patti. Her power as a performer is so unattainable that you can’t help but be in awe.When did you first see her live? It should have been when I was 12. I still hold a grudge against my family. My parents took my sister to see “Gypsy” for her Sweet 16, but they didn’t bring me because I was too small. My mom told me I have to get over it. I told her, “I will never get over it.”Quinto OttActorJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhy do you love Patti? Because she’s an ally to us in a way others are not. Lots of celebrities are part of the battle, but she’s been with us a long time. For an artist like Patti to come out here and do a show for us at the Ice Palace, that says something about her allegiances.If you could spend a day with Patti, what would you do? I’d love to sit and have cocktails with her and Mandy Patinkin. Just to listen to the two of them talk. About anything.Austin TracyBartender and playwrightJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhat’s the story behind your tattoo? Years ago, I decided I wanted to cover myself with the divas I love, and I’ve been adding Broadway legends to my back ever since. This Patti is from “The Baker’s Wife.” I’ve also got Liza Minnelli and Elaine Stritch.Daniel NardicioNightlife promoterJames Emmerman for The New York TimesHow did this show come about? We basically wooed her to come out here and eventually she said yes. Sure, we have the famous Underwear Party, but we also have greats like Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera here. Gay men have a deep relationship with these women, so they’re always appreciative to see them, and that’s why these women are willing to come out here and do these shows at the Ice Palace.Lynda MarcheseRetired astrophysicistJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhen did you first see her live? I saw her do “Evita” years ago and I was mesmerized. I don’t even like musicals. I’m not like the guys here.What do you make of her performing here? This place started out as a sea shack for good times by the ocean. Everyone was doing poppers and having fun. But Cherry Grove has been changing. Lots of straight people from the city have been buying places here, changing our community’s culture.Josh PreteWhiskey salesmanJames Emmerman for The New York TimesAny song you’d like to hear? Anything from “Sunset Boulevard.” It holds a special place for LuPone fans because Patti was infamously fired from her role and replaced with Glenn Close. So hearing Patti sing anything from it would be special and rare.Ben RimalowerCabaret directorJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhy do you love Patti? Her ferocity. Everyone throws that term around now but she’s the real thing. She’s a tiger. Patti would cut you. Whereas Minnelli is there to delight, Patti commands you and makes you afraid of what you might miss if you take your eyes off her for even one second.If you could spend a day with Patti, what would you do? I wish a reality television show camera followed her. I would watch it all day.Adam FeldmanTheater criticJames Emmerman for The New York TimesWhy do you love Patti? Because her voice is a unique musical instrument and she’s maintained it to an astonishing degree. When other stars do cabaret shows they can sound diminished, but not Patti. She’s also old-school in a way that Broadway doesn’t reward so much anymore. She plays by her own rules.Yvonne LaVialeRetired property managerJames Emmerman for The New York TimesAny tune you’d like to hear? “The Ladies Who Lunch.” There’s no one like Elaine Stritch, but Patti is the only one who can sing it with the same feel as Stritch.Michael Fisher and Gary SacksCherry Grove residentsJames Emmerman for The New York TimesYou’re longtime Cherry Grove residents. What do you make of Patti’s playing here?M.F.: The Ice Palace is where gay men used to come to discover their sexuality. It only makes sense for Patti to play here, to perform for her most devoted following.G.S.: We love Patti and it’s beautiful to see her come to our community. I hope she sings “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” Because when she sings that, I want to cry. More

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      Queer History Was Made in ’90s Clubs. These Fliers Captured It.

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      “Getting In,” a new book from David Kennerley, collects the edgy advertisements for parties at clubs like the Palladium and records a culture forged from defiance.In the new book “Getting In,” the journalist David Kennerley takes an electric visual stroll through New York’s 1990s gay club scene. Not with photos, exactly, but through fliers — more than 200 of them — featuring polychromatic drag queens and come-hither hunks who enticed him to dance to Frankie Knuckles and Junior Vasquez remixes at popular nightclubs like Twilo and the Palladium, and parties like Jackie 60 and Lick It!“People threw the fliers on the ground,” Kennerley, 63, said in a recent interview at a Midtown cafe. “I thought, why would you throw this out? It’s going to be a memento.”Kennerley assembled the book from his collection of over 1,200 fliers that he acquired from several sources — promoters outside clubs, now-closed gay shops and bars, club mailing lists — all before social media. A self-described “bit of a hoarder,” Kennerley considers the book an act of queer music history preservation.“We weren’t all snapping pictures at clubs back then, so we don’t have much of a visual record,” he said. “These provide some sort of visual evidence of what went on.”Kennerley and other ’90s club veterans recently shared memories of some of the fliers, and the era. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.via David KennerleyDivas Fight AIDS, Palladium (1992)LADY BUNNY, D.J. and CLUB KID Back in the ’80s and ’90s, we felt we needed to come together as a community to fight AIDS. The fear of AIDS made us party with greater abandon. For an entire generation of gay men, especially those connected to the club world, we weren’t saving money. We assumed the odds were against us. Loleatta Holloway and Lonnie Gordon — that’s quite a lineup in terms of what songs packed dance floors.MICHAEL MUSTO, NIGHTLIFE CHRONICLER We learned the power of graphic art from ACT UP and Queer Nation. They knew how to use slogans and imagery to get a point across. Promoters used that know-how to sell their parties.DAVID KENNERLEY It feels like she’s a superhero in a way. That’s what people needed to be then because of the stigma and persecution.via David KennerleyPurgatory, Sound Factory Bar (1992)KENNERLEY At first glance it would be muscle boys in short shorts. It is, but someone Photoshopped on the heads of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Notice it was about getting out to vote. This one has credits of Jon McEwan and Jason McCarthy, the photographer and the promoter. They did one of George Bush spanking Dan Quayle, too.MARK ALLEN, GO-GO BOY and MODEL This was taken during a session where I was photographed with Richard, this kid from Venezuela, whose body was Al Gore. Mine was Bill Clinton. And Jon goes, I want to photograph you in cutoff shorts, the kind that were popular on Fire Island then. It sounded like something Spy would do in the ’80s. They took three shots and we went on to the next thing.You saw T-shirts of this image on cards. It was a good example about how something could go viral before the internet. I didn’t mind being anonymous. I thought it was art.SUSAN MORABITO, D.J. I don’t remember that particular party but I remember the flier.via David KennerleyThe Saint at Large, Tunnel (1992)MORABITO Back then, fliers inspired conversation and controversy sometimes. When the Saint at Large party used to send them in the mail, you couldn’t wait to get it. You’d get on the phone with your friends and talk about it.KENNERLEY Marky Mark had a song called “Good Vibrations” that went to No. 1. He was the Calvin Klein model for a while, and he would pull down his trousers and show off his tighty whities.The promise of the poster is, he’s going to show off his muscular physique. I paid a lot of money to go that night but I was very disappointed. He got onstage and he strutted around in a dark hoodie. Before you knew it, the song was over. I was like, wait, what about dropping the pants? I guess you could say it was misleading advertising.via David KennerleyCopacabana (1992)CHIP DUCKETT, PUBLICIST and PRODUCER Susanne [Bartsch, the club promoter and hostess] has a deep love of all things party. Inside Copa it was this perfect mix. There’s a baroness over here, a real one. Here’s a hooker and here’s a fashion model and it’s really gay but it’s also not gay. I don’t think Studio 54 did it in the same way. She’s still hosting parties every week.In those days I printed 50,000 fliers a month. Some guys in Queens who ran a club opened a printing company called Nightlife Printing. They did fliers for everybody. When I think of the amount of paper that got delivered to my office …Pork, The Lure (1994)KENNERLEY The Lure was leather and Levi’s oriented and they had a dress code. The party on Wednesday was geared toward the younger crowd, to get them involved in the scene. They also had B.D.S.M. shows on occasion. It got racy.MUSTO The way people forged a sense of communal identity was by going out. It was vital to have niche parties, where you had an exact type of gay, like twinks or bears. Now everybody has sex via Grindr, so that if you walk into a gay bar there is zero sexual urgency in the air.via David Kennerley‘Big’ Opening Night Party, Roxy (1996)ALLEN This was me, taken by the photographer Hans Fahrmeyer. I made some money on that one. It was on greetings cards and posters. I remember being in a cab and somebody had plastered on scaffolding 50 or 100 of the posters. I saw it for a few seconds. I thought, this is the closest I’ll ever get to my picture being in Times Square. I went back a week later and it was gone. That captured the fleetingness of the whole scene.LADY BUNNY This was a time when record companies would send D.J.s records to see what was a hit with our crowd. Gays has such good taste in dance music with zero promotion and a cover that didn’t even have the artist’s picture on it!ALLEN I thought it would lead to something incredible. It didn’t. But now it makes me think of my youth and the passage of time and how important the memories are. More

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      in Television

      Yes, These Gays Are Trying to Murder You

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      Queer villains are all over our screens these days. What do they have to say?IT BECAME A meme the second the words came out of Jennifer Coolidge’s mouth. Trapped on a yacht with a small group of ornately charming men who’ve lured her into their world with calculated flattery, she now realizes they have no intention of letting her ever return to the luxury resort where they found her. In the final minutes of the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” Coolidge’s rich, lonely, addled Tanya McQuoid pleads her case to the boat’s captain. “Please! These gays,” she implores in her signature husky bleat. “They’re trying to murder me!”Listen to This ArticleThat moment — the line that launched a thousand GIFs, not to mention T-shirts, coffee mugs and emblazoned hand fans — was brilliantly designed for the decontextualization it quickly underwent. But it also marked a milestone in the history of gay representation in film and television because … it was true: Those gays were trying to murder her! What better way to obtain her fortune and secure their status as haute Mediterranean palazzo dwellers? Although poor Tanya isn’t long for this world, she does manage to take down most of them before exiting, like the trained hit woman she isn’t. And the gay men in the show’s audience? We were the first ones cheering.Why was this OK? (And yes, weirdly, it was OK.) It helped to know that a queer man, the show’s creator, Mike White, had originated the idea. If you’re gay, chances are you understood that you were on safe ground with the show — that this wasn’t homophobia but, rather, a joyous reclamation of the idea of gay monstrosity from the homophobes who held custody of it for decades.The scene also upended the conviction that negative stereotypes can be assiduously monitored and tallied to determine whether a film or drama or sitcom or line or joke is with us or against us. For many L.G.B.T.Q. consumers of culture, including me, that kind of tensed, hyperwary watching — “Is this good for the gays or bad for the gays?” — is a hard habit to break. Several generations of us grew up exposed to movies and TV shows that forced us to develop a bitter awareness that, at any minute, we could be confronted with an ugly caricature or made the target of a cruel slur deployed to generate laughs or cheers from a straight audience. Several younger generations of gay men were raised in an era when the industry regularly patted itself on the back for earnest “representation” designed to show straight viewers that gay people were “just like us,” though only rarely were gay characters allowed to be just like themselves. And still younger generations have come of age in a world in which gay creators have increasingly taken charge of the way queer characters are depicted. But a murderous cabal of gays? Not since Sgt. “Pepper” Anderson broke up a trio of kill-crazy lesbians who ran a nursing home in an early ’70s episode of the Angie Dickinson cop show “Police Woman” had television gone there, and even 50 years ago, that story line was viewed as sufficiently retrograde to warrant a rebuke from critics and gay activists alike.What “The White Lotus” did felt so backward that it was, paradoxically, transgressive — not to mention very gay. This punchline was so air quotes appalling that gay viewers could enjoy it without having to fret that straight viewers might get the wrong idea about us. (And if they did decide that gay people were lethal Eurotrash yacht queens? Better, I suppose, to be feared than hated.) In any case, “These gays …” was primarily about ownership. It wasn’t “We can take a joke”; it was “We can make a joke.”The 20th-century Manhattan writer Truman Capote (above, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the 2005 biopic) will be the focus of a Hulu series starring Tom Hollander.ShutterstockWHAT WASN’T APPARENT when the show aired is that those killer gays presaged a trend: We’re witnessing an explosion of out-and-proud gay villainy. Showtime’s forthcoming limited series “Fellow Travelers,” created by the gay writer Ron Nyswaner, whose credits stretch back to “Philadelphia” (1993), is a kind of idiosyncratic dramatized history of gay-movement politics from the McCarthy years through the early days of the AIDS crisis. Its protagonist, played by the gay actor Matt Bomer, is not a heroic activist or a noble victim but a ruthless, chilly, opportunistic user, an ambitious closeted husband, father and eventually grandfather who, in an early episode, manipulates the timid male lover he dominates into writing an anonymous letter that could destroy the life of a lesbian friend. The character is complex, but nobody would call him a good guy.Showtime recently canceled plans to air another limited series that is literally about a gay man who’s trying to murder people, but Netflix picked it up, and eight episodes of “Ripley,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” starring Andrew Scott as the obsessive killer, will likely be released next year. Readers first met Ripley in 1955, when Highsmith introduced him as a young American of indeterminate desires whose envy of the rich, indolent playboy he’s been hired to bring home from Italy shades into a kind of lethal longing — to be him, have him, replace him. Ripley’s sexuality is murky in Highsmith’s five novels, and in the hands of her many adapters, he’s been as heterosexual as when Dennis Hopper plays him in Wim Wenders’s “The American Friend” (1977) or as gay as when Matt Damon portrays him in Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999). And this time? We don’t know yet, but Scott has already described him as “a queer character.”A third limited series, “Capote’s Women,” a continuation of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” anthology for FX and Hulu, will feature Tom Hollander — one of the murderous gays from “The White Lotus” — as Truman Capote. (Full disclosure: I am working with Murphy on an unrelated film project.) The Capote drama will apparently concentrate on the latter period of the writer’s life, in which Esquire’s publication of excerpts from his novel “Answered Prayers” (1987) was viewed as a friendship-rupturing betrayal by the society women whose company the author craved. Although it hasn’t been revealed which version or versions of Capote the show will bring forth, a degree of villainy is baked in, since Capote himself, on one talk show appearance after another, cultivated an image as a demonic, acid-tongued imp. It’s the Bad Gay renaissance we never asked for but somehow seem to have long wanted.To be specific, this is gay male villainy — lesbians and bisexuals, long underrepresented in a world of pop culture still dominated by male creators, are insufficiently ubiquitous in movies and TV to be reframed as fun bad guys. (A delightful recent exception: the homicidal lesbian elders played by Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson in Rian Johnson’s “Poker Face.”) And trans villainy is, right now, not an option in pop culture: The struggle for acceptance remains too imperiled for anyone to be glib or ironic about goals like positive representation. White gay men make better marks; as members of two dominant cultures, we’re easy targets in a world in which everyone’s hyperconscious of identity, and we have enough clout to be labeled part of the problem without that critique being racist or sexist.Last year, Hollander ushered in the latest Bad Gay renaissance when his character, Quentin, conspires to kill Tanya McQuoid, played by Jennifer Coolidge, on the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus.”Courtesy of HBOThat itself is an indication of how far we’ve journeyed from, say, 1981, when the gay culture writer and activist Vito Russo published “The Celluloid Closet,” a book that traces Hollywood’s contempt for and mistreatment of gay characters from the earliest days of cinema. Russo explored a subject that had previously been viewed by moviegoers simply as the way things were — the treatment of gay people as pansies and wimps, perverts and tragedies, serial killers and suicides. He wrote the first edition of his book roughly a decade after the Stonewall uprising — during which, while television slowly but steadily humanized gay characters, giving them dignified guest appearances in ongoing comedies and dramas as well as the occasional TV movie, feature films continued to traffic in mincing best friends, bar-crawling lowlifes, killers and victims. The James Bond films, those bastions of heterosexual virility, toyed with a pair of gay hit men in 1971’s “Diamonds Are Forever” and, in general, big-screen queer sexuality was often murder adjacent (“Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” “American Gigolo,” “Cruising,” “Dressed to Kill”) when it wasn’t comical, absurd or doomed.But what neither Russo nor his readers could have known was that AIDS was about to change the world. For the next 15 years, after the virus became prevalent, gay characters gradually became exemplary — the only choice during a struggle in which Hollywood felt compelled to represent the part of American society that didn’t want gay men demonized, marginalized or dead. This period, bracketed roughly by “Victor/Victoria” (1982) and “In & Out” (1997), wasn’t free of queer villains, but they were often greeted with ire and contempt: When the serial killer Buffalo Bill was showcased in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), backlash was so intense that its director, Jonathan Demme, turned around and made “Philadelphia,” about an admirable, likable gay lawyer seriously ill with AIDS. To say that many of these films were made with persuasion in mind is not to disparage them. Anti-gay agitprop had been a staple of Hollywood for decades; what was pro-gay agitprop but a long-overdue attempt to fight fire with fire?By the late ’90s, Good Gays had become staples of both movies and TV series — 1998 marked the beginning of “Will and Grace” — and, not soon after that, it finally became acceptable for a new kind of Bad Gay to stand up and be counted. Twenty-three summers ago, a group of strangers went to Borneo and had their adventures filmed for 39 days and, when it was over, one of them was a millionaire. Richard Hatch, then 39, was the first gay villain of the reality TV era, and a shock at a time when L.G.B.T.Q. television presences were supposed to model relatability and safeness. On the night of the first-season finale of “Survivor,” more than 51 million Americans watched as one competitor Hatch had beaten offered a disgusted endorsement, labeling him a snake and his rival a rat, then telling her fellow jurors that they should honor what nature intended and vote “for the snake to eat the rat.”It’s hard now to convey what a violation of accepted norms it was for a straight woman to use that language about a gay man on national television, especially since, in retrospect, Hatch’s malevolence was wildly overstated. All he was guilty of was figuring out how to work the game before everyone else did. What Hatch was doing — observing a playing field as only a lifelong outsider could, then using the ruthless detachment that exclusion can generate to his advantage — was, to many gay viewers, a recognizable survival strategy now revealed on a nationwide scale. The cultural ascent of a Bad Gay was a shock: Hatch had the dubious honor of becoming the first homosexual man America could hiss at when the country was only just past the most acute phase of the AIDS pandemic and beginning to uncouple male homosexuality from death. For gay people, the question was complex: Should we hate him, root for him or both?IF YOU’RE GAY and over 30, you’re probably at least somewhat used to assessing negative reflections of yourself on a spectrum that stretches from the flatly unacceptable to the semi-embraceable. At the most extreme end, for instance, there is the slur that gay people are groomers, a charge closely tied to the idea that homosexuality is a spreadable disease. Because social conservatives have always found the accusation of preying on children an irresistible way to threaten sexual minorities, it should not be surprising that in the last couple of years, the groomer libel has been transferred from gay men to drag queens and trans people.But history provides no shortage of other gay villain clichés from which to choose. There’s the trope that gay people — or gay-coded characters — are weak, cowardly, sniveling (think of Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith on the 1960s TV series “Lost in Space” whimpering, “Oh, the pain, the pain!”). That one’s almost more boring than it is defamatory — but it’s still defamatory, even when drolly done. There’s also the old, double-edged McCarthy-era insult, intriguingly played with in “Fellow Travelers,” that gay people are security risks on two fronts: They harbor a secret that makes them susceptible to blackmail, and their resentment toward the oppressive straight world makes them obvious candidates for double agentry; in other words, we’re potential victims and potential moles. Then there’s the having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too stereotype that gay people are fine but gay closet cases are all potential serial killers. Finally, there’s the broad-brush (and essentially misogynistic) derogation of gay men as effeminate, an old insult that has been so effectively reclaimed by happily effeminate gay men that it’s lost much of its sting. As Harvey Fierstein subversively states in the 1995 documentary version of “The Celluloid Closet,” “I like the sissy,” and that stereotype, the movie origins of which can be traced back to the silent era, can range from hurtful and belittling to joyful and empowering, depending on who’s doing the sashaying and shantaying, and to what end it’s being used.In “Fellow Travelers,” soon to be on Showtime, Matt Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a federal official with a vengeful streak.Ben Mark Holzberg/ShowtimeThere’s one kind of gay villain, though, that seems especially alluring these days, including to gay men. It’s the Wicked Queen — the devious, manipulative, cunning, conniving male homosexual who has learned how to stay two steps ahead of anyone who thinks they can outsmart him. The Wicked Queen often shows up in stories that take place in a primarily gay universe: He’s the selfish one, the callous one, the one who’s a bitch to all his friends — his malice doesn’t need to be filtered through the gaze of the straight world. It’s our business, and it’s there for our delectation. At his most refined and extreme, the Wicked Queen seems not only to relish his criminality but to turn it into a louchely decadent performance piece. These are the gay villains who are currently having their moment in the spotlight. Performative, even showy gay (or gay-coded) villainy — the idea that we’re dark-souled masterminds who know how to be stylish and sociopathic in a single gesture — has been around forever; it’s evident in everything from George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt (technically straight but really not) in “All About Eve” (1950) to Cesar Romero’s Joker in the 1960s “Batman” TV series to Dr. Evil’s pinkie raised to his pursed lips in the “Austin Powers” movies to Divine’s early 1970s collaborations with John Waters to the latest seasons of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Yes, it’s a vicious attack on our collective character but, honestly, as vicious attacks go, some of us kind of enjoy that one.Perhaps, on occasion, we even wear it proudly. The murderous gays in “The White Lotus” certainly do; they escort Tanya to an opera not long before they intend to kill her, almost as if they were event planners pulling together a theme weekend, and to win her confidence, they actually pretend to be a different gay cliché — the obsequious Gay Best Friends, forever fluttering around and consoling the heroine, happy to serve as her supporting characters. Using one stereotype to conceal a worse one? That’s so ruthless, it’s applause-worthy; it’s what one of the drag house members in Jennie Livingston’s documentary “Paris Is Burning” (1990) means when he explains, “Boys are the stupidest. They don’t know how to do a stunt right. Now, faggots will do a stunt and, I mean, you will never catch up with it until years later!” Translation: Gay people know how to play the long game because we have to know; we’re tough, we’re smart and we’re sly because that’s how we endure.It’s worth noting that the appealing Bad Gay is, and should remain, the province of fiction. In real life, if you internalize those personality characteristics too thoroughly, you do not become a fascinating charismatic antihero; you just become George Santos. But in pop culture, there’s something unexpectedly liberating, even progressive, about seeing gay characters unshackled from the necessity of making a good impression. (It’s why John Early’s staggeringly self-absorbed, needy gay millennial in the cult comedy series “Search Party” [2016-22] was so beloved by gay viewers.) In its first two seasons, the comedy series “The Other Two,” a savage and specific take on our boundless appetite for fame, presents one of its main characters, the aspiring actor Cary Dubek (played by Drew Tarver), as an essentially Good Gay, a young, appealing guy who came out on the late side and is now simultaneously learning to navigate the dating world and the thousand natural shocks and humiliations of struggling on the margins of show business.But in the recently concluded third and final season, Cary finally makes it, if not to the top then to the middle, and goes full Bad Gay. He becomes a camera-hungry, friend-shafting, insincere, self-dramatizing narcissist. In the hands of the show’s co-creators, the former “Saturday Night Live” head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, it feels clear that Cary doesn’t lose himself so much as find himself — the monster he has been all along was just waiting for a chance to emerge. It pains me to say it, but this is, in a way, what diversity looks like (at least, this is one of the things diversity looks like): the dead-on representation of a type that a lot of gay men have met in life but that rarely makes it onto a screen.It’s fair to ask whether we can afford this at a moment when those who hate and fear queer Americans are getting louder and bolder. But no minority culture has ever thrived by retreating to role model politesse in response to the menacing behavior of those who are never going to approve of them anyway. Besides, there’s something undeniably satisfying in saying to homophobes, “You think drag queens reading fairy tales to children is scary? We’ll show you scary.”It’s also a welcome change from a time in which every single movie or television show that was good for the cause had to be greeted with a dutiful round of applause or show of support, no matter its faults. Almost 40 years ago, in his 1987 revised edition of “The Celluloid Closet,” Russo wrote, “There is a tendency on the part of politically committed lesbians and gay men to make allowances for the aesthetic shortcomings of films that offer a more accurate picture of gay life than has been previously seen. This is the temporary cultural reaction of people grateful for a refreshing change in the way their lives are reflected on the screen. This will also moderate with time.” Russo was right, but I wonder how he’d react to the fact that gay culture has virtually inverted itself. Rather than make apologies for stories with good intentions and dubious entertainment value, we now get to see ourselves as worse people in better product. It seems odd that the fragile, perhaps precarious luxury of being able to enjoy an entertaining range of gay villains is a signpost of progress. But a qualified win is still a win, and this victory can, perhaps, be counted as one of the strange spoils of a larger, long-fought battle: the chance to be ourselves — all of ourselves — even when we’re monsters. More