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- [00:04]
Lucas Hildebrand
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com making films then you've got.
- [00:31]
Frankie Knuckles
Footage in Dropbox, scripts and docs, notes in Slack and no time to hunt Dropbox Dash New from Dropbox pulls it all together so you can focus on the final edit.
- [00:42]
Lucas Hildebrand
Learn more at Dropbox.com/Heather is a nurse practitioner from UnitedHealthcare.
- [00:47]
Christy Soares
We meet patients wherever they live.
- [00:49]
Lucas Hildebrand
During a house call she found Jack had an issue.
- [00:52]
Christy Soares
Jack's blood pressure was dangerously high.
- [00:55]
Frankie Knuckles
It was 217 over 110.
- [00:58]
Lucas Hildebrand
So they got Jack to the hospital and got him the help he needed.
- [01:01]
Christy Soares
He had had a stent placed in his heart preventing a massive heart attack.
- [01:05]
Lucas Hildebrand
If it wasn't for my guardian angel, I wouldn't be here. Hear more stories like Jack's at unitedhealthcare.com benefits, features and or devices vary by plan, area limitation and exclusions.
- [01:14]
Narrator/Announcer
Appreciate.
- [01:22]
Christy Soares
1978 the Halls were dark and quiet and chill, and only in the distance the sound of someone's moans or the rheumatic wheeze of a stopped up toilet or the hum of the water fountain marked the otherwise unblemished silence. The baths were almost peaceful then. The hot gloom of lust had lifted the place for a moment just before dawn became an ordinary hall of closed doors or open doors in which the occupant, lying invitingly on his bunk, had fallen asleep and was snoring ferociously. It was then Malone went out and took whomever he found and made love. We all knew people who had their most magical experience very late one night at the Everard Baths with a man they never saw again but of whose embraces they would think of periodically for the rest of their lives. Andrew Holloran, Dancer from the Dance I'm Christy Soares.
- [02:26]
Ryan Purcell
And I'm Ryan Purcell and this is Soundscapes.
- [02:37]
Christy Soares
Soundscapes is a bi monthly podcast about the sounds of the city that have shaped New York's history. In this second episode, we talk with Lucas Hildebrand. Lucas Hildebrand is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Hildebrand is the author of several monographs, including Inherent Bootleg Histories of Videotape and copyright Paris Is Burning, a queer film classic, and most recently, the before trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight. For this episode, we talked to him about the Bars Are Histories and Cultures of Gay bars in America, 1960 and after, released by Duke University Press in 2023. Hey, Ryan, how are you today?
- [03:20]
Ryan Purcell
Hey, Christy, how are you?
- [03:22]
Christy Soares
I am great. I am so excited to get into this conversation with Lucas Hildebrand about his excellent book, the Bars Are Ours.
- [03:30]
Ryan Purcell
I absolutely love this book. It felt like a bar crawl across America, but one in which you dove into the history in each of these different distinct place. It's really fun.
- [03:38]
Christy Soares
Yeah. He takes us in the book to various different sites, including places like San Francisco and Kansas City. But today we're going to talk to him about his work on the gay scene in 1970s New York, which is.
- [03:49]
Ryan Purcell
Totally up our alley, because many of these bars that he's talking about in that chapter have to do with this culture that we're talking about in this series called Disco.
- [03:58]
Christy Soares
Yes. One thing that I found fascinating is that you and I have talked a lot already about house park parties, about discotheques and nightclubs, but what we haven't talked as much about are the baths and the kind of sex club and bath scene of New York City, which is also a site of disco and dance music.
- [04:15]
Ryan Purcell
That was a fascinating part of this conversation because it opened my eyes to this. This phenomenon that the clubs and discotheques we're talking about aren't exclusively just bars and discotheques. They're also used for other purposes, too, like bath houses and sex clubs.
- [04:31]
Christy Soares
Yeah. So thinking about the Continental baths, which is maybe the most famous, that ultimately launched the careers of Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, and even folks we don't necessarily associate with the bathhouse scene, like Bad Midler and Barry Manilow.
- [04:46]
Ryan Purcell
Here's a wrinkle in that story, because a group that I talk about in the previous season, New York Dolls, are also playing at the Continental Baths, which is fascinating to think about. It kind of speaks to that fluidity of genres that I was coalescing in New York city during the 1970s.
- [05:01]
Christy Soares
Yes. Fantastic. All right, should we get into it?
- [05:03]
Ryan Purcell
Totally. Let's go.
- [05:10]
Christy Soares
Lucas Hildebrand, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.
- [05:13]
Lucas Hildebrand
Thank you so much for the invitation.
- [05:15]
Christy Soares
We're so excited to talk to you. We love both of us, Ryan and I. Your book, the Bars are Histories and Cultures of Gay bars in America, 1960 and after, which was published in 2023 through Duke University Press. And I'm Going to go ahead and start with asking you a question about the tit. One of the things that I love about the book is the way you problematize the word hours. The bars are hours. And hours is, of course, a shifting category, a contested category. So I wonder if you could talk about hours. The bars are hours. What does that mean in the context of your book?
- [05:47]
Lucas Hildebrand
So the hours, as you pointed out, has a complicated meaning and it shifts across the book, and it's contested. And it's intended to signal both, on the one hand, a desire for, or at least a pretense of inclusion. So one of the ways in which I was inspired to write the book was to think about the ways in which the gay bar has historically functioned as the primary social institution of queer public life. But from the very beginnings of my research, it was very clear that that question of inclusion and who was included in that hours, who was welcome in these spaces, was very much contested. So from the late 60s onwards, we see a lot of protest within the queer community around questions of exclusion. And so many, many bars early on were exclusionary towards women, if they were male bars, trans people, and most visibly and most extensively documented racist admissions policies that excluded people of color from these spaces.
- [06:56]
Christy Soares
I love that. And I think it's particularly important in the history of disco dance music. In particular, the way that dance music cultures get written about is through this lens of sort of utopian inclusivity, which is a little bit different than the way that other music cultures get written about. So I think going into this conversation about the disco bars, in our case in 1970s New York, it's important to remember that they weren't all admitting everyone. Right. It's a subset. And you talk about that, about the specific bars.
- [07:23]
Lucas Hildebrand
Yeah, absolutely. And I think so in much, in many ways, disco music is this idealized music. And I think there's a couple reasons that we see that happen. So on the one hand, I think part of it is this recuperation because it wasn't taken seriously for so long, or it was culturally marginalized, whether in. Whether in terms of sort of what is good music and these questions of authenticity and sort of musicianship, or whether it's a question of who was participating in disco. And part of it we see is this reclamation of the sense of possibility and the sense of inclusion and the sense of pleasure and joy that disco allows. And I think that's very important as part of that history. But there's also the actual history of who was part of these scenes, who was making the music, who was dancing to the music. And I think one of the things that I learned early on, and I'm sure you've talked about Tim Lawrence's work across these podcasts about disco, sort of one of the foundational academic studies of disco. Looking at the evolution of DJ set lists and particular venues. The work by Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day, Life and Death on a New York Dance Floor. These books really advance the sense of a kind of utopian inclusion. But at the same time, these earliest parties were by invitation only, or you had to know the right people, you had to actually have the social ins. So even if they weren't exclusionary in the sense of identity categories, they were socially exclusive in some way. You had to have the right connection to know about the parties, to get into the parties and these kinds of things. And so on the one hand, within the space itself, there's this sense of radical inclusivity. But also looking at even the playlists themselves, music that we don't think of as disco is being played and danced to in ways that totally challenge a more sort of self conscious genre ification of disco music and kind of codification of what disco sounds like that comes by mid decade in the 1970s. So it's a really interesting history that is very complex and it is much like the hours of bars, a contested history of both who had access to these spaces, what had a kind of cultural legitimacy or what was taken seriously, and the ways in which sort of the late 70s backlash really changed the discourses around disco that I think actually were not reflective of what they meant in the gay male community in particular or the black community.
- [10:02]
Ryan Purcell
One of the things I loved so much about your book is exactly that, how you demonstrate that these are spaces that are very complicated. They're both spaces of liberation, but yet also spaces of exclusion and perhaps, perhaps even repression in some ways. For example, you write, if people hadn't had fun and found kindred spirits, gay bars would not have endured and evolved as they did. And people continue to experience the full range of tensions and release both within these bars in the past and in the present. And I'm thinking about what is the role of dancing in this relationship? What is the role of music in this relationship? Because you can have a gay bar, but you know, it's something different where people are dancing, people are brought together through the music. I'm wondering if you can talk about the role of the music and the relationship in your book, both with identity and sonic qualities within the bar.
- [10:54]
Lucas Hildebrand
So many histories of Nightlife, and particularly gay bars, if they don't sort of, if they bracket out discos or sort of other kinds of venues, I think overlook that sense of what was playing on the jukebox. What was the DJ playing? What was the soundscape of these spaces? And I think for many, many people, the spaces can be remembered and they're experienced through the mnemonic of what song they heard there. So sort of these moments of intensity, of joy, of release are so much identified with hearing a certain song at a certain club at a certain time. And I think that was really central to capturing the feeling of these spaces. What we also know and what I've experienced in my own life is that sort of, on the one hand, music shapes the space and it sort of creates a sensibility for space. It also reflects the space in terms of who the space is imagined to be for. So music really shapes and reflects sort of who is included in the hours of this particular space. And one of the things that's really interesting is that there will be times when you'll be on a dance floor and it's almost entirely white gay men dancing to black disco divas. And there's this kind of dissonance in terms of the voices you're hearing and the kinds of cultural imaginaries sort of produced through disco, but also who is sort of participating and sort of consuming that music. There's also times when I've been to even my own sort of local gay bar In Los Angeles, Akbar. There was a Janet Jackson night by the local DJ's rhythm. And she no, sorry, R. And she as a play on R and B. And I have never seen a more diverse group of people on that dance floor than Midnight because it drew in both the regulars, but also it drew in across generations, across demographics. It was the most sort of gender inclusive night I've ever seen at that bar. And so the music transforms who goes to the bar. And the music becomes a way of creating community, creating spaces, creating moments. That's very ephemeral and perhaps intangible, but that really structures the social dynamics of that space.
- [13:24]
Ryan Purcell
Yeah, I mean, that comes across very, very clearly in your, in your book where you talk about these bars as serving as kind of a social function, but also talking about the music as intertwined within that social function in terms of creating meaning within those spaces. I think that's so well done in this book. And I was wondering if we can step back for a moment and talk about the geography in your book and then perhaps zoom in and Talk about specifically New York city in the 1970s. And the first question I have is really about your process. I mean, in this book you're taking us all across the country, mostly set in the 20th century, the mid 20th century, but we're going to Canada, Kansas City, we're going to San Francisco, we're going to Chicago and New York and also all the smaller mid sizing cities in between. What was this research process like? It sounds like pretty much a tour across the country based on these different venues. Is that about accurate or is it accurate?
- [14:20]
Lucas Hildebrand
But it's more messy than that, it's more complicated than that. So when I started the book, I knew that I didn't want it to be a New York, San Francisco history. Obviously those cities are going to be in the book. But I knew from my own life that queer people are everywhere. Nightlife exists in different ways everywhere. And I grew up, I came of age in the 1990s and was coming out around the time that there was a lot of this discourse around the homogenization of gay scenes and the idea that gay bars are the same everywhere. And it was this sort of post. There's actually a discourse of post gay even at this point, this idea that we've already assimilated. And so there's no sort of specificity anymore. So on the one hand, sort of I came of age at a time where that felt like that was a sort of. I would say it's a very sort of privileged homo normative sensibility. But there was. We had gotten to a historical point where like that could even be imagined. But I also knew that there are local specificities. And so there was always this dichotomy of the local and the national, sort of the specific and the homogenized. What started to happen is that certain cities emerged both through the local and national gay press and through specific collections and archives that certain cities could tell certain stories. So for instance, the gentrification chapter happens in Boston, which was not my expectation going into the project. We tend to think of New York, San Francisco, Seattle, other cities as being where this happens. But I actually found a plurality of news articles that were actually far more radical and far more leftist and militant in the early 70s about what was happening in Boston, which is also earlier than I imagined. These discourses existed. And so then that became the city that can tell that story. Kansas City happened because there was a collection at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, called the Glamour Collection, which is an acronym for Gay and Lesbian Archives of Mid America. And it Happened that they had a collection related to a drag. Sorry, a female impersonation cabaret, which was one block away from a gay bar that had drag shows. Esther Newton had done her field research for Mother Camp, which was this landmark anthropology study of drag queens in America. And she had done field research in Kansas City at these two bars. And so between the archive and this landmark study, I began to have material to actually build out a story of sort of the differentiation of female impersonation and drag. Drag is a specifically gay cultural phenomenon that happens in Kansas City, which I think is not a city anyone would have expected to be in the book or to tell that story. So New York, obviously was always going to be in the book. And in terms of what New York would do, really sort of. I call it the greatest hits chapter in my book. Because it's the one that is, I think, the most expected chapter in a certain way. And it's dealing with what is sort of very much a Golden Age history, sort of with the rise of bath houses, sex clubs and discos in New York. And what was sort of both interesting and challenging in terms of doing that is, on the one hand, there are so many existing histories and accounts and glorifications of this period in this city, in this period. And I totally subscribed to it myself. It's like, you know, as a queer person growing up in the Midwest, like New York was the goal. New York is what I wanted to be and what I wanted to live. And on the other hand, interestingly, there were cities that had very, very robust local archives. And New York, strangely, I think because it had so much abundance, had actually less archival material than certain other cities. But one of the earliest research sites I had was the New York Public Library going through their collection of bar ephemera. And there was folders and folders of these very elaborate party invitations from the Saint Disco, which opened in 1980. So it's just after the 70s, but it's where the 70s continued in certain ways. And I knew that the Saint was going to be an important venue. And I also knew that the Paradise Garage, Larry Levin's club, which was only about a mile away from the Saint, and they're both downtown New York venues, one's east side, one's west side. That these were kind of the two exemplars of what disco could be and what New York disco and New York gay disco was. And they were very much racially coded as well. One was a black gay club and one was a white gay club, even though they Actually, both had white owners, but they had. They meant different things and they attracted distinct audiences. And my sense was that there was kind of shocking, shockingly little overlap between who went to these two places. And so they sort of. They sort of. They existed concurrently. They were very close geographically to each other, but they meant totally different things. And they became the two models of what sort of the greatest gay disco of all time might be.
- [19:52]
Christy Soares
Let's talk about some of those specific bars. One of the things you make really clear in your book, which I think is really astute, is that it's not very useful to try to define a bar from a disco from a right. Like, these are categories that flow in and out of each other. So in that way, in your chapter on New York, you're looking at bars, you're looking at bathhouses, you're looking at sex clubs. And I think one of the ways that the story of disco gets told is through the lens of the discotheque, of course, because of the similarities in the names. But of course, there was disco music, or what we would today call disco music in all of these sites. So I'm going to give you a specific quote that I would love to you to talk about, which is from your book. You're looking at Mineshaft, which is a sex club in New York, and there's this list of dress code, and it's basically rules to not have people be too fancy. No tuxedos. But one of them that stood out, and I'm sure it stood out to you, is no disco, drag or dresses. So I want to talk about why this sex club would have a rule that you can't come in wearing, quote, disco, drag or dresses, and how that might help us understand a little bit the relationship between the sex club and the discotheque.
- [21:01]
Lucas Hildebrand
Yeah. So what's interesting is that these venues exist in tension, and oftentimes they define themselves in opposition to each other, even though we also know people went to the disco and then they maybe went to the sex club afterwards, or, you know, sort of like people did flow between these different spaces, but they sort of put on and took off different kinds of identities. In other words, they sort of. They did. They did drag in terms of. They assumed different costumes and different sort of social roles in these spaces. But in terms of the sex clubs, there was really very rigid policing of masculinity, and that's really the primary thing here. And so what's interesting is that the sex clubs also played music. And what's very striking is the music is very different from what was playing at the discos, but it's about performing a certain kind of virility. I would even say sort of a pretense of rigor in terms of self presentation of masculinity. And I think part of that is a reclamation in the 1970s of masculinity and this idea that so many of the men going to these spaces would have grown up either seeing themselves as sissies or having been called sissy or other slurs, sort of, and. And been bullied around that. And so there was this sense in the 1970s of reclaiming our own masculinity and. And becoming the man of your own dreams, which is something that I quote from one of the people writing about leather culture of this time, that there's this sort of self. Self invention, self reclamation of a certain kind of masculinity. And I. And I think that there is a. There's a way in which I understand that the kind of work that does for someone in terms of their self esteem, in terms of their psyche, in terms of their sort of sense of self. I also find it to be an example of textbook toxic masculinity. So that again, there's these things coexist. Like, I understand why this cultural move happens, but I also think it becomes so policing in terms of a very rigid definition of what masculinity is. And the irony is that if you look at accounts of these spaces, there's policing of behavior within these spaces themselves. So one of the things that I found in the collections at the Leather Archive in Chicago were the personal papers of Wally Wallace, who was the owner or manager of the Mineshaft. And one of the things that we see is like a list of house rules for the membership. And one of them was like, you're welcome to talk about opera and Joan Sutherland's performance at the mat at this bar in this space, but you can't talk about it in the playroom in the back. Like, sort of. You can't talk about opera and be like a fagging out opera queen if you're in the fisting room. Like, that's just not allowed in that space. There's this sort of demarcation of where certain kinds of gay male connoisseurship around music, around opera. The kinds of musics that are encoded and connotative of gayness, of sissiness, of queenliness, get really regimented within these spaces. And what's interesting to me is that in many ways there's a kind of parallel between the Discos and the sex clubs in that they often operated overnight all hours. They're actually both in many ways about endurance. So if you read accounts of some of these dance clubs that you would dance for 12, 14 hours because you would be on a cocktail of different pharmaceuticals and drugs to sort of sustain your energy across all that. But it's this kind of body and mind altering experience of endurance on the dance floor that is a kind of rigor and it is about a kind of pushing yourself to your absolute physical limit in seeking a kind of personal liberation. And I think in many ways the sex clubs are doing some of the same things. These are sort of overnight all night venues that don't close, that operate 24 hours. And people are pushing themselves to a kind of physical limit to transcendental the confines that society has put on them, but also to sort of transcend the body and the body's limitations itself in a certain way. So there's a really interesting parallel between these spaces, but they mean different things to the community. They mean different things connotatively and again, sort of many of the men would have gone to both of these kinds of venues, but they meant different things and they were assuming different social roles and social performances in these different venues.
- [26:12]
Ryan Purcell
I really appreciate that description. You really get down to like the experience of the body within the space. And I'm thinking about, specifically to follow up on Christie's question, this differentiation and the variants of different spaces, specifically the bathhouses in relationship to the bars and discotheques, the content of the baths. In your book you talk extensively about the content of the baths and how as an industry, as a venue, it changes over time. And so in 1970 you say that the Continental bands start offering live music, hosting performances with Bette Midler and Barry Manilow and for example, and I'm wondering how you saw this space transform in the records and in the, you know, the sources that you're reading. Basically, you know, it's an establishment that's set up as a bathhouse with private rooms, it seems within. So where's the live, live entertainment being provided? Is there a stage on top of the, the baths or is it, is it adjacent to it? Like I'm. I'm trying to understand how there's, how that shared function is negotiated between performance venue and a bathhouse.
- [27:17]
Lucas Hildebrand
Yeah, so one of the things that we see in the late 60s, going into the early 70s, is this emergence of what's called the superbar. And I think historically it really coincides with this sort of mass Phenomena of people coming out. And there's this kind of scaling up of a sense of a gay community, particularly gay male community. And what we see sort of in terms of like a spatial replication of that is that venues begin to expand spatially and they begin to offer multiple kinds of things within the same space. So one of the sort of most prominent and influential early examples of that is the continental baths in New York. So it begins primarily as a bathhouse which has, you know, sort of has a pool, it has gym facilities, as a steam room, has sauna. And then they begin adding other things to it and expanding what it does. And the bath, the continental baths is one of the places where sort of it really informs sort of the logic of a venue can be many kinds of things. And there's no inherent contradiction in that. But there was also because it operated on a 24 hour schedule with no clocks inside, so you would lose your sense of time. But the idea was that we're offering something to everyone and this is kind of, it's about sort of improving and heightening the experience for the patrons and that we're going to offer many kinds of amusements, many kinds. So you would, you know, maybe you would go cruising for a while and then you would take a break by watching a live performance or maybe like, oh, I'm going to dance for a while. And then when I get. And then when it gets more crowded, then I'll go sort of cruise the steam room or whatever. And that sort of the idea that a space could do all these things, but also the people who go there could be going for that many different kinds of experiences really expanded the logic of what a queer venue could be. And what we see across the country is that venues begin replicating this both in terms of bath houses that just physically take over a lot of space. And I think part of the story, maybe I don't even really get into this in the book and should have. One of the things that makes this possible is the deindustrialization of cities in the late 60s and 1970s is that you have these warehouse spaces that are cheap and basically abandoned. And so there's just more real estate that you can fill with these kinds of venues. Because one of the things with a bathhouse is you, you typically need multiple floors of a building, you need a lot of space and you can convert it relatively cheaply with these sort of shoddy little private stalls and things. And you know, you just sort of paint everything black and it's sort of have dark corners it's actually, aside from the pool itself, it's a relatively cheap space to outfit, but it demands a lot of real estate and a lot of square footage to do it. And typically it exists across multiple floors. And so people can sort of migrate up and down throughout the building over the course of the night. And different floors will have different kinds of amusements or entertainments or cruising zones or private rooms or what have you. And my feeling is that very much the scaling up of the venues in the 1970s, but also this idea of having multiple things within a particular venue reflect this idea of the expansion of a gay world, the expansion of gay community, but also the sense of, like, there's many ways to be gay, and there's many sort of elements of gay life, and you can participate in all of those things in one venue. So, for instance, the first gay bar I ever went to, which wasn't really a favorite bar of mine, but it was the gay 90s in Minneapolis, which had a dance club, which is the main reason I went there, and they had 18 plus nights, so I could go there before I was 21. But they also had a leather bar, they had a drag cabaret, they had a western bar. They had all kinds of. They had a piano bar. They had all kinds of venues within the same single venue. And it reflected this idea of something for everyone, a kind of smorgasbord or buffet of what gay life could be and all the different kinds of possibilities. And a lot of sort of cities had these superbars in them, and New York and LA had more of the bathhouse version of that.
- [31:52]
Ryan Purcell
Can you talk just a few more sentences, a little bit more about this relationship that you're kind of tracing, this expansion of the industry, expansion of the bars? And is it. How. Is it parallel to, I suppose, LGBTQ activism, or is it about visibility? What is that relationship? Can you describe that a little bit more? Because it sounds very, very dynamic.
- [32:11]
Lucas Hildebrand
Yeah, I mean, so the. Actually, the relationship between particularly disco and activism is actually quite explicit. If we look at the Gay activist alliance or GAA firehouse of the early 1970s. So this was one of the two main activist groups that that sort of emerged in the wake of the Stonewall raid and riots. And Gay Activist alliance took residence of an abandoned firehouse, and they would host weekend dances. And one of the things that we see happen here is that part of this was creating an alternative to the bar scene, which was not only subject to police raids, but was also largely understood to be Mafia controlled. And so this created a space that was sort of by gay people for gay people. But also these dance parties really advanced, having a DJ spinning records. And that was in part not just a matter of logistics. And it's not just sort of about like, oh, this disco culture exists and we're going to do it here. But it was actually an explicit rejection of jukeboxes, which were also understood to be a concession operated by the Mafia. And so one of the things that's really fascinating to me is the way in which how music gets played in these venues is political. And so, on the one hand, it's about sort of rejecting Mafia control of these spaces. On the other hand, it's about we're going to curate our own experience and create sort of a live and dynamic relationship. It's not a preconceived set list. It's a DJ sort of who can see the crowd dancing and they can sort of play the crowd. And that really emerges at sort of, sort of, perhaps most notably in New York with Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage, who is known for effectively playing the crowd like, sort of. He was DJing the crowd. He wasn't just DJing records, he was DJing the crowd. And he was manipulating the crowd and playing records in a way that no one else was playing them to create an experience. And it was a kind of euphoric. It was communal. It was exhausting. People would, like, scream and shout, like, let us off the dance floor. And he would just keep playing the record and keep playing the groove and keep playing the hook and keep playing the refrain. And he was playing the crowd, and the crowd loved it, and that's why they went there.
- [34:42]
Christy Soares
Let's take a step back and explore the soundscape that we've been illustrating. Here's Bette Midler performing at the continental baths in 1972. I thought you had the big time. How come you keep going back to those baths? And I say, I like it. And they say, well, what's the matter with you, girl? And I said, well, you should just.
- [35:02]
Lucas Hildebrand
Get what I get after that.
- [35:36]
Christy Soares
I can tell. Now we have some audio of DJ Frankie Knuckles talking about his time at the Continental Baths in the documentary Liquid Vinyl.
- [36:02]
Frankie Knuckles
Continental Baths was a. Well, it was a bathhouse at Slash entertainment complex. And I guess I should talk about it a little bit because it's been gone for so long. There's a lot of people who probably wouldn't remember what it was. A number of different people got their start there. Bette Midler. Barry Manila was her piano accompanist. LaBelle. Patti LaBelle. They got their start there. It was a bathhouse and it had entertainment on the weekends, on Saturdays. So all these people would come in and they would perform on Saturday night in front of an audience full of guys sitting in towels. It wasn't just a bathhouse, you know, it had a full nautilus room and, you know, and sauna and Olympic swimming pool. And it had a, you know, it had a boutique in it. It had a bar, a restaurant, which is something that was just completely unheard of in those days. And it had the disco, they had the club. This was in. This was on the Upper west side. This is on 74th street between Broadway and West End and the Ansonia Hotel. There was one Saturday night that Mick Jagger came in to watch the show. At first he wanted to sit in his clothes and watch the show, but they told him he couldn't. He had to get in the towel. I think he got chased around there. But there was a lot of people. It was a wide spectrum of people that performed there. Beverly Sells, you know, she performed there. You know, I mean, people from, you know, from opera, everything. It was. It was on Saturday night, every Saturday night. That was my. That was my first real gig. Yeah, 1972.
- [37:31]
Narrator/Announcer
72.
- [37:33]
Frankie Knuckles
And I was there for. I was there until they closed in like 76. It was fascinating to me. And I mean, I was afraid to go to that place because I heard all kinds of stories about bathhousing and I didn't want to go anywhere near it. But Larry had already been working there for like about a year, and he had asked me to come and play on Mondays and Tuesdays, you know, So I figured, okay, well, this is a golden opportunity for me to really try and hone my skills, I guess, a little bit, or try and concentrate on the music and build my record collection and this, that and the other. And now, you know, I didn't take it serious at all. I just thought, you know, this could be a lot of fun. You know, I was still in high school, school, I can make some money, you know, I don't have to work during the day, that kind of thing. I mean, you got people walking around. Sometimes you have people that will come and just sit on the dance floor, sit directly across from the dance floor. Because right across from the dance floor was an Olympic sized swimming pool. And there were benches around there. And so I could play anything from classical, you know, or, you know, you know, or jazz or anything. I could play something, anything. I can go anywhere I wanted to you know, musically and stuff like that. And that was perfect for me.
- [38:38]
Christy Soares
Here's Larry Levan in 1990, reflecting on his time at the Continental Baths.
- [38:46]
Narrator/Announcer
Listen to yourself. Don't let people tell you what kind of music you should do, what kind of work, what's good, what's bad. Don't do it. Because if you listen and it doesn't happen, you're gonna hate them and yourself. So if you are interested in being an artist, and a true artist means one who believes in himself, second to God, that's an artist. And you gotta maintain that kind of thinking. You have to really, really get into yourself, I might say, you know, forget about the rest of the world. Just respect everybody, but respect yourself and believe in what you do.
- [39:34]
Christy Soares
All right, let's get back to our conversation. It's interesting to think about Levan in particular, and actually a lot of the gay DJs of this time, because they were playing the crowd, but they were also playing at the crowd, as you said. Larry Levan was famous for weaving a song in and out over an hour. So if you love that song, you couldn't leave the dance floor even if you had to pee and you were exhausted and you wanted a drink. You know, I'm thinking about also Richie Rivera, who played the firehouse Anvil. Flamingo is famous for similar behavior. I'm thinking about David Rodriguez, who was at Limelight, the first Limelight. They're all sort of famous for having this sort of, I'll tell you how to party. I'm gonna teach you how to party. I'm gonna curate the night in a way that was, I think, quite different from the way that the story gets told toward the end decade, when we're talking about your Studio 54s and sort of these high money players that are coming into these clubs and wanting to some extent, to be catered to. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about some individual DJs, maybe Larry Levan is a good place to start. Started in the bathhouses, famously, and then would go on, of course, to become maybe one of the most famous resident DJs of all time. What did you find out about Larry Levan in your research that maybe surprised you?
- [40:56]
Lucas Hildebrand
Yeah. You even acknowledge this? I mean, Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles started at the continental baths as DJs there, and then sort of would go on to their sort of respective glory at the Paradise Garage in New York and then the Warehouse in Chicago. And, I mean, so one of the things that I think is distinct between My research and Tim Lawrence's research. So Tim Lawrence is very focused on particularly DJs, what they played, coming up with the set lists. And it's really, really useful. I was a little bit less concerned with sort of the cult of individual DJs, aside from, I would say, Larry Levan, who. You couldn't even begin to talk about the Paradise Garage without talking about Larry Levan. It was, I think, more than any other venue in New York, it was understood as his club, even though he didn't actually own it. But Paradise Garage was him and he was Paradise Garage. And I think one of the things that differentiates and sort of how I understand the distinction between Paradise Garage and the Saint is that the Paradise Garage was about the music. And it was very much Larry's fiefdom in terms of creating a space and playing the audience. And the audience had to wait until he was ready. He would stop the music and shine up the mirror ball if he thought it wasn't glimmering just right. And it was all on his terms. And you accepted those terms because you knew it was going to be a transcendent experience. Whereas the Saint on the east side, which opens in 1980 and goes until 88, it was really about the built in environment. And it was intended to be this kind of seamless experience. The seamless experience. And one of the things we see is Larry Levin was really known for his embrace of lyrics, sort of, you know, discourses of love and sort of vocal music, whereas the Saint was really pushing more instrumental high energy that would sort of eventually sort of go into electronica, you know, by the 90s. But this idea of sort of removing some of the human touch from music in a certain way.
- [43:13]
Christy Soares
And we should probably say for folks that don't know that Larry Levan, of course, was a gay black dj.
- [43:17]
Lucas Hildebrand
Oh, yes.
- [43:19]
Christy Soares
In case folks don't know. Right.
- [43:20]
Lucas Hildebrand
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that, I mean, I just. That went without saying that. Yes, absolutely. It should be said. So. So, yeah, so Larry Levan was a. Was a gay black dj, and he was one of the figures who developed what would come to be called house music in a certain way. Sort of more famously associated with Frankie Knuckles at the warehouse where the word house comes from. But the Paradis Garage was one of the other clubs where house music really sort of. Or proto house music comes out of. The clubhouse in D.C. is another one which often falls out of that lineage, but also has house in the name, interestingly enough, but sort of one of the things that we see is the distinction between, on the one hand, the Paradise Garage is really about the music, and it's about the experience of the music, and it's about dancing music. And it's about the sort of intense, sweaty experience of this converted parking garage, which is pretty, pretty much a raw space that's really, really about the music and really about the dancing. Whereas the Saint is, interestingly, sort of the. The owners of the Saint didn't want the DJ to become more famous than the venue. And so they had a roster of house DJs that would rotate and each party would say who the DJ was. There was also accredited lights person for every party as well, which I think is an interesting distinction. You don't see very many other places, but on the one hand. But that was also a measure to sort of downplay the centrality of the DJ themselves. And it's more about creating a kind of built environment. So that famously, the dance floor at the Saint had a planetarium dome over the COVID and they had a star machine that could project all kinds of different things on the scrim. There were no walls, there were no sort of columns. There were no barriers around you. You felt like you were dancing out in the cosmos or out in a field with the stars over you. And it was this kind of total immersive experience. But it was really the built environment as much or more than the music that created the experience of that space. Whereas at the Paradise Garage, it was really the music.
- [45:33]
Ryan Purcell
That's a really great distinction there. And just to talk about one other venue, I'm very curious about one shared square, One Sheridan Square, which I think was the Haven at one point, a small club, almost literally subterranean. I think you had to go down underneath the street level to get there. But it has different incarnations as well. Before that, it was Cafe Society, where Billie Holiday sang Strange Fruit. And then after the Haven, this came up in my research, and I wonder if they came from yours as well. 1973, Gate Activist Alliance, I think, operate a club there called When We Win, which is very, very fascinating. And I know that long relationship between GAA Gay Activist alliance and GLF and the dances that they have in kind of unifying people. But did you come across When We Win in your research as well at 1 Sheridan Square?
- [46:26]
Lucas Hildebrand
You know, I actually haven't come across that. And so, I mean, I am. I'm trying to picture. I'm not sure exactly which building on Sheridan Square. One Sheridan Square would be. I think my guess is it's where the monster was. Later, based on your Description. But what's interesting is it's either across the street or on the same block as the Stonewall. So it also sort of points to sort of how local these histories are in many ways. That sort of the idea that these very, very key venues could be within the same block or across the street from each other, or that later on, you know, the Paradise Garage, the Saint, the GAA Firehouse and the Stonewall are all, you know, effectively within a square mile. They're all very, very close geographically. And so obviously New York City is bigger than that. But where these things happen, happen in very sort of localized ways.
- [47:18]
Ryan Purcell
Now, about the transformation of these spaces and also the transformation of music and if you will, this kind of scene that you're. You're painting in New York city during the 1970s, a very hyper local scene based on institutions in very close proximity. By the mid-1970s, Saturday Night Fever, the movie, comes out popularizing what we now call disco music to very high level commercial audiences. And I'm wondering if you see the release of this movie transforming the culture in gay bars, bathhouses and sex clubs during this time as well.
- [47:54]
Lucas Hildebrand
Well, what's interesting is that. So I think one of the effects of Saturday Night Fever, and I would say even its soundtrack, more than the film itself in certain ways, and actually I think the soundtrack was a bigger phenomenon than the movie perhaps, is that it sort of becomes this explosive phenomenon within the sort of straight white world. But queer people and people of color and queer people of color had been living disco for a decade before that, and they continued living disco for at least a decade after that. And so there's this way in which I think kind of like the way I talk about Studio 54 is. Studio 54 often sort of sucks all the air out of the room as this sort of like that is what disco was, or like that is the one venue that sort of in the popular imagination, defines what a disco was in a certain way. And one of the ways I approached Studio 54 is to think about that this was a club that wasn't explicitly gay, but basically what it did is it mainstreamed gay culture. And so. And it sort of. It took many of the elements of gay culture and sort of opened them out in a way that became the most famous nightclub of all time. But it was never the most important nightclub in the gay community or in the gay scene. So it sort of. It was a. It was a. It was a club that was like culturally gay, but was. But was sort of on a different scale and to a Different audience in a certain way. But it was. No, it was actually never as important as Paradise Garage or Flamingo or the Saint were for the gay male, white, gay male scene. So. So I think some of the same things are true of Saturday Night Fever. Is that sort of. Yeah, it was this sort of explosive moment in the mainstream culture, but it didn't, as far as I could tell, actually redefine anything for the queer clubs because it was seen as such a straight phenomenon. I think the one thing it did do is that it sort of did generate a bubble of more music because just every sort of every label and every artist had their sort of disco record or disco mix or whatever, cashing in on this as a phenomenon. So there was probably more music to play. But interestingly, if you look at what was actually playing in many of these clubs, it wasn't necessarily reflecting mainstream disco either. So, like, it was sort of gay male disco culture often still had its own specificity. And I would actually argue the golden age of gay disco in New York is the 1980s, is actually not the 1970s. And so even though you have the disco sucks backlash at the end of the 70s, it's actually sort of the Paradise Garage and the Saint reach their peak, and the Saint only exists in the 1980s. And so that actually becomes this golden age after the straight people have, like, sort of forgotten about disco and it becomes gay again.
- [50:59]
Christy Soares
This makes me think about a parallel between the way that disco is narrativized and the way that gay bars are narrativized, which is that people love to say that they're dead or dying.
- [51:10]
Lucas Hildebrand
Yes.
- [51:10]
Christy Soares
I'm wondering, as a cultural historian, if you could theorize why that is. What is the utility of saying that disco and gay bars are always dead or dying, even though we know, of course, that both are alive and well as we speak?
- [51:27]
Lucas Hildebrand
Well, I think it's one of these things. Well, I think there's many things going on here, and I've. And part of. So when I started working this project, there was the emergent discourse of the gay bars dying. And so part of doing the project at the beginning was, oh, I want to sort of document them before they're gone, before I forget them. And, you know, I continued to work for 15 years and they still existed. But I finished revising the book in the wake of COVID and a lot of the writing happened in lockdown. And a couple of things mattered around that. So on the one hand, sort of finishing the book in that context sort of reaffirmed the need for these kind of shared public spaces in this moment when we couldn't really have them. And we begin seeing a lot of tributes and sort of nostalgia for gay bars and for dancing in that moment. But also what I've seen again and again and again, and this is true of some of my other work about other things that were sort of. Of supposedly obsolete forms, is that I often find claims to obsolescence sort of overstated. So, yes, statistically, we've lost about half of gay bars in the US in the last since the turn of the millennium. But sort of a loss of absolute numbers doesn't mean the culture has ended. So there's different ways. You could say, well, okay, we've lost half of gay bars and so the gay bar is dying. You could also say, well, half of them still exist. And so they still exist. And what's particularly interesting is I've seen a number of bars sort of opening and trying to imagine sort of new communities, new forms in the wake of COVID I think part of it was that there was a sense that we do need these shared spaces. There's also, I think, a new generational relationship where it's about sort of reimagining who is the gay bar for and what is it, what forms would it take for a new generation that wants something different, that maybe doesn't have an attachment to the existing form as it existed? And so one of the things I've seen is that the gay bar has been very responsive to, or at least the gay bars that succeed and survive have been responsive to their context and to sort of adapting to their time and to their markets. But also, it's a relatively recent phenomenon that we think a gay bar should last forever. Historically, a lot of these venues were short lived. Some of the most famous bars, the Stonewall, existed for like six months. It was not sort of a long standing institution. And so I think it's also we need to think about the bars that actually define a period often are not the bars that last forever. And the same with parties, the same with discos. And I think that that actually really changes how we think about this question of longevity or sort of cultural impact.
- [54:43]
Ryan Purcell
Well, speaking about cultural impact, your book takes us on a long journey in American history, all the way up into 2016 with the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Could you talk a little bit about why that's a good ending point or what role that specific scene plays in this longer narrative?
- [55:02]
Lucas Hildebrand
When Pulse happened, One of the things that happened in the wake of Pulse is that it produced so much outpouring of these tributes to gay bars and why they matter and also Latin night and dance nights and parties and why they matter. And almost immediately, it was just clear to me, like, that's where the book ends. Not to say that this is the end of the gay bar, but that this event re articulates the significance emotionally, politically, communal, communally, why gay bars matter and why. And why dance clubs and parties matter to people. So. And a lot of that was written by people who, like, well, I used to go out a lot, and I don't anymore, but it shaped who I am or have these attachments to it. And it just became a very clear way to articulate the stakes and why this matters and sort of the kinds of personal and emotional weight that these venues and spaces and events have for the people who are shaped by them.
- [56:15]
Ryan Purcell
Well, we've peppered you of questions, and I think that, you know, our perspective comes from the fact that this book has been so exciting for us to read and explore in the context of this larger project that we're conducting here. And I can't help but think that other readers find that same excitement and the responses that you've given or so illuminating to this history. Really appreciate it.
- [56:36]
Lucas Hildebrand
Thank you.
- [56:36]
Ryan Purcell
You're very welcome. And again, thank you so much for this conversation. Really learned a lot actually, from this conversation. And, yeah, I look forward to reading and see what you have coming up next. Thank you very much.
- [56:47]
Christy Soares
Thanks, Lucas.
- [56:48]
Lucas Hildebrand
Thank you so much.
- [56:49]
Ryan Purcell
Bye. Bye.
- [56:49]
Lucas Hildebrand
Bye. Bye. Okay.
- [56:56]
Christy Soares
That was our conversation with Lucas Hildebrandt. I hope it was as fun for you to listen to as it was for us to record. So, Ryan, what'd you think of that conversation?
- [57:04]
Ryan Purcell
I absolutely loved it, partly because it provided a context for later conversations that we'll have with people like Felipe Rose, who's discovered at the Anvil, one of the gay clubs that Hildebrand explores. It was fantastic.
- [57:16]
Lucas Hildebrand
Yeah.
- [57:16]
Christy Soares
When we talk to Rose in a couple episodes, he's going to tell us the story of when Jacques Morali, the eventual producer of the Village People, walked into the Anvil and saw Rose performing as what he called a Go Go dancer in his American Indian attire and ultimately decided to build the concept of the Village People around this moment that he saw at the Anvil.
- [57:35]
Ryan Purcell
And that's part of what I like about this series so far, is that the juxtaposition between scholars and primary sources really brings this history to life.
- [57:44]
Lucas Hildebrand
Yeah.
- [57:44]
Christy Soares
One way that I think people can actually get in touch with this history itself is by visiting the Bars Are Archived, which is Lucas Hildebrand's archival project put together through Alexander Street. And if you Google the Bars Are Archive, you'll find this amazing archive of primary documents, flyers, receipts, visual ephemera from queer bars throughout history. It's really cool. I would check it out.
- [58:09]
Ryan Purcell
That sounds really fascinating and a tremendous resource for scholars that dive further into this history.
- [58:14]
Christy Soares
So our next episode is interesting because we're gonna be speaking to Gillian Frank, who actually is talking a little bit about the backlash against this kind of gay world of disco, as evidenced in the so called disco demolition night, which is under understood as the night, quote unquote, disco died.
- [58:32]
Ryan Purcell
We're fast forwarding the chronology to 1979 and transitioning to Chicago where all this action takes place. And it will enrich the conversations that we've already presented in this series. Now I just want to give a few shout outs. First to the Gotham center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate center in Midtown Manhattan. To the generous support of the Urban History association and to Fordham Lincoln center where I teach American Studies.
- [58:55]
Christy Soares
Thank you. Also to the the Society for American Music for its funding. And also to the University of Colorado Boulder President's Fund for the Humanities. Follow us on Socials on Instagram, that's soundscapesnyc. On Instagram, that's soundscapesNYC.
- [59:09]
Ryan Purcell
And finally, thank you for tuning in.
- [59:12]
Christy Soares
I'm Christy Soares.
- [59:13]
Ryan Purcell
And I'm Ryan Purcell.
- [59:14]
Christy Soares
Until next time.
- [59:20]
Narrator/Announcer
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