Happy Birthday to Sylvester, the “Queen of Disco,” who would have been 66-years-old today.
As m’colleague Niall O’Conghaile has previously written:
If there’s any one artist who represents everything that was revolutionary about disco music, it was Sylvester. It doesn’t matter how many Bee Gees, Ethel Mermans, Rod Stewarts, Boney Ms et al you can throw at the genre as a reason to hate it, the fact is that if it wasn’t for disco there is no way that a linebacker-sized, black, openly gay, outrageous, gender-bending performer like him could have reached the top of the world’s charts.
Sylvester broke every taboo going. In fact he didn’t just break them: he tore them up, threw them on the floor and stamped on them with uproarious glee, all while dragging you out to dance with his irresistable energy. He didn’t have to shout about any of his social or political inclinations because he was already living them, out in the open, for everyone to see.
Sylvester didn’t make “political music” because he didn’t have to: Sylvester’s very existence was inherently political.
Sylvester James jnr. was born in Watts, Los Angeles, on September 6th 1947. He started his singing career with the choir at his local Pentecostal Church. Openly gay from a very early age, Sylvester quit the church allegedly aged 13, after being persecuted by the Jesus-lovers, who it has been said would beat him, punch him and spit on him, for having a consensual relationship with a much older “man of the cloth.” Even so, Sylvester would retain a deep love of the church and Gospel-singing.
By 16, Sylvester was homeless and living by his wits. But his desire to sing eventually led him to start a band of black cross-dressers and trans-women called The Disquotays—this at a time when it was possible to be arrested in LA and charged with “masturbation” for cross-dressing in public. After The Disquotays disbanded in 1970, Sylvester joined the legendary, radical, hippie, drag troupe The Cockettes, performing with them in San Francisco, where he became a major sensation—receiving standing ovations whenever he performed. When The Cockettes toured New York to negative reviews, Sylvester quit the band (famously making his announcement to quit onstage) and began his solo career - performing and recording his first album with backing group The Hot Men, then gigging with three of The Pointer Sisters as his backing.
However, it was his teaming with Two Tons of Fun (later known as The Weather Girls of “It’s Raining Men” fame), that Sylvester became the major star of Disco and Soul. As his biographer Joshua Gamson wrote in The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the 70s in San Francisco:
“Something clicked and sighed into place when Sylvester and the Tons got together – something that wasn’t there with the Hot Band white boys, for all that they could cook; something that wasn’t there with Peter Mintum, for all the beautiful oddness that he and Sylvester shared; something that wasn’t even there with the black drag-queen singers, for all the fierceness they projected. Izora and Martha were whom he came from and who he was… They were women who got their own. They sounded right with Sylvester, and looked just right, one on either side of him. Plus, next to them, Sylvester, who had grown quite round, looked positively svelte.”
In 1977, Sylvester relased his self-titled album, followed by the superb Step II in 1978, from which came his best known single (originally a Gospel tune) “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”
Happy Birthday Sylvester—supreme singer, performer and “Queen of Disco”!