When My World Was Young 1945-56 The Yellow Brick Road 1956-60 What a Wonderful Town 1960-61

Wonderful Town (pt. II) 1962-66 The Gay Sixties 1966-70 The Juicy Life 1971-76

Juicy Life (pt. II) 1976-80 Losing Alexandria 1981-87 The AIDS Spectacle

Losing Alexandria (pt. II) 1987-1990's


the JUICY LIFE

1970 - 19 74

Lush Life is a classic torch song which has been recorded by many jazz vocalists. It was written in 1938 by Billy Strayhorn and offered to bandleader Duke Ellington; a year later the openly gay Strayhorn had become his arranger and composer-in- residence. Ellington called Strayhorn, "my listener, my most dependable appraiser [and] critic." Lush Life is a sardonic lament for a life of luxury, sex and parties. It was rather odd that this old song was recorded by Donna Summer of all people in the early 80s - done in a fairly straightforward fashion and plunked down in the middle of the disco diva's new album.


Or was it so odd?


Billy Strayhorn

Strayhorn's wry label "lush life" may have been appropriate to his time, but in the 70's some gay men created a lifestyle that was beyond lush. The era when gay men ornamented their subculture with borrowings and fantasies from the world of entertainment and café society, and circled elite cultural and social circles like bees around flowers was falling into twilight. There was another gay style in the making, and it was a melange of the "sexual revolution," drug culture, Hippies, black music and urban attitude, Tom of Finland...add sex to taste and stir. Ironically, as this lifestyle evolved, now straights came to it as voyeurs and hangers on, and they became the borrowers, circling around a world of gay discos, parties and resorts.

It had a quality of over-ripeness. It was the Juicy Life

For the few it ultimately became the life where more wasn't better...it was never enough.

John Tristram

That only a relatively small number of men, in a few urban areas, were totally wrapped up in living this way to the max is not the point. This lifestyle was to become in the minds of many gay men, and some straight people as well – for better, and often for worse – the signature of gay life.

As knowledge of the Stonewall raid and Gay Pride parade spread across the U.S. - and the rest of the world – the public commemorations it inspired became, as much as anything, pageants of this new urban gay lifestyle. While the events of June '69 were often known in only the vaguest way – even among many New Yorkers – the word "Stonewall" took on the significance of an invitation to celebrate living an openly gay life. In the city the first years of what became an annual parade saw plenty of political placards, raised fists, chanting, etc. in the Sixties style, but rather quickly – especially after the marches reversed direction and ended in the Village rather than uptown – a tone of joyful physicality and exuberance was predominate.

I think it would have been around 1969 that Ken brought back some copies of the Advocate from a business trip to the West Coast. And as slick gay publications began to proliferate and become available across the country what was being publicized was the way of life in places like New York and San Francisco.

THE FIRST DISCO?

In an era that encouraged eroticism and public display, combined with a new and increasing tolerance for gays – e.g. liberalized laws allowing same sex dancing – gay men found – and eventually helped shape - one stream of American pop music as an expression of their liberation. While the juke boxes in gay bars had been barometers reflecting changes in gay taste, and its increasing divergence from that of mainstream white audiences, it was the dance bars, of course, that underscored that this music was for the body, not just the ears. Despite latter day vilification of bars and clubs of this era as "racist," my own personal observation was that blacks and Hispanics were a presence there, whereas they were much more rarely so in straight places. And I believe this was one of the pipelines for gay venues into the music of non-white night life. In time the dance places were providing such an overload of feedback that it killed the juke box in most gay bars in the city.

Arthur, run by Sybil Burton, ex-wife of actor Richard, opened in New York and was the first discotheque with a format similar to what later became familiar – a "discaire" (DJ) playing a thought-out mix