Tim Anderson

“Remarkably, Midler and some of her musicians got their breaks in a bathhouse designed to give men a safe space for spontaneous trysts. Opened in 1968 by bisexual entrepreneur Steve Ostrow, the Continental Baths—a sex club in the basement of the Ansonia, a residential hotel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side—facilitated gay liberation in New York by making it far easier to have man-on-man intercourse. Bathhouses, like the Continental and the Everard Baths, offered refuge from the condemning eyes of the outside world as well as an immersive, nonstop sensual experience in which physical pleasures could overlap endlessly, like one record segued into another through a seamless DJ mix. Bathhouses were like discos of the flesh—often sordid, but still oases.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“As the theorist Susan Sontag, who was bisexual, wrote in her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“Disco’s earliest platinum album, 1974’s Nightbirds, proved how big a record could get if overlapping LGBTQ and Black audiences got behind it. Labelle’s ferocity finds flattering compliment in producer Allen Toussaint’s New Orleans funk, which grounds Hendryx’s inclusive rock ’n’ soul as the Meters’ propulsive accompaniment sprinkles gumbo spice in disco’s melting pot.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000

“the Continental’s context, heterosexual monogamy is artifice, while gay promiscuity is natural. That, my darlings, is camp, but also poignancy: She lionized what we could not yet do.”
― Barry Walters, Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music, 1969-2000