That kind of gender play and refusal of gender and sexual categories, that overt homosexuality and sexuality, seemed strange, and here we are 30 years later and the world is starting to catch up. There’s a quote from him, when he was on stage, something like, ‘Folks think we’re strange but they’ll catch up.’ It feels to me that’s what’s happening. He was about being as fabulous as you can be, so I felt pushed to make the book the best I could get it to be.
#DISCO CULTURE AMP FREE#
“There’s something about what he was about – being free and being fabulous – that is a very powerful energy that can linger,” Gamson says. He was part of it and produced the soundtrack to it.” (Much like he built off the Cockettes, others springboarded off his success – his backup singers, Two Tons O’ Fun, would later rename themselves The Weather Girls and record one of the all-time gay anthems, “It’s Raining Men.”) With disco, people were celebrating a kind of freedom he came to represent.
He was in and around the Cockettes in the early ‘70s, and they were doing outrageous countercultural stuff. “He took what was going on in the communities he was a part of and elevated and exploded it for other people. There was Bowie, Grace Jones, and he came from communities of people doing some version of that - they just weren’t doing it in front of huge audiences,” Gamson says. He had hits on his own queer, gender-fucky terms. “He was certainly a pioneer, doing something people hadn’t been doing publicly, getting recognized for it and making it work. But if you were at a gay bar and he was in boy drag, that’s how you saw him. A lot of people first met him and thought he was a woman. He was not easily classified in terms of gender. Most people experienced him as male or just Sylvester. When I was interviewing people, they would sometimes refer to Sylvester as she and he. Sometimes he was male identified, other times Sylvester was full-on drag queen, but mostly it was some combination. “It was a fluid gender more than anything else. Sylvester’s gender identification “depended on what day you caught him,” Gamson says.
Sylvester Was One of the First Openly Gender Fluid Musicians He turned things that were used to stigmatize him into assets.” “All these things that were the basis for marginalization, he turned into superstardom for a minute. “He was black, gay and some form of gender queer before there was that term,” Gamson says.
Sylvester Turned Others’ Prejudices Into Assets To close out Pride Month, Billboard spoke with Joshua Gamson, author of the wonderful biography The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, The Music, The Seventies in San Francisco, for a primer on the many ways Sylvester was a pioneer and remains an inspiration. But even 29 years after his death, his fearless, pioneering life remains a source of inspiration. Jennifer Lopez, Halsey, Brendon Urie, Senator Elizabeth Warren & More Pen 'Love Letters to the…īeing black and queer, Sylvester is often unfairly relegated to the status of minor footnote in pop history.
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