after the Stonewall riots spread outward from their origins in tiny Greenwich Village bars and downtown lofts. While the mainstream music press has worked overtime to canonize rock clubs like CBGB and the string of venues along L.A.’s Sunset Strip, the gay clubs of the 20th and 21st centuries have played a crucial role in shaping the soundtracks of our lives.ĭance music as we know it was born in the early 1970s, when the first wave of clubs to spring up across the U.S. Gay clubs have had immeasurable worldwide historical and cultural value to popular music, particularly to the development of electronic and dance music in all their forms.
When mass murderer Omar Mateen opened fire last weekend on Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, he took aim at an institution.
Few of the revelers could have known that they were witnessing the dawn of a musical revolution called disco, or that their radical idea of how to spend a Saturday night would eventually evolve into modern clubbing and spread to every corner of the world. A deconsecrated church decorated with a mural of nude angels engaged in kinky sex acts, the Sanctuary was designed for transgression and excess, and the crowds of gay men reaching ecstatic states en masse to the drum-crazed sounds Grasso was spinning fit the bill perfectly. Grasso favored Latin music, African rhythms, big beats, and body music, and found dance-floor devotees in Sanctuary’s diverse clientele. Grasso was unlike any other DJ working at the time: He pioneered the idea of blending songs together seamlessly to keep partygoers dancing. In 1970, Sanctuary, a foundering nightclub in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, rebranded itself as a gay club, hiring a local disk jockey named Francis Grasso to provide the music.