That arrogant young gun at the console is going to be sleeping with an extremely sore ass tonight. So is the current crop of journalists whose butts I sure as hell would like to smack. A rash of their reports has been rolling off the press of late, bearing in common only a determination to eulogize dance music and its centrality to the gay experience. Excuse me, but bpm is as essential to the buggery buzz as _c_o_c_k_ rings. Were you born with an insatiable desire to shake your tush on the dance floor? Perhaps I'm a closet straight, but my teenage fantasies revolved around fundamentals and phalluses, not divas and club mixes.
My first post-coming out visit to the scene had me convinced I was straight and it really was just a phase I was going through. What the _f_u_c_k_ was going on? Here was twenty years of suppressed _s_e_x_uality straining at the leash, two decades of masked male fixation coming to fruition, and here were my role models – mouthing the words to some pop on PWL as if they held within them the essence of homo_s_e_x_ual life. Just how much DDR do you have to swallow before it gets down to _c_o_c_k_? Of all the debatable contributions to the culture of the faggot – all the way from the Gay Men's Press novel to butt plugs – disco, house, techno and the whole motley crew of dance styles have to be the most invidious. Ninety-nine percent of dance music is functional vacuous wallpaper, but that proportion is no different from music, period. It is also true that a guitar and a winsome whine don't guarantee an audience with the muses: have a sniff at the queerscore scene and it's little more stimulating than a muso rant.
Dance music has strange effects. Take the innocuous horrors of the scene – preening pec queens, the reek of poppers, cruising – add a thrumming kick drum and within seconds it's transmogrified into writhing deformed flesh, purulent brimstone stenches and carnivorous cardiophagic droolings straight off the brush of Hieronymus Bosch. Within weeks of his initial exposure, the inchoate invert ripe for corruption has become a harmless disco bunny with features clenched in an endless Ecstasy grimace. How did homos become hooked on the hi-hat? The gay 'cultural' commentators' argument has it thus: pre-AIDS, the dance floor generated a sense of community and closeness – albeit temporarily – and it acted as a moral parade for courtship displays and mate selection. The post-AIDS house etc boom is an affirmation of life, a way to exorcise the demon of HIV, and the ultimate safer _s_e_x_. Or, if you believe Gay Times, gays just like techno (so who's stereotyping whom?).
All very clever, but isn't the truth closer to straightforward Pavlovian conditioning? Salivation at the sound of the beat? There's very little alternative to the scene, and with wall-to-wall white labels at every venue, it's difficult for even the most determined not to associate dance with what it's all about – _s_e_x_uality. At its least romantic, dance music is just another drug (like all prolonged physical pummeling, a good boogie gets the body spurting those beta-endorphins, curious chemicals that act precisely like smack). The ultimate conformity drug (unless there's been an outbreak of orolabial herpes). A drug that provides an easy living to a whole rogues' gallery of pimps and pushers, writers, DJs (the ultimate parasite, the whore to the floor, a five minute art and an infinite arrogance), remixers (see under DJs) and the clubs themselves (the more you dance the more you drink; keep 'em on the floor and the wallet's not waltzing out the door: muzak for the _s_e_x_ supermarket).
This pop pharmaceutical, as writer John Gill has pointed out, is created almost exclusively by hets, predominantly of the homophobe variety. The AIDS pronouncements of Gloria Gaynor and Donna Summer have been oft reported, although if anything's the curse of the Almighty it's the music of these two. Still, that's no reason to _d_a_m_n_ the entire genre. After all, everyone's a capitalist now, and the holding of warped views and adherence to degenerate credos might be witless and objectionable; and although Clinton and his cronies are no longer clinging to the couch at the White House that's still unlikely to become a capital offence.
There might be a positive note. The popularization of dance culture is transforming the common conception of the fag as sad lisping pervert, and doing so immeasurably more effectively than a theaterful of luvvies or a bunch of professional committee sitters on a must-do-lunch offensive. Unfortunately, the humble homo is now perceived as an E-popping, good-time groove guy with a hotline to the right sounds.
"Mum, Dad," stutters the nervous teenager. "I've got something to tell you .... I'm gay."
"Fine son. Can you make us a tape of Reactivate 9?"
The gay scene sucks. And so, much as I love him some of the times, that son of a bitch DJ saluting the entire rave culture to a vinous stupor, is going to be baring his beaten arse for my roommates tonight. Besides, it IS time for that once-a-month airing of his private parts.