Sylvester: Remembering the Inspirational Life of an LGBTQ Musical Pioneer
(Billboard) With a gorgeous, androgynous falsetto that powered futuristic disco hits “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Do Ya Wanna Funk,” Sylvester was a musically singular talent whose mélange of disco, soul, hi-NRG and dance made him one of the most uncategorizable talents of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
He was also an unabashedly queer presence in an era not terribly warm to LGBTQ voices, an artist who embraced the gender spectrum decades before ‘gender queer’ became part of the national conversation.
Being black and queer, Sylvester is often unfairly relegated to the status of minor footnote in pop history. But even 29 years after his death, his fearless, pioneering life remains a source of inspiration.
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Sylvester Turned Others’ Prejudices Into Assets
“He was black, gay and some form of gender queer before there was that term,” Gamson says. “All these things that were the basis for marginalization, he turned into superstardom for a minute. He turned things that were used to stigmatize him into assets.”
Sylvester Was One of the First Openly Gender Fluid Musicians
Sylvester’s gender identification “depended on what day you caught him,” Gamson says. “It was a fluid gender more than anything else. Sometimes he was male identified, other times Sylvester was full-on drag queen, but mostly it was some combination. When I was interviewing people, they would sometimes refer to Sylvester as she and he. Most people experienced him as male or just Sylvester. He was not easily classified in terms of gender. A lot of people first met him and thought he was a woman. But if you were at a gay bar and he was in boy drag, that's how you saw him. To him, it was all drag more or less.” ........(more)
https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/pride/7850196/sylvester-pioneer-lgbtq?
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I have a really, really cool Sylvester story!
In the early 80's one of my best friends was living in The Bay Area with her fiance who had been transferred there for work.
They had decided to get married so another one of our good friends and I flew up there (from TX) to be in the wedding as we had all been friends since elementary school. We were in our 20's and "sewing our wild oats". To say we had an absolute blast in San Francisco is a major understatement. We also engaged in really stupid and risky behavior.
One afternoon we ended up at an amazing pub in the coolest mountain town called Mill Valley. Sylvester and his band were on stage jammin'. There were very few people in the bar since it was in the middle of the day in the middle of the week.
When they took a break they came over to our table and asked if we wanted to go outside and smoke a doobie! Naturally we did and we had the best time!
Through the years it's one of those stories that comes up when people are chatting and asking what's something you've done that was fun and you'll never forget. This is normally the first thing I say....
