Sylvester - "Over and Over"

Normally during PRIDE month (June) I do my best to post only or mainly LGBTQIA+ Artists. In light of the civil unrest around the nation and the injustices that have been forced upon the Black Community through years of enslavement, systemic racism, widespread oppression, and a set of generational socioeconomic traps, I thought this year it would be important to spotlight just how many QUEER BLACK ARTISTS changed and shaped the world through music, arts, culture, and activism.

So this June I will spotlight all Queer Black Artists to show you one more way in which we should be grateful for to the Queer Black Community and how without them we would not have the world or nation that we love so much. We should be grateful and proud.

BLACK LIVES MATTER + PRIDE (LGTBQIA+ Allies)

Sylvester James Jr. who used the stage name of Sylvester, was an American singer-songwriter. Primarily active in the genres of disco, rhythm and blues, and soul, he was known for his flamboyant and androgynous appearance, falsetto singing voice, and hit disco singles in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Born in Watts, Los Angeles, to a middle-class African-American family, Sylvester developed a love of singing through the gospel choir of his Pentecostal church. Leaving the church after the congregation expressed disapproval of his homosexuality, he found friendship among a group of black cross-dressers and transgender women who called themselves The Disquotays. Moving to San Francisco in 1970 at the age of 22, Sylvester embraced the counterculture and joined the avant-garde drag troupe The Cockettes, producing solo segments of their shows which were heavily influenced by female blues and jazz singers like Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. During the Cockettes' critically panned tour of New York City, Sylvester left them to pursue his career elsewhere. He came to front Sylvester and his Hot Band, a rock act that released two commercially unsuccessful albums on Blue Thumb Records in 1973 before disbanding.

"When I was little, I used to dress up, right? And my mother said, 'You can't dress up,' " Sylvester told Joan Rivers when he appeared on The Tonight Show in 1986. " 'You gotta wear these pants and these shoes. And you have to, like, drink beer and play football.' And I said, 'No I don't!' And she said, 'You're very strange.' And I said, 'That's OK!' "

"The [Pentecostal] church was oppressive," says singer Jeanie Tracy, who shared Sylvester's religious background and became his friend and collaborator. "They just didn't tolerate gayness. They didn't tolerate a lot of things. They didn't allow you to wear makeup. You couldn't wear toeless shoes or sleeveless dresses. It was just real ... controlled."

Too much so for Sylvester. At 13, he left the church. Two years later, he left home. He lived with friends and his grandmother, who accepted him as he was.

In his early 20s, Sylvester moved to San Francisco to join an avant-garde theatre troupe called The Cockettes, whose fans included Truman Capote and Gloria Vanderbilt. But he left the group soon after — to front his own act. Jeanie Tracy remembers being introduced to him by friends in the music industry.

"They said, 'Oh, Jeanie, this is Sylvester,'" she says. "And I said, 'Sylvester? I thought you were a woman.' And then I said, 'Oops! I'm sorry!' He goes, 'Oh, no, girl, that's okay!'"

When guitarist and songwriter James Wirrick saw the singer for the first time, Sylvester was backed by a tight three-piece band and flanked by two drag queens — "in full drag, with full neck-beards," he laughs.

Wirrick became Sylvester's bandmate and collaborator a few months later. By then, the drag queens had been replaced by backup singers Izora Rhodes and Martha Wash, aka Two Tons O' Fun. (They went on to record another anthem — "It's Raining Men" — as The Weather Girls.) Wirrick and Sylvester wrote "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" together. Getting the rest of the band on board was a challenge.

"At first the band didn't wanna play it as a dance tune," Wirrick says. "They were kinda snotty about it. 'We don't really wanna do that,' y'know? And Sylvester and I kept saying, 'No, you have to do that because that's what's on the radio.' "

More than on the radio, the song was a huge it in discos — and its falsetto vocals, four-on-the-floor beat and bouncing synthesizer influenced generations of electronic dance music producers to follow. Eleven years after the original came out, vocalist Jimmy Sommerville of the British band Bronski Beat paid tribute with a cover. The following decade, Chicago House vocalist Byron Stingily's version once again took the song to the top of the U.S. dance chart.

The song also went on to become the centerpiece of a 2014 off-Broadway musical that tells Sylvester's life story. It's appeared in ads, films, and TV shows. So far this year, James Wirrick says he's gotten eight requests for permission to use the song he co-wrote: a video game, three television commercials, three movies and an episode of The Simpsons.

Sylvester never had a mainstream hit after "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)". A year after it came out, Chicago radio DJ Steve Dahl made "Disco sucks!" a rallying cry with his "Disco Demolition" promotion between the games of a White Sox doubleheader; the ensuing melee forced the Sox to forfeit the second game.

Joshua Gamson says the event was a reaction by straight white fans of classic rock against a music that they saw as too black and too queer — and that that backlash is partly why he missed the anthem's power when it first came out.

"In a way, if I had felt that earlier, I'd have come out earlier," he says. "Embracing who you are, celebrating who you are, being as fabulous as you could possibly be, I think that's the message that he's preaching in the song. And I could've used a dose of that as a teenager."

But Sylvester remained popular among dance music fans, and he leveraged that popularity to raise AIDS awareness. He played benefit shows and distributed safe-sex information to his audiences. When he appeared on The Tonight Show, he thanked Joan Rivers and guest Charles Nelson Reilly for their early support of what was becoming a movement. "I was there trying to do whatever we could at the time to get it together. And now it's like a national thing to do," Sylvester said. "I want to thank you myself."

Less than 10 years after "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" came out, Sylvester's husband died of complications from AIDS. The singer was never tested for HIV — he told friends there was no point, because he knew he had the virus. Within a few months, his own health was deteriorating. But, Jeanie Tracy says, his senses of style and humor stayed intact, even as he was planning his own funeral. "He looked at me and he says, 'I wanna be buried in a pearl-colored casket,' " she recalls. " 'Don't bury me in a white casket, 'cause I don't wanna look like I'm lyin' in a white refrigerator!'"

A few months before he died, Sylvester appeared in the 1988 gay pride parade in San Francisco. He was emaciated and weak and rode in a wheelchair. But he didn't want to hide, Gamson says — he wanted the crowds along Castro Street to see him.

"It was part of the same almost philosophy of realness — like, this, this is being real," Gamson says. "This is mighty real, to be marching in the Gay Freedom parade looking, like, 40 years older than you are. And people, knowing that they've seen this icon of their freedom, they see him [as] a symbol of the devastation that AIDS took on the community."

Sylvester made sure to champion that community even after he died. In his will, he left his share of future royalties for "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" to two San Francisco nonprofits: the AIDS Emergency Fund and the meals program Project Open Hand.