Was Motown, the “Sound of Young America” also the “Sound of Queer America”?
Nearly 35 years before the release of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, a Gospel singer turned Disco star, recorded a song bearing the same title, which became one of the era’s most important Queer anthems. That a Baltimore bred, African American man, who came of age during the height of Civil Rights movement could so seamlessly wed the Gospel impulses of this nation’s most affecting social movement, with the nascent impulses of the LGBTQ movement — “Yes, I’m gay/tain’t a fault ’tis a fact/I was born this way” — should not be surprising. That Bean did so while recording for Motown Records, a company that symbolized the push for Black integration and respectability in the 1960s and 1970s, should elicit some wonder.
Bean was not alone; in the mid-1970s the Motown roster also included the vocal group the Dynamic Superiors, whose lead singer, the late Tony Washington, was an out and flamboyant Gay man. Though the musical legacies of both acts, have been largely obscured over the years, their connection to, arguably, the most prominent Black brand of the 20th Century speaks volumes about how inclusive Berry Gordy’s vision was with regards to what he called the “Sound of Young America.”
Whenever the subject of Black music and Queer identity is broached, the figure of Sylvester, the groundbreaking Disco and Dance artist, is immediately recalled. While the Dynamic Superiors and Carl Bean where contemporaries of Sylvester, it is important to remember that both acts had already broken through to the mainstream before Sylvester released his influential classic Step II in 1978. As a solo artist committed to drag performances, Sylvester became the quintessential example of Black artists who successfully challenged the boundaries of race, sexuality and gender. Sylvester was indeed peerless, but not without precedent, if you consider artists such as Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington’s longtime contributor), Nona Hendryx, and Bessie Smith, to name just a few.
Not surprisingly, even Sylvester owed some debt to Motown for his success. Sylvester’s 1977 solo debut Over and Over was produced by Harvey Fuqua, founding member of the doo-wop group the Moonglows and one-time Motown record executive, who was responsible for bringing Marvin Gaye to the label. The title track of Sylvester’s solo debut was a cover of a Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson song, featured on their 1977 album So So Satisfied. Ashford and Simpson, of course, were the well-known song-writing duo behind the great Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell recordings of the late 1960s; they were also responsible for the songwriting and production on the first two Dynamic Superior recordings, their eponymous 1974 debut and Pure Pleasure (1975).