In 1992, poet and LGBTQ activist Essex Hemphill wrote of being Black and overtly homosexual, “we are a wandering tribe that needs to go home before home is gone….there is no place else to go that will be worth so much effort and love.” Sylvester James Jr., a Virgo with a aptitude for the dramatic, discovered that dwelling in music.
Sylvester grew up within the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles throughout the Civil Rights Period together with his grandmother in a strict Pentecostal family. As an adolescent, Sylvester was not solely overtly queer, however a part of a rambunctious group of younger, Black drag queens referred to as the Disquotays. He even wearing drag for his highschool commencement. After coping with homophobic harassment each within the church and at dwelling, he left in 1969, looking for a metropolis that might maintain each his queerness and his blinding expertise as a singer and songwriter. He landed in San Francisco on the peak of the homosexual rights motion.
After arriving within the Bay space, Sylvester suffered by means of years of homelessness and instability. Whereas exploring the nightclubs and underground music halls of the town, he discovered group with different genderfluid people. Within the early 70s, he joined the now legendary drag efficiency troupe The Cockettes as a full-time member. Two of Sylvester’s musical heroes have been Billie Vacation and Josephine Baker, and his time with The Cockettes allowed him to concurrently showcase his falsetto and the lows of the blues that he mastered within the Pentecostal church. However it wasn’t an ideal match.
As Joshua Gamson writes in his biography The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco: “Sylvester shared the Cockettes’ affinity for outrageous flaming, their celebration of sex and gayness, their love of acid and good hash, and their bent movie-musical fantasies. Like them, he was making himself up, fantasizing a self into existence. But he usually stood a few feet back, among the Cockettes but never quite one of them.” Sylvester’s solo performances have been a gradual second in in any other case psychedelic productions. He wasn’t doing excessive camp, however saluting his idols with reverence, by means of a voice that listeners couldn’t assist however take critically.
After a collection of performances in New York Metropolis, by which Sylvester emerged because the unquestioned star of the group, he left to kind a solo act that finally earned him a document deal. Sylvester’s expertise and star high quality have been plain, however the US wasn’t fairly prepared for a gender non-conforming soul and pop singer. When Sylvester met and began to work intently with producer Patrick Cowley, his music lastly channeled the vitality of Sylvester’s stay present. Their collaborative relationship coincided with disco’s rising dominance, a style and tradition that allowed room for Sylvester’s vary of each vocal tone and gender expression. The spotlight of their partnership was 1978’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” which nonetheless stands at the moment as one of the profitable and well-known disco songs of all-time.
In disco music, Sylvester discovered a refuge, a house the place he may begin to really discover. Sylvester wanted that area. As Gamson places it, “gender was an everyday choice” for Sylvester. He lived in an period that was not but as progressive about gender identification, however many at the moment would contemplate Sylvester deeply gender fluid and nonbinary, in the identical means his music performed with the boundaries of sound and pitch. Cathy Cohen’s seminal queer research essay, 1997’s “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” gave framing to Sylvester’s intentional non-conformity: “Queer politics [and] sexual expression is something that always entails the possibility of change, movement, redefinition, and subversive performance – from year to year, from partner to partner, from day to day, even from act to act.” Sylvester was creating himself day by day that he lived and it confirmed within the deeply amorphous sound of his music. He had all the time lived out loud, even when the world tried to silence and ignore him.
Sylvester introduced drama however didn’t commerce in tragedy; his public story was certainly one of decided persistence; he was by no means tragically Black, tragically queer, and even tragically in poor health. He was quiet about his personal AIDS analysis even whereas turning into an early, outspoken AIDS activist earlier than his passing in 1988. As each an artist and human, Sylvester explored the grey space earlier than the mainstream totally acknowledged such area existed. He was forward of the world he knew.
The 70s was a transformative decade in music, however one of many biggest disappointments of the period was the dearth of safety for the marginalized individuals – Black, brown, LGBTQ, and ladies – that birthed its sonic make-up. Nonetheless, Sylvester’s legacy is of residing within the in-between, of transgressing the hegemonic, of discovering a house the place many have deemed it desolate and barren. And, in these darkish corners, discovering deep exuberant pleasure within the freedom of an area you declare for your self. A house that nobody can take from you.
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This text was first printed in 2020. We’re republising it at the moment, in celebration of Sylvester’s birthdate. Black Music Reframed is an ongoing editorial collection on uDiscover Music that seeks to encourage a distinct lens, a wider lens, a brand new lens, when contemplating Black music; one not outlined by style parameters or labels, however by the creators. Gross sales and charts and firsts and rarities are vital. However artists, music, and moments that form tradition aren’t all the time best-sellers, chart-toppers, or rapid successes. This collection, which facilities Black writers writing about Black music, takes a brand new have a look at music and moments which have beforehand both been missed or not had their tales informed with the correct context.
