Disco Delivery: November 2026

Thursday, November 12, 2026

This was my first time appearing on a proper podcast, and it was a pleasure to join David Sessions and Domenic DeSocio for a discussion on disco and gay liberation for the Off Christopher Street podcast. I recently reached out to David after discovering his excellent website dedicated to the archives of Christopher Street magazine. When he asked me if I'd like to be a part of their upcoming episode on disco, I gladly accepted.

Listening back to yourself is always a strange experience, and as expected, I found myself thinking about a bunch of other topics and points of discussion well after the fact. Even so, it was a pleasure to have my first podcast experience with two thoughtful scholars—Sessions is a historian and journalist, and DeSocio teaches a course on contemporary dance music and nightclub culture at Northwestern University.

As Sessions mentions in the show notes, "disco never died for gay men, because it had always been about more than music." I can certainly speak to the truth of this, not just on a broader social level, but on a personal one too. Disco wasn't just music I loved. As a gay teenager with little around me to affirm my budding queerness, learning about and exploring disco was like discovering one's cultural heritage. Upon reflection, I feel like I dove into disco in the same way that one might research their family background or their ethnic history as a way of situating themselves in the wider world and finding pride in their identity.

Having recently finished Andrew Holleran's landmark novel Dancer from the Dance, I was looking forward to covering his pieces on disco for Christopher Street in his "New York Notebook" column (see scans above). Even if his CS disco columns—"Dark Disco: A Lament", "Another Opening, Another Laser Beam" and "Dancing: The Past Five Years"—are fairly critical of the state of disco and disco culture, they are beautifully written time capsules of gay New York in the 70s and 80s. Even amongst his laments, Holleran makes observations that are not only sharp but still feel relevant today—or at least to my experience. There is also the mysterious Sean Lawrence, whose "Discaire" column, while short-lived, is one of my favourite pieces of disco coverage in Christopher Street for reasons I've mentioned here before.