Yes, I had severe trepidations after the original shade that LIFEbeat threw at us, but I knew LIFEbeat board member Mel Cheren, the co-founder of the Paradise Garage, wouldn’t let this particular benefit be anything but a phenomenal success. And it was - for so many reasons, it was! I applaud LIFEbeat for honoring not only the genius and life of Larry Levan, but also for honoring the lives of those dancers, singers and other DJs that AIDS has taken from us. I felt them all around me. Thank you DJs Joey Llanos, David Depino, Danny Krivit and Kevin Hedge for your love.
I arrived around 10pm. I didn’t think I’d get a lot of support from our protest crew, understandably so, but I kept looking around for our faces. After a while, I settled near the bar and studied the DJ and the room. There were a LOT of younger people! When I think of the kids today, I automatically think “hip-hop” (I guess every party promoter does as well) but I was wonderfully surprised to see SOOOOO many kids living and loving this music, getting a taste of what disco is all about. (If you don’t know, then you still don’t know. Okay, here’s your chance …)
Sometime after France Joli’s performance (YES!! Ms. Come To Me!!!), the DJ played Sylvester’s ‘Over And Over’ and turned me out. Hearing that crowd in the song took me back to what it must have been like at the Paradise Garage and I lost it. This guy saw me going through it so he came over and gave me some love.
A highlight of the evening was meeting Mel himself. I asked him if he knew anything about this other LIFEbeat benefit and its fiasco and impending doom. He told me how angry it made him as a gay man and gave further testimony of the disconnect between LIFEbeat’s executive committee and its Board of Directors. He was thoroughly pissed. I then told him that I was one of the Black gay bloggers that protested. He put his arm around my waist and hugged me and almost talked my damn ear off! Standing at Mel’s right was legendary DJ/producer/remixer ‘Little’ Louie Vega (one third of the reason I came back to New York, Kenny ‘Dope’ Gonzales and Todd Terry being the others) and I felt like he was waiting to talk to Mel, too. Mel took his time talking to me and made him wait. I was living! Really, I think I could have picked his brain all night. It was really a high honor to meet this man - and to meet him on the dancefloor no less!
It was so good to see us! You see so many images of disco which feature white people dressed up to look like John Travolta and Karen Lynn Gorney and little else. Disco (and house) is and has always been about predominately Black crowds dancing to Black music. The announcer said at the end of the evening, “People all over the world have tried to duplicate this crowd. You guys are the best crowd in the world!” I really wish we Black gay bloggers could have made a concerted effort to support this event and witness an event that LIFEbeat got right.
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