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Donna Summer - I Feel Love (Patrick Cowley Remix) - Remastered, HQ

Do You Wanna Funk - Sylvester - HQ

Paul Parker - Right On Target Original 12 inch Version 1982

I graduated high school in 1980. I prolly came out the day after i graduated. It certainly wasn’t going to happen before then.

I saw how my high school’s only out homosexual was treated. And to be honest, he was not so much out as completely unable to be in. He wore jellies and toenail polish. Knowing what i know now? He prolly wasn’t Gay, maybe he was Trans. He went to my high school when i was a junior and he didn’t come back when i was a senior.

When i came out, told my mother and then decided it was time to get laid. In 1980, there was only one gay bar in my hometown. (In fact, from the time i came out until the time i left town, there was NEVER more than one gay bar in my hometown. When one closed down a new one opened, but never more than one.) That bar was The Green Frog. The Green Frog prolly could comfortably hold no more than 100 -175 (?) people. It had a bar, a dance floor that doubled as a stage, a tiny DJ booth, maybe a pinball machine, 2 bathrooms, and a small outdoor alcove that featured a stocks and a picnic table. The walls were painted with glittery green paint and the atmosphere was perpetually murky until “Last Call” when 1000 watt flourescent bulbs, turned all the people green and bleached out the walls.

I literally had sex with the very first person who asked me and after him, i officially entered the Gay World - enthusiastically and often!

I have speculated on the idea of “Gay Music”… is there such a thing? Of course, there is Gay Taste. Broadway, Opera, Jazz, Girl Singers, Pop Stars - all tastes we share with other groups - old White ladies, old White men, Black people, Weirdos, Teenage Girls…

But “GAY” music? Music for and by GAY people? Is that really a thing? Well, i know for certain it once was.I am trying not to look back at this past era thru green, glittery glasses, because i know i was as often disappointed in this new world as i was elated, but man, those HIGHS were HIGH! (And i was, too!)

It was pretty amazing when it was amazing.It didn’t matter that i was not always attracted to the people around me, who wanted to sleep with me I was 18, it took nothing for me to get past that. It didn’t matter that i had seen the bar when the lights came up at Last Call, because when the DJ was in his booth and cranked the music up and turned the lights onto that tiny “dance floor” - it SPARKLED.

It was an amazing feeling the lights and the smell of men and the possibility of sex and the beat, that beat, beat, beat!

Three songs more than all the others take me right back to that magical (mythical?) feeling and/or place, and one guy was behind all three. Patrick Cowley!

“Do You Wanna Funk With Me?” which featured the other-worldly, other-gendered voice of Sylvester.

His 15 minutes PLUS! remix of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”.

And Paul Parker’s “Right On Target” (A Patrick Cowley Production.)

Patrick Cowley made Metal Machine Computer Music. I was already schooled in Kraftwerk and i am certain i was not unaware that David Bowie had already declared Giorgio Moroder’s production of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” to be “the future of music!” How lucky for me i was also hearing it right then - and there! on the dance floor at my lil’ ol’ gaybar? Oh my god! That song already just goes on and on and on. It seemed to get longer every time i heard it. Patrick Cowley stretching it to its very limits. Very, very limits.

“Do You Wanna Funk With Me” literally oozed sex onto the dance floor and was the lubrication that took you places… well, to places where you might need lubrication. The song smells like poppers and teen spirit, smells like three-ways, eyeliner, and dresses.

I eventually got a steady boyfriend. Once i finally had sex with someone the same age as me, i grabbed hard and held tight. I KNEW it wasn’t love, but not that i’d say.Paul Parker would sing, “My love’s an arrow and my aim is true,” and my “boyfriend” would bend over and i would be “RIGHT ON TARGET” and there were free drinks and “interesting” people to meet.

This sort of thing went on for maybe a year, a year and a half. Then one morning, i woke up in a house i had been to before, but had no idea how i got there the night before. in the living room of a guy i thought might be named “Richard” (They were ALL named Richard.), my trick is still asleep in his bed and i am reading an article in a magazine that might have been called The Advocate about some disease that seemed to only kill gay men. And i thought to myself, “Well, that doesn’t sound very good.”

Patrick Cowley died in 1982 of a disease that had only just been named GRIDS (Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome), but his doctors hadn’t even figured that much out. They thought he may have had a touch of food poisoning from touring with Sylvester in Brazil. At the time, he died there were maybe 300 cases of what became AIDS diagnosed. One year after he died there were 3,000 sick and on their way to death (including Sylvester). By 1990, nearly a million men were dead.

It was all over before i had barely begun, i guess…