06/26/2020
Sylvester (1947-1988)
Known as the true "Queen of Disco" with a falsetto that could reach the high heavens. Praised for his vocal abilities, he was a true entertainer with a flamboyant, androgynous appearance that took the disco era by force. He will always be remembered as a major activist during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late 80’s.
In the late 60’s, he had been a member of the Disquotays, a group of fierce, black, teenage drag queens “somewhere between a street gang and a sorority house”, as one former members put it. They openly flouted California’s law against public cross-dressing by wandering the streets of South Central Los Angeles in full drag, and threw outrageous parties.He graduated from high school wearing a blue chiffon dress and a beehive wig, and later moved to San Francisco and joined the Cockettes, a cross-dressing hippy performance art troupe, singing old blues songs and jazz standards in his astonishing gospel-trained voice.
In the early 70’s, he made a bid for mainstream success fronting the Hot Band. David Bowie was an admirer, but the US wasn’t ready for an androgynous black man doing covers of Neil Young songs. The band was also threatened with violence when they toured in southern states. He scored another record deal as a solo artist on the basis of a nightclub act that was packing them into the bars in San Francisco’s Castro district. “Sylvester preferred to work with straight musicians,” says James Wirrick his lead guitarist and songwriter. “He used to say: ‘There’s only room for one queen in this band and I’m it.’”
Sylvester’s “Mighty Real” remixed a gospel song and became a pioneering disco record, musically and socially. It’s one of Billboard’s top LGBTQ anthems. You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) has lasted because it’s an incredible, timeless pop record, strong enough to transcend its era. But perhaps there are other, deeper reasons. “Where does the power of that song come from? Why has that power lasted?” says biographer Joshua Gamson. “I think it has to do with Sylvester’s ability to bring together these things that were on the margins – traditionally excluded from value – and bring them right into the center.” It was a huge global hit. When Sylvester arrived in London to promote it, at gay and straight clubs alike, they were packed.
And perhaps it has something to do with what a curiously modern figure Sylvester seems, proudly genderq***r before anyone used that term: a man one day and a woman the next, depending on their mood. “More than just a drag queen or a gay guy or a tr*******al – he was all of that,” one friend recalled. As Sylvester himself told a New York audience in November 1978, while basking in the first flush of fame that You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) brought him: “Sometimes, folks make us feel strange, but we’re not strange. And those folks – they’ll just have to catch up.”
A few months before he died, Sylvester appeared in the 1988 Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco. He was emaciated and weak and rode in a wheelchair. But he didn't want to hide; he wanted the crowds along Castro Street to see him. "It was part of the same almost philosophy of realness — like, this, this is being real," Gamson says. "This is mighty real, to be marching in the Gay Freedom parade looking 40 years older than you are. And people, knowing that they've seen this icon of their freedom, they see him as a symbol of the devastation that AIDS took on the community."
Sylvester made sure to champion that community even after he died. In his will, he left his share of future royalties for "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" to two San Francisco nonprofits - the AIDS Emergency Fund and the meals program Project Open Hand.
