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Because most people were not out at work or to their families, whatever, nightlife was where you sort of became yourself. Oddly enough, when it came to nightlife, being gay was really cool. Okay, we controlled clothing, we controlled fashion. Most of the DJs were gay, so records would break in gay clubs. The whole idea of going to these clubs was to celebrate. It was to celebrate your liberation, was
to celebrate your sexuality. Was to celebrate your desire to sort of express yourself and dance and to listen to music that made you really happy.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll meet how Rubinstein, a fashion legend and a regular at the iconic disco club Studio fifty four.
We'll learn how Studio and the disco era broadly was deeply influential in shaping queer culture for decades to come from My Heart podcast. I'm Jordan and Solve and this is what We Loved. I was nine when I first heard Donna Summer. I was online Mark trying to download the song Naughty Girl by Beyonce, and instead I accidentally downloaded the song she sampled, I Love to Love You Baby. I clicked play, and what came out of my computer speakers was magical. It was funky and groovy with all
these violins and pianos. I didn't understand the sounds that she was making, but I didn't care. I was entranced. As a little gay, Catholic kid living in the South, listening to that song gave me the feeling that I could be whoever I wanted to be. Little did I know that the freedom I felt listening to that disco song was the same freedom that many gays before me felt too. Disco music and the disco era the nineteen seventies to find a vital time in queer history. It
was right after Stonewall, but right before AIDS. It was a time when gay people felt liberated to celebrate their sexuality, and disco music was their soundtrack. Arguably, the symbol of that era was a nightclub called Studio fifty four. As soon as it opened it became wildly famous. But it was a gay club. It was where gay culture went from underground to mainstream. Queer people could meet each other there without consequence and form bonds of friendship, love and
other things too. My next guess, Hal Rubinstein was a regular there. He's a style icon now at seventy four years old, having been one of the founding editors of in Style magazine. But when Studio fifty four was at its height, he was my age twenty eight. When did you know you were gay?
When I was ten, I just got the sense there was something. I just I had a best friend at school, Stephen Chase, and he found a copy of a magazine called Junior, and it was a magazine and if you hire guys in posing straps. I didn't have full nudity back then.
What is a posing strap.
It's almost like a jock but smaller.
Oh you know, basically you know, so basically your junk goes in, it goes into the piece of fabric and the rest is best held in by a string.
And that was like the first at a gate porn.
Anyway, Stephen found it and basically was charging everybody fifty cents to look at it. And I remember he showed it to me because we're friends, and I was surprisingly and inordinately interested, and I just was. I was kind of shocked that it was turning me on. Not that I didn't do anything then. Like I said, I was ten, so but I realized there was something up.
So when did you act on it for the first time.
It was nineteen sixty seven. I was seventeen years old. I was a freshman at Stony Brook. Uh. I wanted to work in the reference library, and there was a really good looking a guy named Ralf Fusler who was the editor in chief of the school newspaper.
And we got along very well.
What I didn't know is that the bathroom down the main floor bathroom in this in the school library was notorious. So I'm in the I was in the bathroom stall, and all of a sudden, I see a hand come under, you know, but the part I see the hand come under the partition. I didn't know what that was. So I handed the guy in another rollertorle pit and he threw it and I went wow. And then all of a sudden I see a foot, and I'm looking at
the foot, going, what the hell is that? Like, I just didn't understand what the hell was coming on, And all of a sudden, this voice goes, what's wrong with you?
And I said, I don't know what you're doing.
And with that, I go to I got to walk out of the stall because I just got cranky. Uh, and the stall with that, and of course the dwell. Basically, he realized that I was kind of green about this, so he asked me basically to come to his room that night. I wanted to come by his room that night and talk about the school paper or whatever it was. And he was the first person I ever slept with.
Wow. Yeah, and that was your introduction.
Yeah, it was terrible sex.
It was actually I realized that was however, so began my career in journalism. I was actually the art set of the school paper for my sophomore year.
How was it coming out to your dad and your mom?
I don't have the stories that other people have of that era, where so many of my friends were either ostracized by their family or nobody handled it well. When I told my parents I was gay, my father asked me if I was happy, that was the first thing out of his mouth, and I said, Dad, I'm trying, and that was it. My mom was a little bit more difficult, I think, only because she had she had plans. You know, my mom had plans. You know, she wanted to be agree, you know, she wanted me to get married.
She wanted kids, you know, grandkids and all that kind of stuff. So it was also I think she worried. My mom was was really smart and basically my best teacher, and I think she she she worried for me that that it would that life would be harder, which of course it is.
So now after you graduate college, you're proudly out what was New York City nightlife in the seventies, Like once you turned.
It was thrilling.
Remember you had you had the Stonewall, you had you know, you had the Stonewall riots. And I think what what what happened with Stonewall is that it changed the profile, It changed the profile of gay people or so from what to what, Well, you gave you number one, gave you a voice, gave you a presence. You know, it made you realize that you weren't the only one out there doing you know, basically who was gay.
There was an.
Enormous community and because most people were not out at work or to their families, whatever, night life was where you sort of became yourself. The city was dirty, it was scary, it was dangerous, it was really dirty. New York was raunchy back then. But it all kind of fit. But if you were young in New York in the seventies and you had an outgoing personality and you had to dance and you had friends, Basically we went out five, six, seven nights a week. We went out almost every night.
There was a different club. You went to Hippopotamus on Monday, you went to Hurrah on Tuesday, you went to La Jardan on Wednesday.
Studio was much later.
There was the Flamingo, there was the Loft, there was the Tenth Floor. The number of clubs that were out there prior to Studio it's kind of staggering. But we went out every single night.
And tell me what that era was sort of like, who were the top artists, and what was the fashion like? And was what did the music sound like?
Maybe the greatest dance song ever written, ever created, and it's an instrumental It's by a group called War and it was called City, Country City, and it's an eleven minute song and it will make you to this day if you play it will make people delirious.
Wow, you remember dancing to it?
Yes, absolutely, of course. Like I said, I love dancing. We rehearsed during the weeks. Dancing was very serious back then. Basically you watched Soul Train on Saturday morning, and you watched, and you rehearsed, and you met with your friends and you worked out routines. I remember when we went my favorite after hours club of all time was called The Loft, and it was strict membership. I think I was the
second white person excepted in the club. I don't think the place was more than six seven hundred square feet, the original Loft, and yet it just it had the
most devoted crowd. Went on Saturday night. You walked in about two thirty in the morning, and basically when the teutest man never walked the earth, the guy named Bryce took your coat, took your coat, and he would give you your coat, he would give you a number, and he would give you whatever drug we were all doing for that week, whether it was window pane or blottery, acid or whatever.
It was.
And so the incredible thing was we all showed up at the same time and everybody basically took the exact same drug.
What did you wear out on a typical night. Oh my gosh, you had to have outfits back then. You dressed up to go out. You wore Gaberdine pants, You wore silk shirts and.
You destroyed them. Wow.
Well you danced seven eight hours in these clothes. I mean, silk only lasts so long.
Oh, so you would go out at midnight, say out till eight in the morning.
Probably went out later the midnight.
So yeah, what were you wearing on a on a typical night.
Well, the thing is, you went shopping. They sold shirts made not a sort of banl on Niesta and back and they were thirty five dollars, which was a fortune back then for a shirt, and they were body hugging, they were tight. You wore these little these sexy little tops you wore. You wore, like I said, you wore Gavitine pants. And I remember this is around the same time I first got a hold of a credit card, you know, because like I said, I was a kid. I was, I was, I was. I was working at
the United nations I was doing. I was editing speeches before they went into into print. I wasn't making a lot of money. So I had a credit card. But you had to have you had to have a look. You couldn't wear the same thing out of it all the time. So by the end of the first year of having a credit card, I was four thousand dollars in debt, which back then was a lot of money to be in debt, and that had to work three waiters job to pay it off.
But you had the cutest clothes.
Oh my god, of course you had to. I know.
The idea was, you went out there address as sexy as you possibly could. It was all about a track, It was all about flirting, it was all about attraction. You went out to dance and you went out to get laid.
Just in the sixties and seventies, America was changing rapidly. The Civil Rights Act had been passed in sixty four, Stonewall happened in sixty nine, and Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationwide in seventy three. Many Americans felt free to explore all facets of their life for the first time,
and disco music had become widely popular. Because for many it represented that sense of freedom that, along with wider access to oral contraception or the pill, shaped a new attitude towards sex for straight and gay people alike, sex without consequences. In fact, the disco song Ymca by the Village People is actually said to be about gay people hooking up, and one of the best places to find hookups was on the dance floor at disco clubs.
You know we call them, you call them hookups now. But basically, you went to a club, you went home with somebody. Basically you went back into the club after that and kept on dancing. Because of the sexual revolution, it wasn't like you had the option to go home with all these people.
You actually had the responsibility. I'm not joking.
You had the responsibility to go home with as many people as you could because you were just spreading the love.
Literally.
Wow.
The whole idea of going to these clubs was to celebrate. It was to celebrate your liberation, was to celebrate your sexuality, was to celebrate your desire to sort of express yourself and dance and to listen to music that made you really happy.
It seems like it was a flirty sign.
Oh, my god.
Yes, theme of flirting is it's an unbelievable skill. The ability to flirt is such an incredible gift in the sense that it can get you virtually anything. It can get you, It can get you laid, It can get you a cheaper price and a mattress, it can get you a job. It just but flirting is such an incredible scale. I feel like I should go, like, go to the new school and teach it because because young people don't know how to flirt.
And back then it was all about flirting.
It was absolutely all about flirting, and that's what made it so much fun. And remember too, it's I mean withou getting ahead of ourselves. It was it was sex with that consequence.
What do you mean.
We didn't know bad aids. We didn't know that there would be a downside to promiscuity.
As disco and the sexual revolution began to crescendo louder and louder, a new club opened in New York that became the talk of the town. It was called Studio fifty four. It was an old opera house with massive sets and bright lights. Every night felt like a theater production, and as though you were partying on stage, and if you wanted to have sex, there was always the balcony. Words spread fast that Studio fifty four was the place to be. Celebrities like Michael Jackson and Cher would show
up frequently. A giant line would form outside the club, with thousands of people trying to get in every night. Most were rejected, but it didn't matter how much money you had, or if you were as famous as regular as like Andy Warhol or Diana Ross. The only criteria was that you had to be beautiful, and if you got in, you were transported to a different world. The music, the drinks, the drugs, and the sexual energy was intoxicating for the patrons and for the queers it felt like home. Well,
now tell me about Studio fifty four. How did you first hear about Studio fifty four.
If you went out, you knew, I mean, if you went out, you knew people were building this club.
It used to be a theater.
You know, you walk through an entrance way, you walk through a lobby, so you know, you would see all these pictures of people waiting to get in a studio. Wait, you know, go hey, wait, screaming please get me. If you were if if you were gay, You were well dressed, and you were i'll use the word cute. You didn't wait more than twenty seconds to get in. I never waited to get into the club.
Way way, way. I have a question. Do you think I would get in?
Yes?
Yes, no.
Look, it's just they wanted they wanted the nice looking gay boys in the club. It's that simple. You were you were the attraction. The front of the club. The first thing you hit was the bar. It was a circular bar, oval shaped bar that faced one side to the dance floor and one side not to the dance floor, and then and then to the to the left, to the left was this big open was this big open space. It's you know, because it used to it was a stage, so it was two stories two stories high.
You know.
The lights would come down to these great and these bars, and there were like four bars, four or six bars of lights that would come down. The funny thing was, though, unlike now, the clubs weren't dark. You actually could see people. That was it. You wanted to see other people. You want to see other people dancing. You want to see what they were doing, You want to see what other
people were wearing. The celebrities all sat in a certain place. Honestly, most of us could have given a shit about them. Nobody cared, you know, because it wasn't about them. It was never about them. For all the way you look at it and you read, you know, Liza City and there in Holston being there, nobody cared about them. For all the celebrities and Liza and Peter Allen and Mick Jagger and Bianca and all those people who shut up,
they were all there for one reason. Studio fifty four was a gay club when you came out to watch the gay boys dance. Oddly enough, when it came to night life, being gay was really cool.
Okay.
We controlled clothing, we controlled fashion. Most of the DJs were gay, so records would break in gay clubs. Remember R and B has its has its origins and gospel, you know, so everything was elevated. Everything was everything was was designed to be celebratory. You wanted to be ecstatic that you went out, you know, I mean, and and you were devoted. I remember we were there on I remember going to on New Year's Eve one year that
was probably seventy nine or something like that. And they must have had no less than six to seven inches of silver glitter on the floor. Wow, I couldn't get I didn't get those that glitter off my body or out of my shoes. For about five months, I would find glitter all over the place in my apartment.
It just went ever, it just went everywhere.
I mean, it was just it was one glorious song after the next.
And what was it like being gay?
There?
The idea when you were there, you were safe within that within that hole, within that hall, regarded which one you were safe that. When you get out in the real world, it's it's it could be other things. You don't feel that kind of safety at work. You don't necessarily feel that kind of safety at school.
You know.
All it sounds like this era was just fabulous, but obviously we know that it ended. But I'm wondering for you, what was the marker of this amazing era coming to an end.
There was this weird disease that was killing gay men beginning of aides, and also a different attitude towards gay people. Suddenly we weren't cool anymore. We were at the place where music dropped, We were at the place that controlled that controlled fashion. Most people in fashion are gay actually passed away from AIDS, go right through the list, but.
You weren't. Because of AIDS.
You were no longer cool, You were no longer people didn't want to hang out with you. People shut the doors on you because they were afraid of you. Nineteen eighty one was the start of GRID gay related immune deficiency.
It's nineteen seventy nine. Studio fifty four and Disco were at the height of their popularity when suddenly the owners were charged with evading hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. The famous nightclub shut down the very next year. An era was ending, but not just for Studio fifty four, the era of Disco two and everything it represented the freedom of queer people, of black people, and of women.
The same year that Studio fifty four's owners were caught and convicted, an event was held at a Chicago White Sox game in nineteen seventy nine. It became known as Disco Demolition. Night Fans were encouraged to bring disco records that would be collected and blown up in protests of disco. Twenty thousand fans were expected, but fifty thousand showed up. The massive crowd chanted disco sucks. As the records were
blown up to smithereens with explosives. There was so much anger that once the explosion took place, thousands of patrons rushed the field and what became a riot. Disco was dead. But there was something else that also marked the end of this era for gay people, this period of being so carefree. It was AIDS.
Unfortunately, I knew people at the beginning it was called GRID. Well, later it was called AIDS, and I knew people who passed away very early on, by eighty two eighty three. I mean, because there was so much misinformation or lack of information about how it was contracted and how it was spread. You know, people thought of you know, if you were gay and they touched you and you touched them, that they could get AIDS. If you kissed them, that
you could get AIDS. The lack of intelligence or the lack of information about how it was transferred and how it was passed on was.
Frightening.
What did it feel like for you that this decade of liberation had sort of come to an end?
Oh God, it came crashing down. My friends started getting sick. My friends started getting sick, and you you banded together. But now you were a banding together, not in celebration, you were banding together in fear. And that changed everything. You realized that people weren't on your side, that people didn't care what happened to you.
They thought you were toxic. I didn't hide that I.
Was being gay, but you weren't really broadcasting it either, because you saw the response of certain individuals. I mean either they were afraid of you, or they hated you, or they blamed you. I used to work at a gay restaurant in the seventies. I used to work at a restaurant called Company on Third Avenue in twenty sixth Street. The food was terrible, absolutely horrible. I made a fortune. I made so much bene why flirting. Basically my thighs
were black and blue, you know, from getting pinched. But I went home with a with a shitload of money every night. But one of the gentlemen who owned the restaurant and was on a panel been actually with NYU discussing the grid and the start of it. And I remember coming to visit him and the hospital in NYU and the room was freezing and he was burning up. And to tell you how long ago.
This was.
He handed me a sheaf of mimiographed paper. Before copy machines, before xeroxing. You had a mimiograph machine where you put this blue ink that wreaked the high heaven in and that's how you rolled off copies of things. And he handed me a sheef of mimiographed paper and said, read this. You're only going to understand about half of it, but you need to know this.
What did it say on the paper?
Well, it was all medical information about.
How people's bodies are going to react to aides and how your body shuts down, how whether it was carposi socoma or pneumonia or the expansion of your lymph nodes, what would happen once you contracted it? And it was frightening. And I read this and I just went, oh my god, this is me. There's no way I'm not HP positive. This is even before they had the testing. I caught pneumonia in nineteen eighty two.
Can you take me to the moment that you were diag ghost? What made you want to get tested?
I think everybody had to get tested at that point. I think you were stupid if you didn't. When I was diagnosed, the doctor said, get your life in order. You got four months, four months for what to live. That's it that your numbers are so low, you're going to die in four months. You know, if you watched your friends started getting you know, purple blemishes, people passing out, people having seizes in the street.
It was frightening.
What did it feel like living through AIDS and thinking back just a few years ago, in the seventies when everything was so different.
Well, the fact is I basically lost almost every friend I ever had at that point. I remember sitting in a and this is like mid eighties. I remember sitting in a restaurant on New Year's Day in Miami with eleven friends, all of them rhould be positive. I'm the only one still alive.
Mm.
My housemates passed away. I lost my best friend, my dance partner, and a perfect example. He started suffering seizures and weakness, delirium, and he wouldn't tell anybody at work what was wrong. And at one point we were on the phone, I could hear him having a sea dry.
It hurt. It hurt.
It's just which you were losing. You were losing your friends, and you had no choice. It was it was not a good time. You found strength in your friends. You bonded with your friends as best you could to support each other because you knew, we knew we were in this alone. You know, you had a government that was wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to your problem because it wasn't their problem. Other than that I didn't have I didn't have symptoms. I didn't. I didn't get thrush.
I didn't have carposies. I didn't. I didn't have wasting syndrome, any of those things. But my friends did. My friend it was it wasn't about celebration anymore.
It was about survival.
The early eighties was a tragic time for queer people in America. Because of AIDS, the government didn't take much action to slow the spread, and the virus was deadly. Holl had already lost so many friends, and he learned that he was HIV positive too. In the span of just a few years, his life had dramatically changed from the care free disco era of the seventies. Disco had
helped gay people realize something though they were powerful. Their culture had influenced an entire decade of music and fashion. This realized power gave them the strength to fight back against the neglect and discrimination of the AIDS crisis. Because of disco nightlife, they'd also formed strong bonds of friendship and community that carried them through the loss and the despair of AIDS. What do you think the impact of disco was on gay life in America and in the world.
Disco was basically helping you to build a community, basically to go out there and see you learn alone. And I think it it was sort of a precursor to the strength that was needed during the Age crisis. That we had found these people initially, and therefore we realized we had a sort of all turn inward to survive, to define strength.
In other words, what you're saying is that the same communities that you built in the seventies, going to these clubs, going to Studio fifty four, these are the same people that were with you hand in hand fighting the ages.
Yes, absolutely, absolutely, I mean, and that's that's what you created. That's where you created these friendships. And you certainly weren't I mean, unless you were fool, you know, are cruel. I mean, you weren't going to run from your friends
when they when they were in crisis. You weren't going to run from your friends when they got sick, because you were possibly the only people they could rely on, because especially if their families or their you know that their families or their coworkers and stuff wouldn't go anywhere near them. You these are the people you drew strength from.
You know. I think that there are so many parallels between our generation, that time period when you felt so free and sort of took everything for granted, and then it all kind of blowing up a few years later. Do you sort of find that young people look to you for wisdom?
Something happened a couple of years ago. All the things that I think young people both straight and gay, thought we're givens, same sex marriage, abortion, all these things that you thought were done deals. You see everything being reversed now, and suddenly younger people started asking questions, how do you defend yourself? How did you make these things happen in your direction? They want to know what happened before they
showed up. Finally, and we have stories to tell because you, especially today, you better dig your heels in and fight hard or are they going to mow you over that there's a lot of ugly out there, and we all need to be strong, we need to be unified. I like is the fact that that younger people want to know, they want the information, they want to know how we
go about making this better. And I think in any culture, if you don't listen to your quote elders, I don't mean follow them, but if you don't listen to the stories they have, you're fool. They know you don't. You can either pay attention or not pay attention, but they know stuff that you. I look, the advantage of being older is that you've been through it. I have great pride in looking at the energy of young people today. I'm actually very positive.
Well, what's your hope for young young queer people these days? The young gays that.
They that they have to understand their power, They have to understand their power and being united and being unified and not being and not being afraid.
What do you want to pass down?
There was a certain period or a certain ara where gays tried really hard to assimilate. You know, we're all going to move to the suburbs and live down the block, and we're going to adopt three kids and all that stuff. I think what I want gay people to embrace is the thrill of being different. I don't want you to assimilate.
It sounds like as you've gotten older, you've become more comfortable being different.
As you get older, you realize how much less or how much you don't give a shit. You know, somebody wants to yell out faggot in the street. You know my answer would be, what's your point? Yeah right, I am not perfectly fine with the word. I don't care. I want people to celebrate the joy of being different once again. I still love the fact that I'm gay. I love the way my life turned out.
It sounds like you're hopeful about the next.
I'm very hopeful about it, simply because they're comfortable in their own skin, and I think that's that's just nothing matters more than having pride and who you are and in understanding what you need to do to maintain that pride.
But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsalves. New episodes drop every Wednesday. A small note, we have two more episodes before we take a small summer break two weeks, and when we're back, we're going to hear stories about the gay origins of house music, the history of drag, voguing, and much much more. As always, if you want to write in to tell your story, email us at Buttweloved at gmail dot com or send us a message on Instagram or TikTok at but We Loved. We are a
production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers Areshina Ozaki, Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey patt Our. Executive producers are Me and Maya Howard. Fact checking by Marisa Brown. Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Brunson and rockel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating, follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.