Shaun Dawson (00:02.798)
Hey y’all, you’re tuned into Assigned Sex: Unarchived.

I’m your non-binary cousin, Shaun Dawson and this is a safe space where we’re honest about what it means to show up as Black, trans, and genderqueer.

Today, we're talking about a Black, gender-nonconforming artist who was pushed out of his church as a kid, ended up homeless on the streets of Los Angeles, and still managed to create music that changed the world. His name was Sylvester. And if you don't know him, you need to. Because every time you hear a house music record, every time you hear disco, every time Beyoncé samples a vogue ball, that traces back to the rooms Sylvester built for Black queer people to exist fully.

Let's get into it.

Dick Clark (00:53.366)
I read somewhere you got you got tired of seeing those skinny model like maidens who couldn't sing so when you saw these ladies. said yeah, that's it. Are they gospel background? Where's your home?

Sylvester James Jr. (01:02.488)
Well you can look at them and tell they can sing. Oh yeah. We all are. Los Angeles.

Shaun Dawson (01:06.271)
Sylvester James Jr. was born in 1947 in Watts, California. His mother Letha was Pentecostal and the church was the center of their lives. Sylvester started singing in the gospel choir when he was small. The women in the congregation called him pretty, prim, and proper. He preferred his grandmother's company to the other boys, often staying inside reading encyclopedias and playing her piano. When the boys outside invited him to play and he said no, they told him he was ‘acting like a girl’. His mother defended him. She said he was not a girl. Just a different kind of boy.

Eventually, the church decided it couldn’t hold him either. He was eight years old when a man at the church, rumored to be the organist, was sexually involved with him. The injuries were severe enough that his mother had to take him to a doctor. Now here is where the story gets complicated. Sylvester maintained for the rest of his life that the interaction was consensual, but he was eight years old. We also know that the doctor told Letha her son was gay. Not that her son had been hurt. That her son was gay. Letha viewed homosexuality as a sin and that became the story that spread through the congregation. By thirteen, Sylvester had stopped going to church and an argument with his mother and stepfather ended with him leaving home for good.

With no stable home, Sylvester bounced between friends and relatives, usually landing with his grandmother, Julia. Yep, he was a grandma’s baby. While his mother struggled with his homosexuality, Julia didn’t. She had been friends with gay men since the 1930s.

It was on the streets of South Central that Sylvester found a different kind of world. Gay clubs and Black queer people living out loud. When he was 15, he found his way into a group called The Disquotays, a group of Black trans women, crossdressers, and gay men who moved through the city together and threw parties at each other's houses, sometimes at the home of R&B singer Etta James.

Etta James (03:09.326)
I just wanna tell you right now that I believe...

Shaun Dawson (03:18.68)
They dressed in women's clothing and wigs and competed to outdo each other in appearance. Cross dressing was illegal in California at the time. Not frowned upon. Illegal. You could be stopped and arrested for wearing the wrong clothes. Sylvester hitchhiked around Los Angeles in women's clothing anyway. The Disquotays wandered the streets of South Central, dressed up like women, and they threw gay parties in neighborhoods where the most powerful institutions were black conservative churches.

They were doing all of this in the nineteen sixties, years before Stonewall, with no movement behind them and no legal protection. Sylvester worked whatever jobs he could get. He worked in an airport parking garage, in a hair salon, as a makeup artist at a mortuary. McDonald's fired him for refusing to wear a hair knit. He graduated from Jordan High School in 1969.

In his graduation photo, he wore a blue prom dress and a beehive hairstyle. By the end of the 60s, the discotes had started to break apart. Some stepped back from cross-dressing, others recognized themselves as trans women in transition. Sylvester always understood himself as male. He moved towards something more androgynous, a look that pulled from both sides. In his early 20s, he moved to San Francisco and joined The Cockettes. a drag troop doing performance art in the counterculture scene. He was one of the only Black members.

Shaun Dawson (04:57.762)
He described his public persona as an "extension of me, the real me." When Joan Rivers called him a drag queen on national television in nineteen eighty six...

Joan Rivers (05:07.79)
What did you say to your family when your family found out you were going to be a drag queen? That you aren't... a I know, I know. But sometimes...

Sylvester James(05:10.914)
I'm not a drag queen. I'm Sylvester.

Joan Rivers (05:13.568)
Well you are sometimes. I know. Sometimes, sometimes...

Sylvester James Jr. (05:19.374)
When I was little I used to dress up, right? And my mother said you can't dress up, you can't dress up, you gotta wear these pants and these shoes and you have to like drink beer and play football and and I said, No, I don't And she said, You're very strange and I said, That's ok.

Shaun Dawson (05:34.856)
His 1978 album Step II gave the world “You Make Me Feel, Mighty Real” and “Dance, Disco Heat”. Both records went to number one on the American dance chart. Rolling Stone called the album "as good as disco" gets and the city of San Francisco gave him a key and declared March 11 Sylvester Day. He became known as the Queen of Disco.

Sylvester James Jr.(05:58.222)
Workin' on my feet in the disco heat
Dancin' through the night 'til mornin' light shines on me, again
Music makes me dance, dance, dance

Shaun Dawson (06:14.658)
Sylvester’s visibility, alongside the visible queerness of disco audiences and artists like The Village People, unfortunately fed LGBT backlash. Frankie Knuckles said it best. Disco's timeline ran parallel to the rise of backlash against gay rights. Disco Demolition Night in 1979...

Steve Dahl (06:33.742)
How about Dana Summer? Gee, that's too bad. We had her waiting off of the wings too.

Shaun Dawson (06:43.34)
Where tens of thousands of mostly white men came to a Chicago White Sox game- to destroy disco records, was not about music.

Steve Dahl (06:50.83)
We took all the disco records that you brought tonight. We got them in a giant box. And we're going to blow them up real good.

Now, we will be returning to the scene of the crime here on the 5th of August for a day in the park with Journey and Santana. You know the whole boogie. And we'll blow up some more!

Shaun Dawson (07:20.424)
Some of the records they brought weren't even disco. They were just Black.

This is the world Frankie Knuckles steps into. Frankie was a gay Black DJ from the South Bronx who moved to Chicago in 1977 to spin at a club called the Warehouse on South Jefferson Street.

Frankie Knuckles (07:36.874)
it's it's like church for me. I think it's like church for my audience because it you know, when you've got three thousand people in front of you, that's three thousand different personalities. And when those three thousand different personalities become one personality, you know, it's the most amazing thing. You know, and it's like that in church, you know. You go to any church, I mean if a church holds five hundred people, that's five hundred different personalities come in the room. You know, by the time the preacher gets everything going, or that choir gets everything going at one particular when things start peaking, that whole room becomes one.

Shaun Dawson (08:13.056)
A members-only space built so Black and brown queer people could exist on a Saturday night without being harassed. Frankie played Sylvester in that room. You Make Me Feel, Mighty Real and Dance, Disco Heat were the records he stretched out and reworked with a tape machine in ways nobody had a name for yet.

Sylvester James Jr. (08:18.542)
You make me feel mighty real
Oh you make me feel mighty real

Shaun Dawson (08:41.877)
Eventually people called what he was making house music, after the club's nickname. Frankie called it Disco's Revenge.

Sylvester kept recording through the eighties as AIDS moved through his community and took people he loved. His collaborator Patrick Cowley died of AIDS in 1982. Sylvester went onstage in London the night he got the news and told the crowd Cowley was gone, then sang "Do Ya Wanna Funk" in his memory.

Sylvester James Jr. (09:08.526)
Do you wanna funk?
Won't you tell me now?
Won't you tell me now?
If you wanna funk, let me show you how
Do you wanna funk with me?

Shaun Dawson(09:22.53)
His partner Rick Cranmer died of AIDS in 1987. By 1988 Sylvester was too sick to tour. He attended the Castro's Gay Freedom Parade that year in a wheelchair. The Castro Street Fair also named a tribute to him. He was too ill to attend but the crowd chanted his name loud enough that he could hear them from his bedroom.

He died on December 16, 1988. He was 41. He planned his own funeral. Red kimono. Open coffin. His friend did his makeup. He left all his future royalties to two HIV and AIDS organizations in San Francisco.

Sylvestor once told a journalist he knew, gay people had put him on a pedestal and he loved them for it. But a pedestal is not protection. White gay men were often the first to benefit from the gains of the gay rights movement. The visibility Sylvester built did not translate equally into safety for everyone in those rooms. That gap between visibility and protection is the same one we are still talking about today, Black trans women remain the most targeted people in trans communities even as trans visibility has never been higher.

Black queer and trans creative expression is not a footnote to Black music. It is the root of it. Disco, house music, the ballroom scene running alongside both. All of it came from Black queer people making space in a world that kept insisting there was none.

Sylvester James Jr. (10:53.43)
And when they hear me sing, people always say to me, I know you're from a religious background. I know you sing gospel. I can tell my religious. And it's very much a part of me. And it's something that I never ever want to lose. I would never give up that part of me for.It is a gift. Right. It is truly a gift. And I am thankful and grateful. And every time I open my mouth, it's for you, but it's mostly for the glory of God, because I know through my gift, people are being touched by what I and people listen to what I say.

Shaun Dawson (11:29.326)
Alright y’all, thats all I got for today.

This story was inspired by A Black Queer History of the United States by C. Riley Snorton and Darius Bose. Check the show notes for the book and for any archival audio from today's episode.

If this episode dragged you a little bit or if it hugged you a little bit, please share it with someone you love. You can find me, your nonbinary cousin, Shaun Dawson on all platforms @iamsdawson. Ya’ll be safe out there.