Louis Niebur is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research explores popular music of the post-war era, including the significance of music to LGBTQ communities, particularly as it has shifted between live music, the jukebox, and the disc jockey in the context of queer spaces. He is also author of Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (OUP, 2010).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Setting Up the SoundChapter One: Disco, the Castro and Gay LiberationChapter Two: Liberation for Some: The Continued Expansion of Gay San Francisco in the late 1970sChapter Three: Sylvester's Fantasy Comes TrueChapter Four: The First Wave of the San Francisco SoundChapter Five: Blecman and HedgesChapter Six: Disco's Dead/Not DeadChapter Seven: The San Francisco Sound ThrivesChapter Eight: New HeightsChapter Nine: Trouble in ParadiseChapter Ten: Dancing with AIDSChapter Eleven: Everything Falls ApartChapter Twelve: In RetrospectSuggested ReadingSelected DiscographyIndex

This book's title, Menergy, evokes the gay culture that Niebur (musicology, Univ. of Nevada, Reno) seeks to restore and narrate, but the title also borrows Patrick Cowley's song "Menergy" (1981), which Nieber writes "is probably the defining track of the high energy San Francisco sound" (p. 8). Disco was more a part of a cultural scene than a specific musical genre in San Francisco's Castro, inextricably linked with gay male clone culture. The author is especially effective when presenting cultural phenomena and context for disco-its drugs, sex, reflections on gay liberation, hypermasculinity, materialism, exclusions, racism, and ultimately-in the early 1980s-the devastation and horror of HIV/AIDS.

Louis Niebur is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research explores popular music of the post-war era, including the significance of music to LGBTQ communities, particularly as it has shifted between live music, the jukebox, and the disc jockey in the context of queer spaces. He is also author of Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (OUP, 2010).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Setting Up the SoundChapter One: Disco, the Castro and Gay LiberationChapter Two: Liberation for Some: The Continued Expansion of Gay San Francisco in the late 1970sChapter Three: Sylvester's Fantasy Comes TrueChapter Four: The First Wave of the San Francisco SoundChapter Five: Blecman and HedgesChapter Six: Disco's Dead/Not DeadChapter Seven: The San Francisco Sound ThrivesChapter Eight: New HeightsChapter Nine: Trouble in ParadiseChapter Ten: Dancing with AIDSChapter Eleven: Everything Falls ApartChapter Twelve: In RetrospectSuggested ReadingSelected DiscographyIndex

This book's title, Menergy, evokes the gay culture that Niebur (musicology, Univ. of Nevada, Reno) seeks to restore and narrate, but the title also borrows Patrick Cowley's song "Menergy" (1981), which Nieber writes "is probably the defining track of the high energy San Francisco sound" (p. 8). Disco was more a part of a cultural scene than a specific musical genre in San Francisco's Castro, inextricably linked with gay male clone culture. The author is especially effective when presenting cultural phenomena and context for disco-its drugs, sex, reflections on gay liberation, hypermasculinity, materialism, exclusions, racism, and ultimately-in the early 1980s-the devastation and horror of HIV/AIDS.

Louis Niebur is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research explores popular music of the post-war era, including the significance of music to LGBTQ communities, particularly as it has shifted between live music, the jukebox, and the disc jockey in the context of queer spaces. He is also author of Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (OUP, 2010).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Setting Up the SoundChapter One: Disco, the Castro and Gay LiberationChapter Two: Liberation for Some: The Continued Expansion of Gay San Francisco in the late 1970sChapter Three: Sylvester's Fantasy Comes TrueChapter Four: The First Wave of the San Francisco SoundChapter Five: Blecman and HedgesChapter Six: Disco's Dead/Not DeadChapter Seven: The San Francisco Sound ThrivesChapter Eight: New HeightsChapter Nine: Trouble in ParadiseChapter Ten: Dancing with AIDSChapter Eleven: Everything Falls ApartChapter Twelve: In RetrospectSuggested ReadingSelected DiscographyIndex

This book's title, Menergy, evokes the gay culture that Niebur (musicology, Univ. of Nevada, Reno) seeks to restore and narrate, but the title also borrows Patrick Cowley's song "Menergy" (1981), which Nieber writes "is probably the defining track of the high energy San Francisco sound" (p. 8). Disco was more a part of a cultural scene than a specific musical genre in San Francisco's Castro, inextricably linked with gay male clone culture. The author is especially effective when presenting cultural phenomena and context for disco-its drugs, sex, reflections on gay liberation, hypermasculinity, materialism, exclusions, racism, and ultimately-in the early 1980s-the devastation and horror of HIV/AIDS.