Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 Disco single I Will Survive (written by Dino Fekaris and Freddie Perren) climbed the pop charts in the U.S., retaining the number one spot from January to May the following year. It became a platinum single, earning the reputation it has today as a household name.

Disco’s association with queer people can be traced to its origins in 1970s New York, where disc-jockeys would play black music in Manhattan gay bars. Many of these DJs were gay men who the music appealed to. Homophobic attitudes from this time can be linked with the hostile response that the Disco genre faced. According to Rap music critic Bill Adler, it became perceived as “too gay”, so young people steered away from this by listening to heavier funk records from artists like James Brown and Kool & the Gang, instead.

Disco appealed to queer people because it provided an outlet for protest, community, and social change. Punk, for example, had the same appeal – it allowed people to express their anger at the way they were oppressed, and in the instance of Disco, this arguably rings true, as well. Punk gave people the ability to reject both the cultural texts provided in school, and the bigotry outside it.

You didn’t have to participate in the music itself to be a part of the subculture – collecting punk records, attending shows and adopting fashion trends could be equally important. These subcultures belonging to Punk and other genres are connected by similar principes. Disco’s close connection to queer culture, as well as the appeal it shares with Punk, make this relevant.

The appeal of Survive can be attributed to its lyrics, rather than Gloria Gaynor, herself – clearly because of its implication that survival and happiness can be achieved provided the listener knows “how to love.” Given this obvious similarity with overcoming oppression and internalised homophobia as a queer person, this alone suggests it would have appealed to that audience.

The 1978 release date, and its alignment with the dawn of the AIDS crisis, may also come into play. The timing of Survive went hand-in-hand with the epidemic, and events relating to it in the coming years. Ronald Reagan and his administration’s failure to properly comprehend and acknowledge it exacerbated the situation. Regardless of the literal meaning of the track, it must have brought hope to an audience continuously surrounded by stigma.

This particular stigma was the one that linked Disco and homophobia. Disco’s lack of appeal to much of the general American population can be attributed to its association with queer people. On the 12th of July 1979, American radio personality Steve Dahl staged an anti-disco performance at Comiskey Park.

During the ensuing baseball game, Dahl entertained a crowd of 90,000 people by towing a collection of disco records onto the field and exploding them. This was met with chants of “disco sucks!”, before fans took to the pitch, began rioting and caused further damage. Most rioters were white and male, and this incitement of violence against a genre dominated by black female singers offers scope into American society of the 1970s and 1980s, and its views regarding race, gender, and homosexuality.

Homosexuality was so frowned upon that it became completely unacknowledged, therefore making homophobia an acceptable response to it. At the time of the event at Comiskey Park, the very word ‘homophobic’ “was not in general circulation,” according to music scholar Nadine Hubbs. Although the word was rarely recognised or spoken of extensively, its meaning definitely did exist.

DJs considered Disco and its often-female performers to be symbols of femininity and campness, directly challenging the attitudes of the American public. Its influence and endorsement in queer social spaces boosted the interest of those who were there. Not only does this link the anti-Disco backlash with homophobic opinions of the time, but it shows that the genre appealed a great deal to queer audiences listening to it.

The Pet Shop Boys It’s a Sin (1987) became an anthem of similar proportion, using a similar harmonic structure to I Will Survive, and lyrics which can also be linked to the LGBTQ community.Front man Neil Tennant sings about a “sense of shame”, and frequently being “blamed” for his “sin” – surely nothing can be a more blatant reference to queer oppression and internalised homophobia. Similarly, Erasure’s Love To Hate You (1991), uses the same synth riff as Gaynor’s does. Both artists later performed their own medleys of original songs that mutated into covers of Survive, which appeared on each of the band’s tours throughout the 1990s.

The song could generally be perceived as one for empowerment for all, no matter the, sexuality, or so on, of the listener. What matters here is that the queer community adopted this, somewhat changed the meaning of the lyrics and applied it to themselves. Its release came at a time when this audience suffered catastrophically due to an epidemic, explaining its importance.