And here we go, original.

Each week, we decide who's to blame for historical tragedy.

And each week, you tell us if we got it right.

My name is Rebecca Delgado-Smith, and this is The Aftermath.

Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Aftermath.

Today we'll be speaking with guest expert Dr. Nadine Hubs.

She's a professor of women and gender studies, and music at the University of Michigan.

She's also the author of Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music.

Let's hear what she has to say about the history of disco and disco demolition night.

Hi Dr. Hubs, thank you so much for joining us today.

I'm delighted to be with you, Rebecca.

So in your article, I will survive musical mappings of queer social space in a disco anthem.

Do you say that the origins of disco extend beyond the New York City underground dance club scene

with queer, black, and Latinx clientele?

Can you expand on that for our listeners?

That is definitely the place where disco got its start in black gay clubs and Latino gay clubs in New York City in the late 60s, that early.

And then in the 1970s, it became mainstreamed, and on its way to that mainstreaming period of which maybe the apex is the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever and the whole BG's soundtrack to that film.

And I think as a mainstream moment that might be most definitive, but on the way to that mainstreaming disco was also increasingly phenomenon in gay clubs outside New York City.

And it became music that lots of white people listened to, although its origins were in these black gay clubs, Latino gay clubs where the DJ would spin an endless beat would overlap one record with the next record, have multiple turntables going.

That's when that got started, so that there was no pause in the re-sense in the absolute joy and pleasure on the dance floor, pleasure in other beautiful male bodies.

So that's where it got started, but then it spread out to places like where I was growing up, where I was a teenager by the late 70s, places like Ohio and Michigan and across the whole country.

And on those sites, you had a lot of women who loved disco, disco then was embraced by LGBT people across the United States in smaller cities, eventually when it became more mainstreamed and was being played on the radio, even in rural areas, but embraced by gay people.

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