Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Kiersten Beszterda van Vliet

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.

Doctoral Colloquium: Kiersten Beszterda van Vliet, PhD Candidate, Musicology and Gender & Women's Studies, McGill University

Title: Dancing Queens: Making the Discotheque Gay in Montreal, 1968–79

Abstract: In 1979, Billboard magazine dubbed Montreal disco’s “second city” after New York. As Will Straw has observed (2014), this status was due to how the city’s musical market functioned as a tastemaker. Rather than major producers of music, at the height of the 1970s disco era Montrealers were noted consumers of disco records, and the city itself was a litmus test for which records would later “break” into other markets and become hits.

Notably, disco is commonly associated with a large, visible gay market. Various theorists have proposed explanations for this phenomenon: the permanent breakaway of disco dancing is liberatory for same-sex dancers (Lawrence 2011), or the mechanized four-on-the-floor beat is disciplining and organizing dancers (Hughes 1994). Another hypothesis for the link between gay men and disco is historical: gay territorialization of discothèques from existing nighttime economies led to the development of distinct club-cultures.

In this presentation I trace the growth of Montreal’s gay market for disco and the influence of these club-cultures on the city’s reputation within the music industry. Starting from the discothèque as the site of disco consumption, I look at how these spaces were appropriated by gay men from the late-1960s by evaluating primary sources from the Archives gaies du Québec, including periodicals, maps, and guides. Ultimately, I propose disco—as musical genre, dance, and mode of consumption—is inherently urban, and disco culture promoted an idea of collective pleasure in urban space that fostered new spaces of sexual citizenship in Montreal and beyond.

Bio: Kiersten Beszterda van Vliet is a PhD candidate in Musicology and Gender & Women’s Studies at McGill University, in Montreal. Their dissertation project, history of LGBTQ club cultures in Montreal between 1970–1990, is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Kiersten is also a labour rights activist and former president of the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill (AGSEM).