When It’s All a Blur

From music to dancing to life

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At some point in my college life, my friends and I decided to go dancing — not an unusual choice for us. Only this time, we decided to try something new: a straight club.

There were a few such places in Birmingham, usually haunting strip malls or nestled into buildings that had been declared “old” decades before. It’s hard to remember what such clubs played for our dancing’s sake. I’m gonna think back now and say, KC and the Sunshine Band, The Bee Gees (“You Should be Dancing”), and I know one DJ who kept playing on repeat, or at least four times in the course of that evening, someone’s discoed version of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” And you know, nothing says I’m not a Gay Disco like multiple playings of that song. They wouldn’t have dared play Manhattan Transfer’s “Operator,” for instance, which I heard so many times at a south side lounge called The Gizmo, a place of dancing and blurred lines for sure.

Likely, this straight club on the night my college friends and I dared the colored lights played both “Fire” and “Fame,” hits found on any…