This afternoon I finished THE FABULOUS SYLVESTER by Joshua Gamson and what a great read it was.

When I first saw Sylvester in the jaw-dropping video for MIGHTY REAL on TOP OF THE POPS back in the day (see here) I knew I had found a musical heroine. Although I never got to see him - I hate you Dawn Coates - he has always been on my walkman/portable cd/MP3 player/iPod down the years.

Gamson's sparkling biography gives Sylvester a flawless setting.
From a little boy startling the church goers with a soaring soprano to the adolescent sissy hanging with fellow drag teens The Disqotays, from his move to San Francisco and performing with the hippie commune drag gayers The Cockettes, from his frustration at their unprofessional attitude to his singing with the soul-funk Hot Band and ultimately his solo success at Fantasy Records as one of Disco's brightest stars.

Joshua Gamson sets against Sylvester's almost Hollywood movie-like rise to fame and fortune the times he lived through and more importantly the city of San Francisco which becomes almost a character in itself: the city of the late 1960s with it's radical politics and hippie communes, the early 1970s with the birth of a gay political movement and identity which transmuted towards the end of the decade into the sexual hedonist years of the baths and the clones to ultimately the Ground Zero of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s.

What struck me from reading the book was that throughout Sylvester's working life he was surrounded by producers and musicians who mistrusted his style - Ben Sidran, Harvey Fuqua and even James 'Tip' Wirrick who worked with him through the glory years had ambivalent feelings about the work they were doing. I am sure he could be difficult and frustrating to work with, pulling diva strokes when he hadn't earned the right to do it but his sheer joy of living and being Fabulous means it is impossible for the reader to dislike him.

Gamson also writes illuminatingly about the two waves that checked Sylvester's career: the 1980s backlash against Disco music which can now be viewed as much as being about racism and homophobia as it was to do with musical taste and the slow dawning of the cold white light of the AIDS pandemic. Sylvester's own battle with it is told movingly and his quiet dignified end watched over by his mother and sister is enough to moist any eye.

His magnificent backing singers Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes add their their voices to the book too, although sadly Izora died before the book's publication. After they left him to add their own moment in Disco history as The Weather Girls he recruited Jeannie Tracy to back him and she too continued the tradition in his life of strong women.

Joshua Gamson's style is insightful but with the right beaucoup attitude too - "there is no weapon more powerful than the right hair".
Sylvester would have been 60 this September. Would he still be performing? Who knows but his wonderful cameo in 'Diana' drag in Bette Midler's THE ROSE and the music lives on... a perfumed and painted extravaganza of joyful dance music... Go 'head on girl.