Sylvester had manifested this.
“I want to play the San Francisco Opera House,” the legendary disco diva told LGBT publication The Advocate in 1977. “And I'm saying this — I am going to play the Opera House!”
He laid out his intentions, one by one: He wanted a “fabulous show with a full orchestra, lots of costumes, lots of lighting, and lots of everything.”
And there he was, on March 11, 1979, backstage at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House. Sylvester was one of the first modern pop acts in the Opera House’s history to perform there, and the first disco performer ever. He was resplendent in all red, save for the shimmery beaded regalia adorning his head, neck, and waist. Two Tons o’ Fun — the San Francisco duo of Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes, who would later go on to become The Weather Girls — was on backup duty, while an orchestra was arranged right below the stage. The three-hour long show was split into three acts, not entirely dissimilar to an opera itself.
This historic Opera House show, in all its glory, is available to listen to for the first time in full Friday — a comprehensive release of this concert that was only available in bits and pieces on 1979’s Living Proof. It still carries all its original resonance: SFMOMA hosted a recent listening event where the concert audio was played in full at its Hi-Fi Listening Room to dozens, if not hundreds, of museumgoers. Even listeners unfamiliar with the legend of Sylvester stuck around for a while, entranced by the voice and charisma emanating from the speakers.
That a Black, queer disco diva made it into this hallowed venue was improbable. According to Sylvester biographer and University of San Francisco sociology professor Joshua Gamson, the one rule laid down by the Opera House was that they didn’t want glitter getting strewn everywhere. No one in the crowd or on stage listened.
“People understood the Opera House to be a place of propriety and of a certain kind of held-back behavior,” Gamson told Gazetteer. “And there's something extra pleasurable about occupying that kind of space with unapologetic, loud queer joy.”
The show was sold out. People wanted to experience Sylvester for themselves. Damn near every major San Francisco political player was in attendance: Willie Brown, Harry Britt, Dianne Feinstein. But the politicos in the room — capacity 3,500 — were secondary to everyone else. The queers and the dolls were the stars of the night. As Gamson put it, every self-respecting homosexual in San Francisco showed up and out for the event.
But this wasn’t just a concert, or even a regular party: Here was Sylvester, coming in with glitter and pomp, a gay rebellion in the nation’s gay capital at a time when right-wing backlash to the gay liberation movement was fomenting across the country. It was a celebration that served as catharsis for the entire city. On this night in San Francisco, he was the biggest star in the world.
The mood that evening was joyous, verging on total rapture — a kind of euphoria that can only come after enduring a loss together. Months earlier, Supervisor Harvey Milk — the defining gay politician of that generation — was shot and killed by fellow Supervisor Dan White.
Milk’s political nascence coincided with Sylvester’s own rise.
“People who were local, who were gay neighborhood people, knew that Sylvester and Harvey Milk were a kind of matched set,” Gamson said.
They were the unofficial (platonic) Mayor and First Lady of the Castro. Together, they encapsulated the freedom and power in queerness. If the late Supervisor Harvey Milk was a political force unto himself, Sylvester, in many ways, captured the culture. You couldn’t have one without the other. They were two of the most visible out gay people in San Francisco, and perhaps even the country.
Milk’s assassination — and the paltry manslaughter charge that followed for White — felt like a threat to gay San Franciscans just as they had grown in influence in the city. A right-wing movement had coalesced nationally, a puritanical Christian right that sought to preserve the institutions of whiteness and straightness.
Sylvester was anathema to those institutions, even in San Francisco’s own gay spaces.
“I saw it happen in real time. Sylvester influenced a generation of gay men,” Andrea Horne, a friend and collaborator of Sylvester’s, said. “He would say, ‘Oh, girl,' and they would say, ‘You can call me girl?’ And Sylvester would say ‘Yes bitch!’ and they would be like, ‘I can be a girl too?’”
Even when he got shit from the Castro clones — the masc, straight-passing Tom of Finland gays — Sylvester represented a new mode of living as a gay person, one less preoccupied with the trappings of masculinity and conformity.
So, when Sylvester stepped out on stage at the Opera House, it felt like an act of defiance and of healing to everyone in the crowd. It didn’t matter that he (and possibly many others in the performance, Horne said, and certainly many others in the crowd) had taken a hit of acid earlier that day. It didn’t matter that Sylvester, just hours before, had a diva fit following some screwy rehearsals. Really, nothing else mattered. This was church, and Sylvester was the pastor.
“That's the energy that I feel when I hear people talking about it and even when they're not making the connection to Harvey Milk,” Gamson said.
His voice, clear and flowing like a forest stream, takes on an operatic quality in songs like “You Are My Friend” — an early Patti LaBelle hit that, in Sylvester’s hands, was a love letter to everyone in attendance, especially his backup singers. He lists names of vintage venues like a travelog — the Stud, the Elephant Walk, and the Palms in the City, the Mahogany in Oakland — and recounts a story about staging auditions in the Sunset, on 6th Avenue and Judah Street, to be exact.
“We had our first rehearsal in a Volkswagen on our way to Marin County,” Sylvester says mid-song, to intense applause, “and these girls have stuck with me all through everything, y’all, and they’re here right now.” Then, he sings the titular line once more with feeling.
But in the performance, there’s one song that, apparently, resonated with Mayor Feinstein.
It was “Blackbird,” the Beatles song. This evening, Sylvester and his band turned it into a gospel track with a groove. Where the original was perched, this rendition soared, propelled by a funk rhythm and the interplay of Sylvester and Two Tons o’ Fun’s voices. It’s a departure from the original, sure, but it’s no less emotive. There’s a moment on the chorus where Izora Rhodes’ deep alto rasps with feeling: “Into the light / Of a dark, black night.” The crowd went wild. “You sure you got the message?” Sylvester asks the crowd. “You mean you know what we’re really talking about?” They sing it — “Blackbird, fly” — again and again and again.
“She was moved by the performance, she was really touched,” Horne recalled about that night, where she sat not too far from Feinstein.
Horne witnessed the Mayor whispering to Britt, Milk’s successor. She didn’t hear, exactly, what Feinstein said, but she remembered him bolting out of his seat. Feinstein declared March 11 “Sylvester Day.”
