More than ten years ago, when pop icon Donna Summer died, I wrote a tribute to the impact her music had made on me as a young gay man growing up in Louisiana in 1977.
A few weeks ago, producer Becky Ripley at BBC Radio 4 in Bristol, UK somehow ran across that essay and read it. She was working on a new episode of their long-running show and podcast, “Soul Music” that would focus on the Donna Summer song, “I Feel Love.” She booked me for an interview in-studio.
That episode, released today, allows me to tell the story of finding my tribe during a time when feeling love was anything but a given, so early in the gay pride movement were we that self-love was a hard-earned journey. But Donna’s song, and its invitation to the dance floor and, for me, to a community that embraced me, was a soothing balm to my longing.
A few swift years later, my community would be searching for love again, during the dark years of the AIDS crisis and the growing realization that we were a forsaken people. Donna’s promises of acceptance and love seemed so very far away. So, my community loved and ministered to one another in a marvelous way that astounds me to this day.
The podcast includes my remembrances of all of this, bookending the episode with the thoughts of a gay man living with HIV for forty years.
The episode also includes – and here my inner disco fanboy is ecstatic with joy – interviews with iconic music producer Georgio Moroder and Donna’s husband, the singer Bruce Sudano.
Once again in my troubled country, it is difficult to feel love in an environment that is treacherous and unforgiving to outsiders and those of us who live on the margins of the mainstream.
For the length of this gorgeously produced episode of “Soul Music,” though, there is great comfort in the pain, in the remembering, and in the promise of love. May it be eternal, like the music of Donna Summer.
Mark
p.s. The episode is available on every major platform.
