aaron gozum

four on the floor

track 1: movement

  1. Between 2006 and 2011, I lived in a small town with my dad in the Central Valley called Tracy. Though Tracy had become the place I had spent most of my life until moving to San Francisco, the foreclosure of our first home in 2008 (which I later realized was connected to broader series of cultural, political, and economic events) became a flashpoint of the tenuous relationship I have had with the home ever since my parents divorced in 1998. Since then, movement has always been a part of my life, which is perhaps, why I found that feeling of home in music. In choir, in band, in piano classes, in musical theater, in songwriting.
  2. After graduating high school in 2011, I left Tracy to attend college and explore what life could be like living with my mom in the city of San Francisco. I was looking for a fresh start, especially since, earlier that year, I had just ended a high school romance with a girl, a relationship both our Filipino families seemed to lovingly approve of. Little did everyone know (including myself…), the end of my adolescence ended with a messy and tortuous love triangle that compelled me to reckon with my sexual orientation… and this newfound queerness was startling, disorienting, and nerve wracking, but a series of events helped me learn to embrace it, and that all started with the glittering possibility of starting over, leaving behind my introverted persona, and recreating myself as a city boy.
  3. Within the first few weeks of moving into the back room of my mom’s apartment, my mom supplied me with a physical map of the city. At the time, I didn’t have a good grasp of how to use GPS technology, which was relatively new at the time, so the map became an overwhelming blueprint brimming with possibilities for the new chapter of my life. To see what was in store for me, I remember opening the map with excitement, unfolding each flap one by one, but then upon seeing the whole map, I was struck with confusion. While I could make out the squarish geography of the city, the southeastern quarter of the city on the map was blacked out, redacted with sharpie. I thought, “Wait, what am I looking at here?” My mom replied, “That’s where you don’t go.” The zone of redaction on my map was out of bounds, marking the bodily horizons for this 18 year old, or at least, that’s what mom thought! As a “good boy” who couldn’t get over his introversion, I steered clear from the zone of redaction in the beginning, but as I began to make friends in college, take on part time jobs, and engage in community volunteer work in the city, I grew curious and came to learn the names of neighborhoods in the zone of redaction: Castro, Mission, Tenderloin, Civic Center, SOMA, and more.
  4. When 2012 rolled around, I secured a full time job working as a barista, and one day at work, I had an amusing conversation with the manager who was expressively gay and also appalled that I had no idea what Pride was. So, he took it upon himself to introduce Pride to me by taking me to Twin Peaks that summer where a mix of people were gathered to commemorate the installation of a pink triangle along the north side of the hill that faced the Castro. It was one of the first times I crossed the threshold into the zone of redaction, which gave me the courage to explore my sexual orientation and desire to meet with others like me. Through a messy process of curating online dating profiles, chatting with strangers online, going on dates, meeting boys, making out, and hooking up, I began unlearning and relearning what parts of myself were lies and what really made me me. Over the years, especially when I was in and out of relationships with men who lived in that southeastern quarter of the city, I began secretly venturing into the Castro and beyond, exploring bars, nightclubs, and concert venues, but also bookstores, shops, and restaurants. In retrospect, this undercover process of rediscovering myself was a queer adventure, not simply because I was coming to terms with being gay, but also because it was a breaking point from the carefully drawn borders promising me “the good life.” But as the eldest child who was often framed as the role model who overshadowed his siblings, this secret adventure was a queer pleasure, where breaking off the path set for me felt problematically pleasurable. It was a kind of joy that felt like I was leaving something behind, moving toward a love that I wanted but wasn’t supposed to.

track 2: queer desire

  1. For me, disco music also became that kind of love that I wanted but wasn’t supposed to. A guilty pleasure that made me move. My origin story, if one were to take a detour through the mind of Freud’s grandson, might begin with “How Deep is Your Love” by the Bee Gees, which was one of my dad’s go-to karaoke songs whenever he wanted to step outside his usual Beatles repertoire. I can’t lie and say this Filipino was a copy better than the Bee Gees (lol), but there are nights when I hear the song, when I find myself trying to relearn how deep love can be, and in an instant, like a flash of light off the disco ball, nostalgia shimmers through me like tears chasing waterfalls. But my love for music and video games also led me to have an unexplainable obsession with playing “Let’s Groove” by Earth, Wind, and Fire on repeat. As they’d sing, “Let this groove get you to move, it’s alright, alright…” I would shuffle and glide across the four arrows on my Dance, Dance, Revolution pad, another origin story where the grooving decadence of its four on the floor beat commanded me with its perpetual pulse. I’m sure it confused my parents who might have wondered how this song got me to move when getting me to play outside was nearly impossible.
  2. Despite these earlier encounters with disco music, the fates decided that for some reason, I was to grace the earth with my queerly presence after the disco era. Yet, somehow, my first gay night club experience at the Cafe in the Castro gave me a glimpse of what disco might’ve felt like. I remember hearing and feeling the pulsing music they bumped all night, which might’ve been disco, pop, or house music, either way, I hated it… but I also loved it. I mean, I could probably live without ever moving through the oppressive musk of the sweaty dancing crowd! Yet, there was something also pleasurable about being in that space. A space with strangers who didn’t care about how I moved my body. Out of time, out of sync, it didn’t matter. I could be unique yet also an echo entwined with the dancing crowd. Because in the night club, there’s no such thing as being off rhythm. When you’re saturated with the glimmering refractions of the disco ball and the lush orchestrations of symphonic synths that fill pulsing soundtracks, you can sway in any direction and still, that the four-on-the-floor beat will catch you wherever you fall. And if not, those polyrhythmic syncopations would pick you up again, make sure your out-of-time-ness had purpose. The glittering sounds of the nightclub drives you, pulls you, and sings to you beyond what you can hear. It moves you, touches you, feels you. And because of that feeling, I felt like I finally felt like I had a place where I could exist, no matter how sweaty, no matter how many gazes and romances went unrequited, and no matter how messy the borders were between my wanted and unwanted selves. In the clubs playing disco music, I was able to find a silver lining of fleeting freedom and melancholic pleasure in my queerness, as if my way of living life was a life worth living despite it all.
  3. Interestingly, the synthetic decadence of disco I came to love and derive a guilty pleasure from speaks to a parallel context: disco’s historical entanglement in material struggles. For example, while dancers in the 1960s took to the floor within the normative structure of the heterosexual dancing, people in the 1970s began to dance without a partner. In much of America’s history, same-sex dancing and interracial dancing were frowned upon, prohibited, redacted. For example, the Cabaret Law in New York City, which began in 1926, prohibited dancing in venues selling food and drinks without a hard-to-obtain cabaret license, which was hard to obtain due to requirements to get finger-printed, background checked, and photographed at police stations while also having to get it renewed every two years. While the law was intended to make it easier for police to control speakeasies and clubs that were illegally serving alcohol under Prohibition, this law was frequently used to justify police raids targeting jazz bars and clubs that permitted same-sex or interracial dancing. This lasted, at least for queer people, until the end of 1971, when New York City allowed queer people were allowed to “meet and work” and sometimes dance in New York City bars and clubs, but the Cabaret Law, despite its racialized and queer legacies, was only recently repealed in 2017. One could say then that disco’s inclusive embrace of these ostensibly “morally bankrupt” others in the late 1960s and 1970s became a flashpoint in the history of scapegoating minority difference, where mainstream society sought to find blame for its internal moral crisis over the meaning of humanity. Indeed, we must ask: What did it mean to be human in the wake of the violent atrocities of WWII? What did it mean to be human in the onset of the many cultural wars that followed decolonization and civil rights struggles? Who counted as human prior to decolonization and civil rights? How did the postwar attempts to dismantle the enduring effects of colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy contest this definition of humanity? And how did those who were “human” respond to this contestation? If anything, these movements against colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy exposed western man’s greedy desires and genocidal spirit to dehumanize the rest of the world, which teaches us that disco is yet another instance of the West’s longstanding practice of redistributing moral bankruptcy to save the (white) human’s soul from damnation. But, despite this repressive control on how one could move their body and how one could relate to other moving bodies, in the late 1960s, disco emerged as an underground cultural movement among Black, Latino, and queer peoples, as an alternative, ephemeral space where queer and racialized lives could exist beyond the orderly experiences of the day time. Eventually, by the end of the 1970s, it was co-opted and mainstreamed for a white, heterosexual urban middle class, as exemplified by Saturday Night Fever.3 As disco grew to prominence in those latter years, disco dominated the radios, leading media to represent it as a threat to the rock music industry, which struggled to keep up with the the mass commercialization of disco, culminating with the “disco sucks” night at Comiskey Park in Chicago in July of 1979 where mostly young white men, like radio talkshow host Steve Dahl, invested in the rock music industry burned disco records. Since then, the golden era of disco declined (with disco traversing the music world under new names), especially as media began using phrases like “gay plague” to frame nightclubs and bath houses as venues for contracting HIV/AIDS, given their association with drugs, hedonism, and queer urban youth.
  4. While disco moved me to unlearn and relearn who I was as I was becoming a young, urban queer of color, moving in with my mom kindled my desire to rethink the idea of family and what it means to love. I knew very little about my mom, it turns out, but against the backdrop of my queer excursions, our relationship fundamentally changed when she was diagnosed with small cell cervical cancer at the end of 2012. At the time, my grandfather was also diagnosed with bile duct cancer, which thrusted cancer into stereo sound throughout my young adult, undergrad life. We lost my grandfather in 2014. But since my mom was pregnant with my little brother, the doctors luckily found it early and were able to eliminate the cancer through the multiple surgeries and radiation and chemotherapy treatments. Still, the loss of my grandfather and the life-threatening scare of losing my mom became the inciting incident, the turning point that catalyzed my desire to learn more about my family and their stories of coming to America.

track 3: redaction

  1. Amidst the disco fever in the 1970s and its waning reign in the 1980s, my family danced to America. They shimmied across the Pacific, boogied across the border, and struggled to make a new home in the US, far from the ravages many Filipinos have simply referred to as martial law. Since 1972, martial law became a metonym for the atrocities of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, atrocities many Filipinos remain hush about, perhaps due to trauma.
  2. Then, in 2023, I learned about Here Lies Love, a musical written by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim about the martial law era in Philippine history. The oddest thing about the musical was that even though it was about the violent era of martial law under the Marcos dictatorship, they told this story in an immersive scenic design, created by David Korins, where the theater was transformed into a disco night club with moving platforms and a dancing crowd. I admit, I initially had an extreme aversion to the musical. I wanted so badly to write a scathing critique of it because through my research and community organizing work, I had become intimately familiar with a handful of disconnected stories of dehumanizing torture and imprisonment that so many martial law survivors experienced. But given the little I knew of martial law and my appreciation for music and musicals and disco and queer culture, I was motivated me to see the musical, since it gave me a new way of learning about this history in performance and song.
  3. I have been told by many not to see the show. It was perhaps, out of a desire to protect me and the victims of martial law, but despite knowing the atrocities of martial law, I grew accustomed to venturing into redacted geographies. So, I saw the musical with some loved ones in 2023, and indeed, as I had expected, I became overwhelmed by a messy feeling of ambivalence. I felt ambivalent because here I was finding pleasure in watching a musical, listening to music, and dancing in a disco with dictators. What did it mean for me to hate the content of the musical but to love its form?
  4. I can still hear her glittering voice echo in my ears, “Let me be your star and slave, and my personal life, let them take it away! I can’t be hurt anymore by those things that they say. Let it come, let it come, let it come what may. Let me be your star, star and slave.” I know what she has done. Even murder and theft seem to downplay her legacy of carnage and greed. And yet, the glittering queerness of her voice uttering the lyrical conundrum of starry enslavement… It feels different from where I stand. Not white. Sometimes gold. But not always. Like a disco ball with a million mirrors, a fractured prism refracting and changing colors depending on the lighting, depending on where you stand. After all, it was only a couple of decades ago when queers, like myself, were conferred the right to a personal life, to intimacy, to privacy under Lawrence v. Texas. But while this victory was important for protecting queer lives, is this flimsy protection enough in the face of Trump’s ongoing assault on gender? It makes me think, maybe we could learn from the era before Lawrence v. Texas, maybe we can travel back in time to learn about how same-sex dancing flourished amidst homophobic state repression. When I was in the disco of Here Lies Love, I found myself doing this sort of space-time travel, awash in a glittering kaleidoscopic experience that saturated me in neon-colored lights and ribbons of digital screens. It was a glamorous night club experience that made me nostalgic for a world I never knew where sonic pulses touched me, moved me, and dictated me to dance, clap along, and gyrate with its four-on-the-floor beat. Saturation demanded compulsion. I knew the story. I already knew how I felt about it. Yet somehow, I still felt pleasure and freedom in this reenactment of the Marcos dictatorship’s harrowing legacy of expending life for gold and glory. As if I were an accomplice. It was this dissonance that resonated with me, that opened me to a complicitous relationality. Fleeting glimmers beyond shine and sweat and fame and toil and life and death. If disco was her escapist fantasy, what did it mean to be propelled to dance along to a history that repulsed me? It was in this dissonance where I felt called to dance while being repelled by the history unfolding—an ambivalence that made me realize the power of disco maybe resides in its glimmering gaps, in its flickering fractures of modern life. In fact, there is an impossibility to our ability to expose the realities of a past in some “raw” and unmediated way, but even if it were possible, such transparency makes me question how transparency can some how obscure complexity. This is why I listen to those gaps like when the ensemble sang the opening song “American Troglodyte.” They sang, “Democracy in action, there is nothing up my sleeve, a watermelon postcard, I am planting all my seeds,” then launched into a hypnotic anaphora that lyrical mimics that pulsing disco beat, “Americans are going to outer space. Americans are buying that real estate. Americans are wearing those sexy jeans. Americans can be what they want to be.” Under the layered matrix of neon-colored lights, polyrhythmic symphonies, and ceaseless drum beats, this opening number showed me how the disco bends, breaks, and at times, merely resides in the kaleidoscopic wake of modernity, as Jafari S. Allen eloquently puts it. It gave me a sense of what Allen meant when he summoned Michel-Rolph Trouillot to remind us: the past has no content, pastness is a position. In the spinning swirl of the disco ball, I could catch glittering flashes that would open paths to memories I never knew while also feeling pleasure in the saturated presence of dancing bodies bearing witness to the dancing bodies on the moving stages, laboring away in heat, in sticky sweat, in musical performance, trying to grapple with histories they’ve inherited. It gave me a little joy and a little hope dripped in melancholy for a past I never experienced, but now, will always hold with me. Indeed, pastness is a position. As the disco teaches me, martial law isn’t over, but also, while we’re struggling and laboring and working to survive, I can continue to desire and yearn for collective life, joy, and hope.

track 4: surround sound

  1. Across an entire ocean, disco and its fleeting freedoms also seemed to thrive in the Philippines around this time, despite its paradoxical overlap with the repressive era of martial law under the Marcos dictatorship. But while the Marcos administration silenced the media, suppressed free speech, and committed horrific acts of violence against the Filipino people, they also became active patrons of various forms of cultural production, as exemplified by “Bagong Lipunan,” Marcos’ program for developing a new social order. As Josen Diaz argues, Imelda has used beauty as a tool for articulating value through civilizing or modernizing discourses of feminized reproductive labor, liberal progress, and global capitalism. (Josen M. Diaz, Postcolonial Configurations, 90) Often criticized with having an “edifice complex” due to her lavish spending on cultural development and large-scale infrastructural modernization projects, Imelda was compulsively compelled to cultivate an aesthetic appearance of prosperity, greatness, and status on the international stage, or as she put it, “to show the world that, see, we have a pretty face.” As a result, these Marcosian cultural reforms for love, beauty and culture shaped what it meant to be Filipino, cultivating a Filipino subjectivity that would make sense as a medium of Third World (re)production for the global capitalist paradigms of the Cold War order.
  2. That is, despite the widespread violence, torture, murder, and repression, somehow disco queerly thrived. The perhaps easy reason for this was because among the Marcos’ patronage of the arts as a means of catapulting the Filipino people into modern life, Imelda also happened to love disco so much that she had a disco ball installed in Malacañang Palace — the Philippine equivalent to the White House — where the Marcos family used to throw extravagant parties, singing, dancing, and socializing with friends, artists, and more in a private two-room disco. Under dictatorial repression, that is, disco, a symbol of freedom, contradictorily thrived in the Philippines, which became a queer source of inspiration for David Byrne’s musical project of grappling with the blurry boundaries of freedom and control through the figure of a powerful figure like Imelda.
  3. But while it is easy to focus on the Marcos regime’s repression, this focus sometimes displaces the broader, global demands in which the Marcos found themselves in, which is not to excuse their wrongdoings, but to point to how we have become incorporated and complicit in histories of violence, swept under the rug. Shaped by neoliberal capitalism, Imelda’s extravagant projects were often funded by foreign loans, which contributed to the nation’s debt crises by the 1980s. As an enduring example, Ferdinand Marcos issued an executive order in June of 1966 to construct the Cultural Center of the Philippines on 88 hectares of land in Pasay City. Chaired by Imelda and designed by National Artist Leandro Locsin, the project to develop the cultural center included the Tanghalang Pambansa (the National Theater which serves as the main building), Folk Arts Theater, Philippine International Convention Center, Manila Film Center, and the Coconut Palace (also called the “Tahanang Pilipino”). But while the Marcoses had prioritized cultural reforms that would create the international image of Filipino modernity that they also hoped would improve their chances of reelection. Beyond the project incurring millions in foreign debt, Imelda rushed the construction of the Manila Film Center so that the first Manila International Film Festival could be held there in 1982, which resulted in the sixth floor of the building collapsing on a group of construction workers. As some report that construction continued on by burying the bodies rather than recovering them, the film center stands in as an architectural signifier that functions to cement the fate-playing production of value through human disposability, a logic that subtends the nation’s conscription into global capitalist modernity.
  4. So, when I feel melancholic pleasure in the disco, I am referring to both the queer ways of finding collective joy amidst repression but also the unresolvable grief, mourning without end of those ways of living and being we’ve lost through not only martial law but also colonialism and capitalist modernity. “Interminable grief is the result of the melancholic’s inability to resolve the various conflicts and ambivalences that the loss of the loved object or ideal effects.” (670). Here, the ideal of justice, even if such an ideal cannot be fully grasped, is the queer of color’s perceived object of loss, where justice from both authoritarian and heteronormative forms of state repression remain to be resolved. But while Sigmund Freud saw melancholia as a pathological form of mourning, melancholia here is better understood as David Eng and Shinhee Han describe, as a shared structure of feeling “underpinning our everyday conflicts and struggles with experiences of immigration, assimilation, and racialization.” (A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia, 669). I say “remain to be resolved” because while it may never be resolvable in the sense of returning to a pristine original state prior to state violence, I contend that melancholia remains as a reparative structure of feeling, an affective force of relationality. That is, if melancholia is an affective state that emerges through the inability to detach from an object of loss, then here, melancholia is not only the repetition compulsion of mourning without end but also a pleasure-driven desire for attachment and relationality. It could be said that melancholia is a failure to redirect the energy invested in a lost object into new attachments, and yet, the melancholic pleasure that emerges in the disco of Here Lies Love is a generative force where new attachments emerge from loss, repetition, and destruction of the self. For example, in Here Lies Love, one might interpret the disco as a metaphor for Imelda’s hedonism, material excesses, and abuses of power, as a low consumerist cultural form used to subjugate the masses. But this interpretation neglects the sensuous experience of disco: how its particular rhythms and syncopations induced new ways of dancing and how the glimmering refractions of the disco ball reshaped how people existed in space with others in more communal ways, in ways that did not subscribe to compulsory heterosexual norms around love, romance, and dancing, in ways that enabled unruly ways of being to survive and flourish, to shine in the shadows, even if temporarily. This experience is particularly resonant in disco’s historical contexts—queer, Black, and Latinx nightlife spaces where dancing was not merely political, but also a collective practice of survival, refusal, leisure, mystery, risk, adventure, and joy. Though night itself could be an enclosure of its own kind, the club nevertheless signified a liminal space where marginalized bodies could reclaim pleasure, intimacy, and visibility in ways that resist the alienation of the dominant social order in the daytime. In this sense, the collective experience of dancing in disco is not just about affective and haptic movement; it is about a deeply social affective attunement, a relational practice of feeling a way into a world that does not yet fully exist but is nonetheless being sensed and lived in the moment. Indeed, aren’t these fleeting moments also a part of freedom—not just the bare means of scraping like rights and wage labor but also the refusal to work with the normative terms given and the right to collective care, joy, and pleasure? How do queer desires and excesses thus shape what freedom, equality, and social change look like?