From February 14 and until August 17, 2025, the Philharmonie de Paris presents the exhibition “Disco, i’m Coming Out”. She traces the story of a lightning musical genre which, in less than ten years, has made dance tracks for springboards for LGBT and African-American communities.
The exhibition presented in Paris combines the history of disco, its icons and its emblematic titles, at the same time as the account of the emancipations that the genre was able to wear. A set of audiovisual archives, photographs, instruments, costumes, design objects and works of art (Keith Haring or Andy Warhol) underlines the political dimension (struggles associated with civil rights, the rights of homosexuals and the feminist movement) and festive of this music which focused on the dance floor different minorities and social classes, hedonist.
Accompanied by a soundtrack mixed by Dimitri from Paris, this chapter exhibition also insists on the aesthetics that disco aroused with artists and designers. “Disco, I’m coming out” begins with a first part entitled “Let’s Groove” with producers, singers, activist movements (Black Pride and Black Is Beautiful) and African-American culture which is behind the disco in the early 1970s. Many titles published by labels like Philadelphia International Records or Motown new energy and sophistication with soul music.
DJs, disco pioneers
“Before becoming a musical genre, disco simply designated music played in disco by young DJs in the early 1970s, who will become just as prescribers as the radio animators of the time in terms of hits creation in the United States as in Europe”, explains Jean-Yves Leloup, exhibition commissioner, in the Music Music show of April 24. The boom in clubs and nightclubs of a new kind during this decade will allow these DJs to play B faces or more dancing songs taken on an album, which will testify to a new dynamic within black American music and in particular soul.
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“During the first years, disco music is a set of soul, funk, sometimes rock or with African roots, like the famous ‘soul makossa’ by Manu Dibango, which are played by DJs and walk in a nightclub (Editor’s note: in particular those frequented by the gay community). And then little by little, even very quickly, it will become a genre in itself with its different musical codes.” continues Jean-Yves Leloup.
Disco and LGBT movement
New dream factories, but also cash machines, nightclubs will compete in innovations in scenography, architecture and sound diffusion and lighting technologies. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, disco music will be carried by the stars of pop, rock or variety, such as Abba, Kiss or Rod Stewart, who appropriate the codes. The phenomenon is broadcast in the cinema (the tidal wave of “Saturday evening fever” at the end of 1977), in the television series, the comic bookscartoons, marketing or advertising.
In the United States, the Disco Music period, which extends from Stonewall riots in 1969 to the appearance of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, was also inseparable from the history of the LGBT movement (Q+). Most musicians and performers from these communities claim in their songs their fights and their appearance, a progressive and transgressive dimension which prefigures current queer culture.
Radio subject and interview: David Christoffel
Adaptation web: Olivier Horner
“Disco, i’m coming out”, Philharmonie de Paris, from February 14 to August 17, 2025.
