Sylvester James Jr. (September 6, 1947December 16, 1988), known simply as Sylvester, was an American singer-songwriter. Primarily active in the genres of disco, rhythm and blues, and soul, he was known for his flamboyant and androgynous appearance, falsetto singing voice, and hit disco singles in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Born in Watts, Los Angeles, to a middle-class African-American family, Sylvester developed a love of singing through the gospel choir of his Pentecostal church. Leaving the church after the congregation expressed disapproval of his homosexuality, he found friendship among a group of Black cross-dressers and transgender women who called themselves the Disquotays. Moving to San Francisco in 1970 at the age of 22, Sylvester embraced the counterculture and joined the avant-garde drag troupe the Cockettes, producing solo segments of their shows, which were heavily influenced by female blues and jazz singers such as Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. During the Cockettes' critically panned tour of New York City, Sylvester left them to pursue his career elsewhere. He came to front Sylvester and his Hot Band, a R&B and glam rock act that released two commercially unsuccessful albums on Blue Thumb Records in 1973 before disbanding.
Focusing on a solo career, Sylvester signed a recording contract with Harvey Fuqua of Fantasy Records and obtained three new backing singers in the form of Martha Wash and Izora Rhodes – the "Two Tons O' Fun" – as well as Jeanie Tracy. His first solo album, Sylvester (1977), was a moderate success. This was followed with the acclaimed disco album Step II (1978), which spawned the singles "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" and "Dance (Disco Heat)", both of which were hits in the US and Europe. Distancing himself from the disco genre, he recorded four more albums – including a live album – with Fantasy Records. After leaving this label, he signed to Megatone Records, the dance-oriented company founded by friend and collaborator Patrick Cowley, where he recorded four more albums, including the Cowley penned hit Hi-NRG track "Do Ya Wanna Funk". Sylvester was an activist who campaigned against the spread of HIV/AIDS. He died from complications arising from the virus in 1988, leaving all future royalties from his work to San Francisco-based HIV/AIDS charities.
During the late 1970s, Sylvester gained the nickname of the "Queen of Disco" and during his life he attained particular recognition in San Francisco, where he was awarded the key to the city. In 2005, he was posthumously inducted into the Dance Music Hall of Fame, while his life has been recorded in a biography and made the subject of both a documentary and a musical.
Early life 1947–1960: Childhood
Sylvester James was born on September 6, 1947, in the Watts district of Los Angeles, California, into a middle-class family. His mother, Letha Weaver, had been raised near Palestine, Arkansas, into a relatively wealthy African-American family, who owned their own farmland. Letha's biological mother, Gertha Weaver, was unmarried and too sickly to care for her child, so Gertha's sister Julia, known to the family as JuJu, became Letha's adoptive mother.
In the late 1930s, Letha, Julia, and Julia's husband took part in the Great Migration of African-Americans out of the Southern United States, relocating to Watts, where Letha married her first husband, Sylvester "Sweet" James. The couple moved into a small cottage owned by Letha's parents. Their first child, named Sylvester after his father, was followed by the birth of John Wesley in 1948 and Larry in 1950.
Sylvester and his brothers became better known in their predominantly African-American community by their nicknames, with Sylvester's being "Dooni". Sylvester considered his father to be a "lowlife" because he was an adulterer and left his wife and children when the boys were still young. Letha and her three sons moved to a downtown housing project at Aliso Village before moving back into her parental home at 114th Street in Watts.
Letha was a devout adherent of the Pentecostal denomination of Christianity, regularly attending the Palm Lane Church of God in Christ in South Los Angeles. Sylvester and his brothers accompanied her to the church's services, where he developed a particular interest in gospel music. Having been an avid singer since the age of three, Sylvester regularly joined in with gospel performances. He sang the song "My Buddy" at the funeral of one of the other children in the Park Lane congregation.
The women at his church described him as "feminine" and as "pretty as he could be, just like his mother." "He wasn't rough like the other boys. He was prim and proper. We were always hugging on him and kissing on him, because he was so cute." Family members also described him as "his own kind of boy — 'born funny'" — preferring the company of girls and women like his grandmother to that of other boys. "He stayed inside a lot, reading encyclopedias, listening to music, and playing his grandmother's piano." When Sylvester would turn down the boys' invitations to play with them, they would say things like, "He act like a girl!" or "He's going to be a girl." But his mother would defend him, including his joy at dressing up in her and his grandmother's clothes, saying that he was not a girl, just a different kind of boy, and a valued part of their family.
At the age of eight, he was sexually molested by a man at the church – at the time rumored to be the church organist. Although Sylvester would always maintain that this interaction had been consensual and not sexual molestation, Sylvester was only a child at the time of this incident, while the assailant was an adult. Because of the injuries caused by the rape, Sylvester had to be taken to a doctor, who told Sylvester's mother that her son was gay. Viewing homosexuality as a perversion and a sin, Letha had a difficulty accepting that. News of Sylvester's "homosexual activity" soon spread through the church congregation and, feeling unwelcome, he ceased his attendance at age 13.
During Sylvester's childhood, his mother gave birth to three more children by different fathers before marrying Robert "Sonny" Hurd in the early 1960s, with whom she adopted three foster children. A supervisor at aerospace manufacturer North American Rockwell, Hurd's job increased the family income and they were able to move into a more expensive, predominantly white neighborhood north of Watts. The relationship between Sylvester and both his mother and stepfather was strained; in the midst of one argument with his mother, Sylvester decided to leave their house permanently.
1960–1970: The Disquotays Now homeless, Sylvester spent much of the next decade staying with friends and relatives, in particular, his grandmother Julia, who expressed no disapproval of his homosexuality, having been a friend of a number of gay men in the 1930s. On occasion, he returned to his mother and step-father's house for a few days at a time, particularly to spend time with his younger sisters, Bernadette and Bernadine. Aged 15, he began frequenting local gay clubs and built up a group of friends from the local gay Black community, eventually forming themselves into a group which they called the Disquotays. Sylvester's best friend among the Disquotays was a trans woman named Duchess, who earned her money as a prostitute, a job that Sylvester refused to engage in. The group held lavish house parties, sometimes (without permission) at the home of their friend, rhythm and blues singer Etta James, in which they dressed up in female clothing and wigs, constantly trying to outdo one another in appearance.
Sylvester's boyfriend during the latter part of the 1960s was a young man named Lonnie Prince; well-built and attractive, many of Sylvester's friends described the pair as being "the It couple". Sylvester often hitchhiked around town while in female dress; such activity carried a risk of arrest and prosecution, for cross-dressing was then illegal in California. Although avoiding imprisonment for this crime, he was arrested for shoplifting on several occasions. He found work in a variety of professions, including cooking in McDonald's—where he was fired for refusing to wear a hairnet—cashier at an airport parking garage, working in a hair salon, at a department store, and as a make-up artist at a mortuary, preparing the corpses for their funerals. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was at its peak, but Sylvester and his friends did not take an active role within it. During the Watts riots between members of the Black community and the predominantly white police force, they joined in with the widespread rioting and looting, stealing wigs, hairspray, and lipstick.
Although he had little interest in formal education and rarely attended classes, Sylvester was enrolled at Jordan High School. He graduated in 1969 at the age of 21; in his graduation photograph, he appeared in drag wearing a blue chiffon prom dress and beehive hairstyle. By the end of the decade, the Disquotays had begun to drift apart, with a number of them abandoning cross-dressing and others recognizing that they were trans women and undergoing sex reassignment surgery. Sylvester always considered himself male and began to modify the feminine nature of his clothing, aiming for a more androgynous look which combined male and female styles, influenced by the fashions of the hippie movement.
1970–1972: The Cockettes
At Los Angeles' Whisky a Go Go bar, Sylvester met Reggie Dunnigan, who invited him to move to the city of San Francisco in Northern California to join the "Chocolate Cockettes"—Black members of an avant-garde performance art drag troupe known as the Cockettes. Founded by drag queen Hibiscus in 1970, the Cockettes parodied popular culture, were involved in the Gay Liberation movement, and were influenced by the ethos of the hippie movement, living communally, embracing free love, and consuming mind-altering substances such as marijuana and LSD. With the Disquotays disbanded, Sylvester had tired of Los Angeles, and was attracted by San Francisco's reputation as a gay and counter-cultural haven. Arriving in the city, he stayed in the Cockettes' communal home for several days. They were impressed with his falsetto singing voice and his ability to play the piano, asking him to appear in an upcoming show, Radio Rodeo. Sylvester agreed, and one of his first performances involved singing the theme song of The Mickey Mouse Club while dressed in a cowgirl skirt. Moving into the Cockettes' communal residence, he soon found the flat too crowded and had difficulty with the lack of privacy; after a year he moved into a new house on Market Street with two fellow Cockettes.
Although a significant member of the troupe, Sylvester remained a relatively isolated figure; not only was he one of very few African-American members, he eschewed the group's more surrealist activities for what he saw as classier, more glamorous performances onstage. In the Cockettes' performances, he was usually given an entire scene to himself, often with little relevance to the narrative and theme of the rest of the show, although through doing so, he gained his own following. With a piano player named Peter Mintun, Sylvester worked on solo scenes in which he exhibited his interest in blues and jazz by imitating several of his musical idols such as Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. Adding to his image, Sylvester used the pseudonym "Ruby Blue" and described himself as "Billie Holiday's cousin once removed". Fascinated by Black musical heritage, he read up on the subject and became a collector of "negrobilia"; in some of his Cockette performances, he played up to racial stereotypes of African-Americans to ridicule the stereotypes themselves.