Hey, Blues fans! Here’s where “Gloria” REALLY started…

I’ve lived in St. Louis for over thirty years, and in the time the Cardinals have one a few World Series, and the (now-departed) Rams won a Super Bowl. But the #Blues have always never quite made it, until this year. They are poised to win their #StanleyCup, in the team’s history, the letters “LGB,” short for “Let’s Go, Blues!” are emblazoned everywhere, and Laura Branigan’s 1982 disco hit, “Gloria,” has become their improbable anthem. Well, for those of you who are new to the song, here’s my very personal #LGB #Gloria Story:

You didn’t even go there till 1 AM. It was only open one night a week, on Saturdays. And they would change the décor every week — one week it was Under the Sea, with huge paper fish suspended over the bar, the next it was Wrecked, with actual wrecked cars hanging precariously in air from piano wire. Even as you waited on line on 12th Street, you could hear the beat and feel the THUMPTHUMPTHUMP in the pit of your stomach, 108 times a minute.

The club was called The Saint, and Bob Corsico, my partner, was a member. Even with that $200+ annual membership, there was still a one-time cover charge of $32/person each time you went.

At the time, I was a pediatric resident at Lenox Hill Hospital on call every third night so I really couldn’t afford an all-nighter of dancing very often, but on those 2–3 nights a year when my schedule would allow it, I would go with him and great friends like Bob Frankel and Bob Giangrasso to the pinnacle of 1980s gay nightlife in New York City.

At the turn of the 20th century, the building had been a theater, a Yiddish playhouse, and in the 1960s it was the famed Fillmore East Theater. Dylan had played there, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, decades after Molly Picon.

Now it had been transformed. The bar, which served only soft drinks and beer — and only Rolling Rock — and where all the drinks were included in your cover, was housed below where the stage had once been, and the fly space was where the aforementioned fish and cars and other fantastical decorations dangled.

But this was mere prelude to the Main Attraction, the immense dance floor which had been built above the old orchestra section. It was circular, and in the center of the floor on a pedestal was a real planetarium projector, a huge black barbell on spindly War of the Worlds metal legs, which beamed the wonders of the night sky onto an immense, dome-shaped muslin scrim stretching above the dance floor. The throbbing beat of Linda Clifford, Loleeta Holloway, Amii Stewart, and dozens of other disco divas bathed the hundreds of us sweaty, shirtless, enraptured men who writhed on the floor as the stars swirled above. As I danced, I gazed at Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Orion coursing through an ersatz sky while I twisted and squirmed with my brothers like protozoans on a microscope slide.

After what seemed like hours, I might leave the dance floor and climb the stairs to the former balcony. The seats were gone replaced by carpeted banquettes, the lighting was minimal, and the sounds of transient passion wafted from the darkness. But the dance floor below would always beckon me. The curve of the balcony was concentric with the scrim, and I would stand there, the dome of stars below me tantalizingly just out of reach. As I saw the multitudes dancing under this firmament of reversed constellations, I wondered if this is what it might feel like to be Zeus, implacably regarding the mortal world from atop Olympus.

New songs were typically introduced at The Saint around 4 AM as men were in a disco trance of low hydration combined with the influence of beer and less innocent intoxicants they might have brought from home. One Saturday night in 1982, I was there with Bob and our friends, and as we continued to relentlessly stomp the floor and pump our fists, the DJ spun an unfamiliar disc where a synthesizer throbbed a new, exotic, beguiling melody. Ears perked up, eyebrows rose, foreheads wrinkled as we heard what sounded like a Brand New Disco Song. We were on high alert like a pack of dogs who have just heard their leash clink knowing it was time for a walk. The anticipation was electric. This was an event, and attention must be paid!

Then a woman’s bold alto voice with a strong vibrato joined in:

Gloria…
You’re always on the run now.
Running after somebody,
You’re gonna get him somehow.

And in response the ecstatic chorus on the dance floor screamed, as one:

“DONNA!!!”

Yes, hundreds of sweaty, shirtless gay men thought that the Queen of Disco, our own Donna Summer who had given us hours of listening pleasure and aerobic workouts with “Love to Love You, Baby,” “Last Dance,” “MacArthur Park,” “Heaven Knows,” “Hot Stuff,” “Bad Girls,” “Dim All the Lights,” “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” (with Barbra Streisand, no less), and “On the Radio” and so many more, had just dropped her latest single on her acolytes at The Saint.

Of course, it was a newcomer named Laura Branigan, but that night none of us knew or cared. We had a new anthem even if we didn’t realize quite yet that we also had a bright, new chanteuse serenading us from the dance heavens.

No matter. I’ve loved the song ever since and have often played it over the years when I needed to get myself up and moving, as it also brings back waves of bittersweet memories of those wonderful/terrible years of dance floors and hosptial rooms, of being gay in America, of the 1980s when I finally became myself and helplessly lost so many I loved.

So to my fellow St. Louis Blues fans: You are welcome, from all us gay men on the dance floor at The Saint in 1982 who’ve embraced and known the power of this song for nearly four decades.

“Gloria” is all our song now, and if you didn’t know how very gay it was when it started out way back when, well, as they say on NBC, “The More you Know…”

And for that matter, Blues fans, “LGB” has some synergistic connotations that you might want to google… 😉😜

Let’s just say that it is awesome that the Blues are using “Gloria” as their anthem during the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and it’s very fitting that all this should be happening during Pride Month.

#LGB, everyone! 🙂🎼🏒🏳️‍🌈❤️