Disco: the longest night.

Before AIDS and after Stonewall, we celebrated our sexual freedom alongside everyone else--without guilt or fear. People did drugs and didn't know they were getting addicted. People had sex and didn't know they were getting sick. Today we're not so innocent, and yet the beat goes on. Why?

You're on a dance floor, and the beat goes boom-boom-boom-boom. The smells of sex, poppers, and sweat from shirts tossed aside compete in air hazy with dry ice as strobes flash everywhere your dilated pupils care to rest. The DJ mixes from the latest electronic European import to something more familiar, and the crowd blows whistles and cheers in recognition. "I love the nightlife," wails the diva, "I got to boogie on the disco `r-o-o-ound!"

Is it 1978? No, it's 1998, you're at a circuit party, and you're twirling away to India and Nuyorican Soul's reverent treatment of Alicia Bridges's "I Love the Nightlife," featured on the sound track to The Last Days of Disco, one of two current competing summer flicks based on the Studio 54 era. There have been much-ballyhooed books on the subject (Anthony Haden-Guest's The Last Party), best-selling compilation CDs (two volumes of Pure Disco), highly rated disco-era reruns of American Bandstand and Solid Gold, TV documentaries (on VH1 and E! Entertainment Television), and a resurgence of platform shoes, Qiana shirts, and vintage designer jeans guaranteed to make anyone old enough to remember them the first time around giggle with amazement. And let's not forget that the nation's top radio station, New York's WKTU, is essentially a disco oldies station.

It's striking that as the once-dreaded disco resurfaces into mainstream consciousness via nostalgia, its ties to gay culture have been downplayed or denied altogether. You'd think from watching The Last Days of Disco that the music was the sole property of straight young urban professionals who weren't even called yuppies until Studio 54 dropped its velvet ropes. The quintessential mainstream disco image is a white-suited John Travolta hustling his girl around a lit disco floor, not shiftless gay men with mustaches and 501s celebrating their newfound brotherhood. It's impossible not to contemplate what those millions of sports fans must be thinking as they do the "YMCA" dance every time the Village People's infamous ode to gay promiscuity is played during halftime. Probably the same thing Puff Daddy thought as he sampled Diana Ross's "I'm Coming Out" for the Notorious B.I.G.'s massive rap anthem--i.e., nothing that has to do with us.

But for gay men (and a whole lot of lesbians), disco doesn't need to be resurrected-because to us it never died. It remains our sound track of life and liberation. You can bet you'll be hearing Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" at every gay pride celebration this summer--and well into the 21st century. Due to radio programmers' continuing disco- (and homo-) phobia, there haven't been many up-tempo dance hits in the Top 40 this year, but the number of gay-targeted club collections of high-energy house music continues to skyrocket. Every time The Advocate prints a list of best-selling CDs at gay bookstores around the country, names like Masterbeat and Go Girl! fill nearly every slot. Gay-themed films such as Kiss Me, Guido and In & Out flesh out their sound tracks with disco classics, and ever since Andrew Holleran's epochal Dancer From the Dance, gay authors have been peppering their tomes with references to those club anthems that hold a special place in our diva-lovin' hearts. What rock is to counterculture baby boomers, disco is to us. It was born with the gay rights movement, and it continues to grow with us, regardless of age.

By its very definition, disco is a public music: Unlike rock's bedroom confessionals, disco is designed to be heard in clubs on a loud sound system while one dances in a crowd. And it's usually the background sound of choice in most gay bars, bathhouses, and boutiques--anyplace men go to meet men. The technology may have changed, but the tribal sensibility of gay dance music remains virtually unchanged as it approaches its fourth decade. Largely created by gays, blacks, and Hispanics for gays, blacks, and Hispanics, dance music in America has never lost its alternative identity. No matter how mainstream it gets, nightlife culture and its music keeps returning underground because that's where it grows. And every time it takes on the air of exclusionary hipness, the mainstream wants in. Now that dance's avant-garde is called electronica, the rock crowd fed up with generic grunge is clamoring for a piece of the action, just as America leaped over its white picket fence for a chance to cross Studio 54's gay-inclusive velvet ropes.

There are other reasons why the mainstream has welcomed disco back. For gays and straights alike, the disco era represents the last era of innocence, when drug use was seen as recreation and not addiction, when sex had few consequences that a shot couldn't cure. It came with the rise of the Pill, which meant not only freedom for women but also the potential of sexual exploration for straight men. It was a time when gay and straight and black and white came together on the dance floor to fulfill parallel and often intersecting fantasies. For a younger generation whose earliest musical memories are of Mom and Dad practicing their dance steps in the living room as Donna Summer moaned sweet secular gospel, disco remains the golden ring they never got the chance to grab. It was utopia, and although it didn't last, disco's memories linger. No wonder we never can say good-bye.

Walters is a pop-music critic for The Advocate.