Sylvester: Mighty Real, From Watts to San Francisco

Sylvester James Jr. — Sylvester to the world — came out of Watts, Los Angeles, born in 1947 and raised on gospel in the Pentecostal Church. That's where the voice started. The church didn't keep him; his flamboyance and gender-fluid presentation got him pushed out, and his mother's rejection cut just as deep. He kept singing anyway.

By the 1960s he had found San Francisco and its gay community, and San Francisco had found him. He performed with The Cockettes, the legendary drag troupe, and worked out a sound that carried both halves of his history: the soulful low end he mastered in church and the falsetto that became his trademark. He studied Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker, and when he sang in homage to his idols, he did it with enough sincerity to quiet a room.

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Then disco. "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" and "Dance (Disco Heat)" were hits, and they were also a statement — a Black, openly queer, gender-fluid singer near the top of the charts in an industry soaked in homophobia and racism. His collaboration with producer Patrick Cowley mattered here. Cowley caught the energy of Sylvester's live shows and got it onto tape, and the records still carry it.

Strip away the sequins and what's left is the harder thing: a man who lived openly, decades early, in a world with no vocabulary for his gender fluidity. His art was self-creation in public, and the LGBTQIA+ community heard it that way. His story runs on triumph and persistence, and on the joy of being exactly himself.

Sylvester died in 1988 of complications from AIDS. The records outlived him. "Mighty Real" still fills dance floors, and it still means what it meant: being yourself, out loud, can be a revolutionary act. Disco produced plenty of stars. It produced one Sylvester.