This track from her second album, Step II, was originally written as a gospel song for the piano it was then remixed and produced into perfection by Patrick Cowley, another disco pioneer lost to AIDS. It’s still stunning, the sheer radicalness of Sylvester: an out-and-loud, gospel-singing, gender-nonconforming queen among queens who not only revolutionized disco in the late ’70s, but affirmed her identity so intensely that few people dared question it. “I Will Survive” remains there for them, ready to galvanize in moments when asserting your basic humanity feels like an act of defiance. (You can imagine the marginalized asking the same rhetorical questions Gaynor poses in the pre-chorus: “Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die?”) Even after decades of progress, many LGBTQ+ people are still made to grapple with daily assaults on their personhood.
It burns with righteous indignation and celebrates resilience, qualities well-suited to a community that scrapped for recognition and banded together even as it was condemned and ignored as a matter of policy. (The out lesbian diva Alicia Bridges’ “ I Love the Nightlife” stands out as another hit from this time.)Ī few years later, when a generation of queer people was ravaged by a disease dismissed as “the gay plague,” “I Will Survive” made for the perfect rallying cry. Had the story ended there, it’d represent the last, best gasp of a culture beaten into temporary irrelevance by thinly-veiled racism and homophobia. It was released as disco’s wave was beginning to break, topping the Billboard charts a few months before the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park. It has an undeniable flair for the dramatic: After moving through that filigreed piano intro, you can imagine a lone spotlight shining on Gloria Gaynor as she drags the man dumb enough to break her heart and crawl back for more. “I Will Survive” probably would’ve become a gay anthem even without the specter of AIDS.
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