In the past two decades, research has concretized the relation between gay men, disco, and dance music. Disco’s earliest moments was located in African American gay clubs in New York in the late 1960s, but it became a main- stream pop culture phenomenon by the mid-1970s. A strong link between gay men and disco dancing is evidenced in autobiographies of singers and record label executives who weave together accounts of their professional and personal lives, sometimes against the background of a larger queer his- tory. 1 The association between gay men, dance, and clubs remained strong even after the homophobic explosion of “gay” disco records at what is now known as the Comiskey Park incident in 1979 in Chicago, 2 morphing in the 1990s into weekend-long, round the clock, all gay male “circuit” parties. 3 Of note in this history is the presence of iconic female divas, particularly black divas in the 1970s, and then white divas like Madonna in the 1980s as “gay” and “black” disco was repackaged as “dance” music for mass/white appeal, repeating the history of the appropriation of black genres in popular music (ragtime, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll). A number of articles have addressed the prominence of female divas in the gay dance scene from the perspective of camp subversion of gender, and survival narratives com- mon to black women and gay men in an alliance of minorities. 4 Both normative and nonnormative identities are important analytics in examining research in gay dance music. There is the crucial intersection of gay with black and female, placed in opposition to straight, white, and male. Beyond the relatively narrow scope of gay club music and culture, more re- search could be conducted into the broader range of LGBTQ music, which can help us to expand beyond gay to reach lesbian, bisexual, trans, and queer cultures. This array of identities is useful both academically and po- litically in helping us to mark out the social terrain and to form alliances— to know both who our friends and our enemies are. However, research into alternative music culture does not employ identity solely as a conceptual anchor. For example, Mitchell Morris examines the psychical nature of gay men’s fascination with female divas, going beyond narratives of subversion and survival to discuss desire, sexual abundance, fantasy, and pleasure. 5 In this chapter, I irst examine how gay men discover a queer (non-normative) 9 Queer desire is not gay, gender is a fantasy Ways of loving Britney Gavin Lee From Gavin Lee ed., Rethinking Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music: Theory and Politics of Ambiguity (New York: Routledge, 2018)