Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 25, Issue 4, Pages 415–438 “Luring Disco Dollies to a Life of Vice”: Queer Pop Music’s Moment Lucas Hilderbrand University of California, Irvine While paging through back issues of the Boston-based Gay Community News in the archive, I discovered an article from early 1982 titled “1981: The Queer in Rock,” which proclaimed a radical surge in queer music. Written by Rob Schmieder, the article appeared as a punk rupture in the liberal newspaper, employing the slur “queer” before it had been reclaimed and using a cockeyed ransom note font headline that deviated from the newspaper’s standard layout. Reading further, I was incredulous to find that a number of songs that I had thought of as disparate singles and had often put onto mixes for friends and paramours actually constituted a queer confluence and dated from a single year: Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien,” Prince’s “Controversy,” Josie Cotton’s “Johnny, Are You Queer?,” Grace Jones’s “Pull Up to the Bumper,” and Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure,” among others. Digging further to corroborate this recap, I found a similar year-end music survey review that cited a number of the same songs and artists, printed the same week in The Advocate, the national gay news publication of record. This recap, however, characterized the year’s offerings as “no classics, but a bumper crop of curiosities” (Block, “Cream of the Pop” 44). Even more provocatively, a clipping from the alternative newspaper LA Weekly seemed to concur that 1981 was the year of cult acts, and sounded the alarm that the role of popular music itself was in crisis: What all of this adds up to is that none of us—consumers, critics, artists or marketers—agree any longer on what popular music is or what it should do, or even what role subcultural music forms should play. Indeed, it may be we’ve reached a point where popular music no longer has a truly transformative or binding ability, no longer has the capacity or consensus to articulate or discover the collective social and emotional interests of a real or imagined community. (Gilmore 10) C  2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.