V. The Freedom Principle: Disco as Politics

At its core then, disco is not about nostalgia or even about music. Disco is a practice — a living, breathing politics of freedom. It is an ongoing experiment in what it means to be fully alive, together. In "Dancer From The Dance", Andrew Holleran wrote of the disco era that "They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other's desire, in a strange democracy whose only ticket of admission was physical beauty —and not even that sometimes."

Freedom, in the world outside the club, is so often defined by those in power — granted, withheld, or rationed according to rules and hierarchies. But on the dancefloor, a different logic reigns. On the dancefloor, freedom is not something to be given or taken away. It is the baseline condition, the first right. You step into the music and, for a moment, you remember: freedom is not a reward for obedience, but the starting point for everything that matters.

This is not a freedom that isolates. It is not the cold, competitive liberty of “every person for themselves.” The freedom of disco is communal — a shared pulse, a collective risk, a promise that your liberation is bound up with mine. When the beat kicks in and bodies move together, difference becomes a beautiful possibility, not threat. The disco dancefloor is a rehearsal for a better world: one where joy is not suspicious, where pleasure is not policed, where the right to be is never in question.

This is why disco has always been threatening to those who seek to control others. The politics of disco emerge in the simple act of gathering, moving, and refusing to be shamed. Every attempt to shut it down — by law, by violence, by ridicule — has only proven how powerful it is to claim joy as a form of resistance.

Disco’s promise is not limited by time or place. Whether in New York or Johannesburg, São Paulo or Istanbul, wherever people gather to dance, the same principle emerges: we are most free when we are most ourselves, and we are most ourselves when we are together.

This is The Afterlife that disco offers — not a return to what was, but a continual becoming, a renewal of the promise that freedom is for everyone, everywhere, every time the music calls us to move.