By Lee Hildebrand

ONCE, ON The Tonight Show, Sylvester informed guest host Joan Rivers that he was not a drag queen. "I'm Sylvester!" the cross-dressing disco diva explained.

"He was more than just a drag queen or a gay guy or a transsexual: he was all of that," his friend Marapasa told Joshua Gamson, author of The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco.

Sylvester James and Letha James may have conceived a son, but Sylvester James Jr. created himself to a great degree. Though often decked out in full drag, he might don a man's tuxedo if it fit his mood at the moment. "I can be a man if I want to, or I can be a very beautiful women," he once said. He knew he was different from the time he had his first homosexual experience, at age eight, with an adult from the church he attended with his family, and he proceeded to reinvent himself again and again. As a teenager in South Central Los Angeles, he was known as "Dooni" and ran with a wild, loose-knit bunch of black boys who would be girls. They referred to themselves as the Disquotays and spent their days cutting tits and asses out of foam rubber, sewing dresses, doing each other's hair, and applying goo-gobs of makeup, all in preparation for near-nightly house parties.

After relocating to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in 1970 at age 22, Sylvester joined an LSD-crazed theatrical troupe of gender-bending hippie anarchists called the Cockettes. Sylvester, who was in some ways the group's most normal member, developed a new persona while living and performing with them: "Ruby Blue," a cabaret chanteuse who specialized in songs by Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and other African American divas of a bygone era. By the mid-'70s, however, he found himself totally in tune with the musical currents of the time, drawing on the melismatic vocal techniques he'd mastered years earlier in church and applying them – in a high, screeching falsetto that threatened to tear the roof off of whatever club or concert hall at which appeared – to the pulsating four-on-the-floor beats of disco. He was now simply "Sylvester" and would score a decadelong string of hits, of which "Dance (Disco Heat)" and "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)," both released in 1978, were the biggest.

Disco, before it entered the mainstream consciousness, was a phenomenon unique to gay American culture, having evolved in night clubs – first in New York City, then spreading to San Francisco and other cities – where men danced with men to up-tempo R&B records, particularly of the Philadelphia variety, most particularly those sung by women. Gloria Gaynor was disco's first queen, though Diana Ross, Thelma Houston, and the group Labelle were also objects of great adoration in the gay disco world. But Sylvester was the only "queen," in the gay sense, among disco's many queens and an icon to countless members of the gay community.

In his richly researched, alternately hilarious and heartbreaking biography of the late singer, University of San Francisco sociology professor Gamson details the ways in which Sylvester's career mirrored the spirit of sexual freedom that ran rampant in San Francisco's gay community – in bars, bathhouses, and clubs where often-shirtless men, sweat flying off their muscular chests, danced till past the break of day – in the 1970s and how AIDS crashed the party during the decade that followed, eventually claiming Sylvester (in 1988) and many of his closest friends and associates. Through interviews with survivors and family members, as well as through numerous newspaper and magazine reviews and interviews written during Sylvester's disco reign, he paints a fascinating picture of a unique artist and a unique time in American history.

Sylvester's primary purpose in life, the author makes clear, was to be "fabulous," and that he always was, whether creating a chain reaction of ecstasy between himself, his background singers, his band, and the audience at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, or while walking his two borzois down Castro Street. Often, however, the singer comes off as being frivolous, going on extravagant shopping sprees when flush with advances against his record royalties or mooching off friends when the money runs out. Music, to Sylvester, was more of a means to being fabulous than an end in itself. During recording sessions, when not laying down his own vocal tracks, he might spend his time gossiping with friends and leave important musical details to his musicians and producers. "He knew Diana Ross did not sit around the studio all day," Gamson observes.

Still, Sylvester worked hard at being fabulous, devoting hours upon hours selecting his apparel for the day or evening, fixing his hair, and applying makeup. And, if a gig was especially important, he would rehearse his and his band's asses off. In 1971, while in New York for a debut that had been heavily hyped by Truman Capote and Rex Reed, most members of the Cockettes made little preparation for the show, instead spending their time in town doing drugs and attending parties. Sylvester made the same rounds, but he also rehearsed his segment of the show every day. Critics savaged the Cockettes' opening-night performance, but they loved the then-little-known vocalist.

Like many gay men at the time, Sylvester engaged in casual sex, but when he met a guy who particularly struck his fancy, he'd take his time. Especially touching is Gamson's account of the singer's romantic courtship of Jason Williams. On their first date, they sat in the middle of Sylvester's bed and played in his jewelry box – no sex. While on tour a few days later, Sylvester sent Williams a greeting card with a drawing of a black man and white man having anal sex (Williams, like most of Sylvester's lovers, was white) and a note reading, "It's a picture of me and you! See. We fit well together." Upon Sylvester's return, however, Williams informed him that they would be sexually incompatible because both were "tops." Nevertheless, they remained close friends. Later, as Sylvester was preparing for a major concert at the Castro Theatre, Williams asked him to perform an obscure song from one of his albums. The singer initially declined the request but relented after Williams said, "Sylvester, I'll give up the booty if you'll sing it."

If Gamson (a sociologist) fails to fully explore all the musical influences that helped shape Sylvester's unique singing style – such as his childhood Church of God in Christ association with such later-to-be-famous singers as Odia Coates, Gloria Jones, Billy Preston, and D.J. Rogers – he nevertheless vividly connects many other of the complex social, musical, and sexual elements that converged into the fabulous self-made soul that was Sylvester.

Lee Hildebrand is a writer who lives in Modesto.

The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the Seventies in San Francisco

By Joshua Gamson. Henry Holt, 320 pages, $26.