Tony Washington (The Dynamic Superiors)

In the mid-1970s the Motown roster included the vocal group the Dynamic Superiors, whose lead singer, the late Tony Washington, was an out and flamboyant gay man. His brother, Maurice Washington, was also in the group. Tony was the only openly gay member of the group, although it is understood that another member of the group was also gay.

“I can’t really think of a soul group that had a very openly gay frontman that was on a major label before this. A lot of gay newspapers and magazines interviewed Tony, and he talked about how happy he was that people would come up to him after shows all the time and say he was an inspiration for them to come out. So in the gay community, I think he made an impact,” says music historian Kevin Coombe.

Whenever the subject of Black music and homosexuality is broached, the figure of Sylvester, the groundbreaking Disco and Dance artist, is immediately recalled. While the Dynamic Superiors and Carl Bean where contemporaries of Sylvester, it is important to remember that both acts had already broken through to the mainstream before Sylvester released his influential classic Step II in 1978. As a solo artist committed to drag performances, Sylvester became the quintessential example of Black artists who successfully challenged the boundaries of race, sexuality and gender. Sylvester was indeed peerless, but not without precedent, if you consider artists such as Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington’s longtime contributor), Nona Hendryx, and Bessie Smith.

Not surprisingly, even Sylvester owed some debt to Motown for his success. Sylvester’s 1977 solo debut Over and Over was produced by Harvey Fuqua, founding member of the doo-wop group the Moonglows and one-time Motown record executive, who was responsible for bringing Marvin Gaye to the label. The title track of Sylvester’s solo debut was a cover of a Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson song, featured on their 1977 album So So Satisfied. Ashford and Simpson, of course, were the well known  song-writing duo behind the great Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell recordings of the late 1960s; they were also responsible for the songwriting and production on the first two Dynamic Superior recordings, their eponymous 1974 debut and Pure Pleasure (1975).

Products of the Washington DC housing projects, the Dynamic Superiors began singing with each other as high school students in the late 1960s. Their big break came when they performed at a music industry showcase in 1972 and were spotted by Motown executive, Ewart Abner, most well known for his work as President of Black owned Vee Jay Records which featured acts like Gene Chandler and Jerry Butler and distributed the initial American releases of The Beatles. The group was quickly signed by Motown and their first album The Dynamic Superiors was released in 1974. The lead single, Shoe, Shoe Shine, was in the vein of the popular harmony groups of the day like the Stylistics and Blue Magic, and as lead singer, Tony Washington’s falsetto was every bit the match of Russell Thompkins, Jr. and Ted Mills, respectively. Here they are, singing Shoe, Shoe Shine:

Yet, Washington exuded something more—a something more that can be easily recognized on the cover art from that first album. For a label that years earlier released an Isley Brothers album with a picture of a White couple on the cover in order to enhance crossover and in the late 1970s released Teena Marie’s debut without a photo in order to obscure her White identity, Motown's willingness to even visually suggest Washington’s queerness is striking. Whatever curiosities arose in response to that album cover would be put to rest when the group began, rather famously to perform a cover of Billy Paul’s Me and Mrs. Jones, in concert with Washington clearly singing Me and Mr. Jones. Such performances quickly had the Black Press describing the Dynamic Superiors as a “gay” group, as was the case when a 1977 feature on the group in the New York Amsterdam News was titled “Dynamic Superiors Lead ‘Gay’ Music Crusade,” of course begging the question, what exactly is “gay’ music and what crusade was it a part of? (questions that the paper had no intention of answering in 1977).''

The group didn’t make much of such descriptions; in a magazine article in 1977 (New Gay Life), simply Washington suggested that “I guess it’s because it’s me myself. The fact that I’m the lead singer. I don’t hide it on stage.” Washington’s brother Maurice, also a member of the group adds in the same magazine piece, “It was always there. We just brought it out. Tony was just another member of the Dynamic Superiors… He never did hide.” In an era when no one talked openly about Black queer identity, Maurice Washington suggests that his brother’s willingness to be “out” on stage was empowering to some audience members: “there are a lot more homosexuals there than we think. But, they don’t care to let it out. Quite often after the show they want to meet Tony and want to thank him for being as open as they wish they could be… Tony’s a great inspiration.”

However progressive Tony Washington’s band mates may have been in their views about homosexuality - it was in fact his voice that made the group so distinct - audiences were not always in sync. As Washington admitted to The Advocate in 1977, “I guess I was trying to push the clock ahead, though I wasn’t that flamboyant in the beginning… I tried to ease it on them, bit by bit. I thought to myself, man, my makeup is part of the program, so why not accept it.” Washington often made the point, as he did to the Baltimore Afro-American in 1977 that “we are everyday people…we are proud and excited about what we do, but we still have our same friends in Washington.”

The Dynamic Superiors released four albums for Motown between 1974 and 1977. Trying to find just the right musical touch, Motown hired Ashford ands Simpson to do production on the first two albums, despite the fact the duo had departed the label in 1973, in part, because the label never saw them as a viable group (Valerie Simpson recorded two solo albums for the label in the early 1970s). On those first two albums, one can hear the embryo of what would become Ashford and Simpson’s late 1970s sound; heavy indebtednes to the Motown assembly line and deeply steeped in the Black gospel tradition that formed the foundation of the couple’s professional relationship in the mid-1960s. Washington and Ashford share similar vocal traits, so a song like the dramatic Cry If You Want To sounds like classic Ashford and Simpson, as does Leave It Alone, which was later samples by Noel Gourdin on Better Man from his debut After My Time.

Here they are, singing Leave It Alone:

Here's Cry If You Want To:

... And here's Romeo:

It wasn’t until their second album, Pure Pleasure (1975) that the group began to broach queer themes in their music. Packaged in the guise of the personal freedoms that marked the 1970s, their cover of the Ashford & Simpson penned Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell classic Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing (a male duet of a song most known as a male/female duet) or a song like Nobody’s Gonna Change Me, became anthems for all those working on the margins.

This is Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing:

This is Nobody’s Gonna Change Me:

From the same album, here's Hit And Run Lover:

Their third album was called You Name It (1976). From this album, here's If I Could Meet You:

... And here's Stay Away:

The subsequent decision to gear The Dynamic Superiors towards disco was prescient, if eventually limiting for a group that got its start as a vocal harmony group. The Dynamic Superiors didn’t really reach their audience, in this regard, until their fourth (and last) Motown album, Give and Take (1977), which features with a Disco cover (again) of Martha and the Vandella’s Nowhere to Run. The song succeeded in part, because, the dancefloor became one of the primary sites where sexuality was being negotiated in the 1970s; seemingly the Disco was the only place where folk had the freedom to come out, given the rampant homophobia of the era, which was manifested in thinly veiled “Disco Sucks” rhetoric.

Here's Nowhere to Run from 1977:

From the same album, here's Happy Song:

... And here's Stevie Wonder's All In Love Is Fair:

One wonders if Carl Bean and Tony Washington ever crossed paths at Motown; Washington is rumored to have died from AIDS circa 1989, after the Dynamic Superiors broke up in 1980. Bean and Washington's legacies will forever be linked, reminding folks of the time when Motown was not only the “sound of Young America,” but perhaps the “Sound of Queer America.”