Invasion of the Clonenoids

Saturday, February 9, 1985
The Concert Hall

"Upstairs, it was all men, it was all gay clones. You know, everybody wearing Lacoste t-shirts, sniffing poppers, and dancing."

- Chris Lea, GCDC Organizer

In February 1985, the Invasion of the Clonenoids dance poked fun at the figure of the “gay clone” on the upstairs dance floor. Indeed, the survey from 1984 found that 9 out of 10 people who frequented the upstairs dance floor at GCDC events were men, whereas the downstairs dance floor was frequented by women, older people, and volunteers. 

Framing this dance around the figure of the gay clone, the GCDC was satirizing a gay male archetype that developed in discos of the mid- and late-1970s. Douglas Crimp describes this figure in his book Disss-co (A Fragment), writing about male bodies that were constructed as dancing machines. For Crimp, the defining feature of the gay clone is overdeveloped chest muscles, which he (and others) jokingly refer to as “disco tits.”

“I think if you were a man, the cool place to be was upstairs. Very few women were upstairs. The heat from upstairs was palpable, it was an amazing place to get lost in the sea of bodies and in the music. But very few women felt welcome–it’s not that they were unwelcome, I just think you’re so invisible as a woman in that environment. It worked for me when I wanted to go dance, I liked being invisible. But there was a different sense of community if you knew men that you could dance with or if you just wanted to feel that larger aspect of queer community. Definitely there were some women upstairs, young women who came out through the bars or have that bar scene as part of their socializing with gay men.”

- Deb Parent, GCDC DJ

The poster for the Invasion of the Clonenoids dance featured robot clones with moustaches and wearing red and black plaid shirts, beaming down from a spaceship. This poster was controversial; at the meeting preceding the dance, it is noted that, “A number of comments have been forthcoming from the community (both men and women) that our Clonenoids poster was very offensive.” Organiser Philip Share recalls this controversy unfolding: 

“We had a student artist that did a lot of the posters, they got 50 bucks to produce a poster for us, and it took them a long time to match the visual with the name of the dance. The Clone Wars, that’s when everything came to a head. The women’s contingent were like, ‘we want women to be represented in this, this is all men getting off of a ship’. The artist was really pissed off cause he wasn’t going to get any more money, we already paid him the 50 dollars. So, what he did was he put boobs on some of the guys. He was like, ‘I’m not doing any more work on it’ and it was too late for us to make other changes.” 

In an effort to appease the community, organisers decided that future dances would be named “at least three dances ahead, to try and allow more time for artwork to be developed and prepared for approval.”