Micah Salkind & (Disco) John Lind

Dr. Micah Salkind is the Special Projects Manager for The City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Department of American Studies at Brown University. He manages large grants and strategic artist initiatives for the City, collaborating with the Creative Capital’s largest non-profit cultural institutions as well as its emerging artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs. He also serves on the boards of the Providence Public Library and Community MusicWorks and is an ongoing collaborator with dancers and scholars in Chicago’s Honey Pot Performance collective and Matthew Cumbie Projects’ “Growing Our Own Gardens” initiative. A DJ, sound designer, and curator, Salkind is the author of Do You Remember House? Chicago’s Queer of Color Undergrounds (Oxford University Press).

“Disco” John Lind was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1935. Although he spent time in the New York metro area as a youngster, he eventually returned with his family to Louisville and finished high school there.

Lind always had a musical bone in his body. He took up the violin at age twelve, and later learned to play the recorder and the transverse baroque flute, which is sort of like a recorder on its side. According to Lind, he doesn’t need a heavy beat to ground him because he always knows where he is in musical space. Later he played violin in the symphony at Cornell, where he earned a BA in chemical engineering before earning his Ph.D. in the same discipline at Yale. After his postdoc in New Haven, Lind went on to teach at the university level for a decade, but by the early 1970s he was frustrated by US politics and decided to leave academia for social justice work. He began the second phase of his professional life in San Francisco working with a consortium of protestant churches. His job was to follow the flow of investment capital from US banks to conflict zones across the globe so that the consortium could pressure them to divest. The goal was to make the banks do good. In the 1990s Lind’s focus shifted to advocating for domestic banking institutions to lend to qualified minority and low income borrowers.

In the late 1980s Lind got rid of his car, which meant giving up day hiking trips. He turned to club dancing for exercise and fun. At the discotheques Lind found that his favorite sounds were both danceable and textually rich – bands like Pet Shop Boys and Alphaville had catchy hooks with queer codes for him to decipher while he moved. Over the years he kept going out while the San Francisco club scene transformed around him; from disco and 80s clubs to the rave scene, Lind could always find a way to enjoy himself. In fact, his life as a dancer was nearly continuous up until the great pause caused by COVID-19. Lind recounts spending first Saturday nights out at the Stud for disco and frequenting Soma’s Cat Club, where he says that he is often a curious sight for other dancers: “I dance in a walker … obviously this is a little bizarre.” With his signature black Levi cutoffs, suspenders, and black compression stockings, “Disco” John is one of the dance floor denizens that make the San Francisco club scene iconic.

Disco John and I connected easily because as he puts it, we are both loners. I would say analytical outsiders who also happen to be social! He picked up on our shared disposition while reading the introduction to my book, which I sent him as part of my For You gift/offering. I also sent him a mix of music that I created based on our shared musical interests. I called it “Disco John Micah House” because I thought of it as an opportunity to connect what I understood to be his musical interests – or some things I thought he might like – with some classic house music. I hoped to connect the dots between our overlapping musical worlds.