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Why disco, apart from that joke about the OFC? I have a vague idea of this as a real AU one day, with ideas of the characters there taking shape. Here's the project research so far, for anybody else who would like to know: what would this be like as a setting?

Discography

A handful of really good compilations allowing you to sample a broad range of disco

• Disco Discharge
• 30 discs of collector's finest picks, themed collections including gay disco, disco ladies, disco exotica, etc
• David Mancuso Presents the Loft (vol 1&2)
• Music played at the original Loft parties, which inspired the disco movement
• A Tom Moulton Mix (2006) - Soul Jazz Records - and the Philly ReGrooved series - Harmless Records
• Moulton invented the extended-play club remix, and had a hand in many disco classics
• Cultures of Soul
• Label dedicated to re-releasing unusual, and particularly international, disco and dance song collections

Project Bibliography

• Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979 - Tim Lawrence
• History of disco, centered around key DJs and nightclubs. Lawrence sets out to argue that disco is a radical underground music form/culture, rather than a cheesefest or set of retro cliches. Comes with selected discographies of DJs; a book which adores its topic. Lawrence currently runs underground disco nights modeled on his favourite communities from his research, and has a great blog.
• Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture - Alice Echols
• Echols was a DJ in the 1970s Her book is sociology focused, taking chapter by chapter themes like women, race, and sexuality, exploring how changes in american culture were caused by and reflected in disco culture.
• Everybody Dance: Chic and the Politics of Disco - Daryl Easlea
• Exploring the era and music through the lens of a single band, the kinds of worlds and trajectories musicians in disco had - specifically, an artform which wasn't centered around bands or superstars; created instead by curator-DJs selecting discs, in-house and unofficial remixers, and in this case, experienced session musicians.
• Turn the Beat Around - Peter Shapiro
• Extremely grating writing style; reading it is a WIP
• Jahsonic: Legendary Nightclubs
• Fansite collecting interviews and information about key nightclubs of the period
• The "disco sucks" movement and the cycle of white grievance that is still churning - Michelangelo Signorile
• Article putting opposition to disco music into a political context
• Website: The Politics of Disco
• Especially for people with institutional access, this university library webpage is a fantastic resource for books and papers on the history and sociology of disco (some free to read)
• Boys Who Said No: Resources
• A documentary on the draft resistance movement - not easily available online, as far as I can find, but with an excellent resources section for further research.

Project Videos

• NY77: The Coolest Year In Hell
• Modern talking heads MTV documentary about New York musical subcultures in 1977. Mostly not about disco - exploring also hip hop and punk - but a great sense of the era and place, recommended as a 101 introduction.
• The Police Tapes (1977)
• CW: Real footage of police violence from the very beginning Fly on the wall documentary following officers from a particular New York precinct. In the 70s, New York's budget was decimated; this is often conceptualised as a drastic rise in crime due to low police budgets, without taking into account cuts to other parts of the social fabric. Police corruption, bigotry and violence was notorious throught the period.
• The Fire Next Door (1977)
• Documentary about arson and living conditions in the Bronx. Contains upsetting verbal description of violence against animals, and documentary footage of unacceptable living situations throughout. Urban poverty and abandonment skyrocketed in the period. Disco cultures grew in unwanted post-industrial buildings, with names like The Warehouse, The Garage, The Tunnel, The Sanctuary giving clues to their former uses. Radical cultures grew in these semi-squatted and extremely affordable, pre-gentrification spaces. One cause of a desolate landscape was landlords burning down buildings they owned to claim insurance money. This documentary explores this - and other reasons behind astonishing arson rates in the setting (bored kids; domestic violence; getting up the welfare list), as well as showing the kind of landscape, people impacted, other living condition problems and tensions caused in abandoned areas of the city.
• Hearts and Minds (1974)
• Disturbing footage throughout (particularly of harrassment, violence and murder towards Vietnamese people). Anti-war documentary.

Disco Movies

• Saturday Night Fever (1977)
• Hoo boy tumblr, you are going to hate this. Based on a newspaper story that was mostly made up, and not really true to the vibrant, communal disco cultures of the era (solo dance became a fad eventually, but it sort of undermines the collective euphoria of a nightclub? Its not about being the best at dancing), and also constantly repellent. Travolta is quite sweet in it, as a tough kid with a vulnerable heart, a metrosexual taste in public peacockery and a dead-end job for life in a paint shop; and I kinda loved this, and loved him in it. Alice Echols does a nice review in Hot Stuff trying to explore the film's deeper themes. Film's attitude to women is horrible, even as it sort-of attempts to critique this. Even the dancing is bad. Absolutely no good reason for you to watch this; I've done it so you now don't have to. Travolta is so charming he carries all this off anyway.
• Thank God It's Friday (1978)
• Star vehicle for Donna Summer, the film unfolds over one night in the world of the nightclub - and is about as fun as a mid night out. Roger Ebert wrote "When you describe it, it sounds like a lot more fun than it is when you see it.
• Roller Boogie (1979)
• Rich girl meets a kid from the wrong side of the tracks - but will she focus on getting into classical music school, or following her real passion: winning the roller disco dance and saving the roller rink from big business? Really cute. Features a roller skate car chase.
• Can't Stop the Music (1980)
• The Village People star vehicle. Abysmal. As an additional camp cringe factor, this film stars a pre-transition Catelyn Jenner. The presence of a character in Native American costume is egregiously uncomfortable. And this film is undecided about how gay it feels it can be. Check out the ludicrous YMCA sequence, filmed in a men's gymnasium and locker room, somehow made into an unsexual place. They don't even get the music right. They make the fatal error of featuring the Richie Family on Give Me a Break (made famous by the les Miserables disco musical, Boys from the Backroom), who blow the Village People out of the water
• Xanadu (1980)
• Fantastical musical about a muse inspiring a mortal man with the power to open a nightclub. Lots of fun dance sequences paying tribute to the history of dance.
• Cruising (1980)
• Inspired by the director's prurient fascination with what was going on in underground gay sex clubs, this film was unpopular with gay activists in its own era for depicting gay culture as sleazy and dangerous; but with the passage of time, footage shot in real clubs is a rare document of an essential time and place. Pacino is a cute-faced young cop sent undercover to try and catch a killer, and is wildly uncomfortable throughout. I liked it. It's kind of a horror film, about being afraid: of murder, of cops, of the city, of the night, of men and wanting to touch them. Isn't that what leather is all about? This film has a filthy, sleazy, moody OST which does not capture what was actually played in these bars: a lot of Donna Summer.
• Staying Alive (1983)
• When people know you are a John Travolta fan, they do great stuff like letting you know there's a Saturday Night Fever sequel. I warmed to this far more than the original. I love that Travolta is a sex icon, and yet a key part of the Tony Manero character is that he just doesn't know how to behave around women. I find that charming & challenging - Echols notes these themes are about men questioning their role in gender in response to women's liberation, and the end of old sexual scripts. In one scene, Manero returns home with a broken heart & feels moved to apologise to his mum for letting her do all the housework as a young person: I love this, I love the idea that toxic men need to come to terms with the gender norms they learned at home and apologise to the first woman in their life, before they can move on to be good partners to women they date. Improbably, this is directed by Sylvester Stallone, and in the final dance sequence - you can tell!