Every Thursday, Zack unites hipster and homo culture with “The Indie Rock Fag.”

Hey everyone, I want to welcome a special guest writer to my “Indie Rock Fag Column:” Captain Obvious! Captain Obvious will be writing this article’s first real sentence:

The 70s are back, and they’re hot!

Thanks, Captain Obvious! What I think my inadequately opaque friend means to say is that indie culture’s mining of the 1970s has progressed beyond The Strokes-inspired Stooges/Ramones styles that defined the first couple years of this decade to a completely unironic embrace of disco. While the first forays at a revival fell into the “House of Jealous Lovers”-style indie romps with slight Studio 54 influences, we have progressed forward steadily from that point. 2008’s house-tinged disco revival act, Hercules’ and Love Affair, has now given way to a balls-out disco revival that is tempered by nothing.

Royksopp’s “This Must Be It” is currently neck and neck with Music Go Music’s “Warm in The Shadows” as my favorite track of 2009. What they have in common – besides strong female vocals and the ability to induce dancefloorgasms in the privacy of your own home – are their utter adherence to the tenets of disco. The former is a Sparks-meets-Donna Summer paeon to true love, the latter a swooning, multitracked Abba homage that knows no bounds.

I love those songs, but I’m still conflicted in my feelings on the disco era. One one hand, three years of life in D.C. make the sexual and pharmaceutical bacchanal of the late 70s sound like Valhalla. On the other, I know that this behavior not only encapsulates the base of some of our most deplorable stereotypes, but also opened the door for the utter decimation that was visited upon us by AIDS in the ’80s.

A decimation, I should point out, that is in danger of revisiting us. While (or perhaps because) the necessary drugs are available now to keep the disease from being the guaranteed deaths sentence it was in its first wave, rates of new infections continue to rise and organizations like Whitman Walker and Gay Men’s Heath Crisis are no closer to their implicit goals of eventual obsolescence.

In short, I think that some members of this loosely connected tribe we call a community have either forgotten the lessons of the post-disco era or never learned them in the first place. It’s frustrating to look at the progression of our history and think, “All this has happened before and all this will happen again,” but I worry that it’s where we’re headed.

I am not even hinting that the disco revival has somehow sparked or precipitated this rise, but I do find it interesting that the soundtrack to the last gleaming of true sexual freedom has reemerged at the same time as condoms begin to lose their place on the pedestal of must-have accessories to a successful gay life.

What I could do is make an argument that people are inclined to look backwards when what is ahead of them does not please the eye. Economic prospects continue to grow worse, America’s ideological split looks near unbridgeable and the world appears to be nestled deeper and deeper into its own handbasket. Why not look back to a time forever associated with a phrase like, “Do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight”?

At the same time, gay life just continues to be so damn hard. A common complaint is that my generation gets all the responsibility of being gay without any of the unbridled joy. On top of the ever-raging marriage and DADT debates, and the task of moving gay culture back into relevancy without losing any of the lessons of our forebears, we’re saddled with the constant message that gay sex is dangerous. No matter how fastidious we are in our condom habits, no matter how many or few partners we choose to have, no matter if we’re in committed relationships, the world still sees butt sex as a deadly, immoral act.

So two products of a past era continue their romp. One begat synth pop, the other a viral holocaust with an endless shadow. Where do you think they’ll take us now?