Disco's downfall & decline
The downfall of disco can be linked to a single night on the 12th of July, 1979, also known as Disco Demolition Night. On that night, haters of disco converged at a baseball field and destroyed boxes of disco records.
A lot of the backlash on disco was focused around the involvement of the gay community, rather than the other minorities that were involved in the disco scene. This was due to the fact that around the same time that disco (and its backlash) were on the rise, the civil rights movement was making its impact in society. Making racist comments against African-Americans was now a taboo, but making homophobic comments in public was still okay.
Media portrayals of disco played a large role in the downfall and decline of the genre in mainstream America. American media chose to focus on the sexuality aspect of disco and omit the race and ethnicity that was present in disco as well.
“The politics of race were doubtlessly connected to some anti disco sentiments, given the overwhelmingly white rock audience and the multiracial disco audience. However, the emphasis on sexual identity in the media created a historical and a cultural framework for rock fans to describe the disco threat within a predominantly sexualised framework that was never explicitly or consistently connected to race.”
-(p. 289-290, Frank, G.)
Masculinity was threatened by the advent of disco, because it broke all sorts of gender norms that men were expected to uphold during that time. Within the world of disco, men were allowed to be effeminate, men were allowed to care for their appearance and wear sparkly, skin-tight, bedazzled suits with plunging necklines. For the white, heterosexual male, this was blasphemy.