High Life

Celebrating Pride Month, June 2023

'High Life' by Dennis Parker
from the album Like An Eagle, 1979

Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we like to celebrate Pride Month by shining a light on some of the undeservedly neglected aspects of the LGBTQ experience, during the interval from 1968 to 1988. Here, we look at the disco singing career of Dennis Parker.

Dennis Posa was born on October 28, 1946, and grew up in Freeport, Long Island. As an adult he moved to New York City and tried his hand at a variety of professions and occupations, including acting. In the mid-1970s he built on a past history of appearing in gay loops and photo shoots to appear in high-profile adult films, under the stage name 'Wade Nichols'. 

The best-known of Nichols's appearances likely is the 1979 film Love You, starring Annette Haven. The film was directed by the well-known actor John Derek, whose wife Bo Derek assisted with many aspects of the shoot. 

In 1976 or 1977 he met the flamboyant French record producer Jacques Morali, who would later create the disco stalwarts The Village People. In 1978 Morali signed Posa, now using the stage name 'Dennis Parker', to a record deal with Casablanca Records. In 1979, the disco album Like An Eagle was released.

While Parker was a novice at singing, the album had considerable musical talent associated with its production, and it deserves greater recognition as one of the best disco / dance albums to emerge in the late 1970s.

'High Life', one of the tracks from Like An Eagle, is pure disco dynamite !!!!

Like An Eagle was Parker's only foray in music. In 1979, he was cast as Police Chief Derek Mallory in the soap opera The Edge of Night, and remained on the show until October 1984, when increasing ill-health forced him to retire. He died of AIDS on January 28th, 1985.