How did a woman get into New York's disco DJ booths in the 1970s?

Sharon White was born in 1954 in West Babylon, Long Island, and started studying percussion at age seven. She got into radio in New York in the early 1970s, then crossed into club DJing in the mid-decade, taught by mentor Roy Thode at a Long Island bar called The Corral. Her early residencies were women's bars, then downtown gay clubs, 12 West and Flamingo, before she landed a booth at Studio 54. Her musical training turned out to be an edge nobody else on the circuit had: she mixed records in key, a skill she says she didn't realize was rare until other DJs started asking how she did it.

Why did Paradise Garage only ever have one female DJ?

Paradise Garage opened in Soho in 1977 as Larry Levan's room, and White studied his sets from the floor long before she ever touched the decks there herself. Decades later, DJ-history writers still cite the same fact: she remains the only woman to have ever DJed the club. That is less a compliment to her than an indictment of the door that stayed shut behind her.

What happened when The Saint said no women allowed?

The Saint opened in 1980, and owner Bruce Mailman reportedly made the policy explicit: no women in the booth. White got a single date only because the club's lighting designer, Mark Ackerman, threatened to quit unless she was given a shot. She filled in for a departing DJ on January 31, 1981, and the crowd's reaction turned an emergency booking into a residency that lasted until the club shut down in 1988, complete with marathon sets stretching up to 21 hours straight.

"Everybody thinks I went through this big struggle... I knew they weren't ready for a woman to be in that position in a club."

That's White herself, years later, refusing the easy trailblazer story even as she describes exactly the barrier she broke.

What did she do outside the booth?

White also became the first female Billboard reporter worldwide and moved through record-label promotions at RSO Records (where she worked artists including Thelma Houston and Diana Ross), then Polygram/Island, Motown and Profile Records. She stepped back from DJing in 1994, returned in 2004, and has since played Fire Island's Pavilion, Santos Party House and reunion nights built around The Saint's legacy. She's a Legends of Vinyl DJ Hall of Fame inductee and received the NY Black Pride Committee's Heritage Gatekeeper Award in 2016.