June 2021: Happy Pride!
At Emanate we believe in, and celebrate the right to expression of all people. Love is love! Music is love!
The LGBTQ + community has influenced many aspects of culture, but one we want to focus on this month is its roots with developing everything about electronic music from its sound to the club culture around the genre. It’s imperative that we focus on the role that the gay community played in the music’s origin and that we inform emerging fans of dance music to the ideals of community, equality and diversity that were so crucial to dance music’s formulation since the beginning.
At the beginning of the 70s in New York City, queer of color started to create pockets of space where they felt they could comfortable and themselves. Music was a vital part of these gatherings which was disco after the french word discotheque. The sound was a mix of soul, funk and Latin music with a driving, four-four kick drum pattern. However, these gatherings didn’t start in clubs, but apartments around the city. David Mancusco, who was well known for playing his records at his house in the Lower East Side of New York, slowly transformed his home into an exclusive underground dance party called The Loft. These parties acted as a safe place for the LGBTQ+ community in New York City at the time.
As disco gained popularity in the late 70s, The Loft became a blueprint for infamous discotheques like Paradise Garage or Studio 54. As disco music saturated the market, the roots of the music began to fade until the market for disco flopped. The downfall of disco acted as a reminder of sexualized and racial origins which prompted the homophobic ‘disco sucks’ movement. Paradise Garage was one of the few disco clubs that remained. It was notable for being a club just for dancing and making the DJ, who at the time was resident DJ Larry Levan, the centre of attention. Larry Levan had a loyal following of fans by developing a distinct sound that was later dubbed “garage.”
In addition to club culture, transgender people, many a part of racial minorities, transformed dance music through the introduction of vogueing and high-intensity dancing and performance tracks. When these underground spaces where the LGBTQ+ community could feel safe and not be harassed, a precedent was set of what dance music would look like in the future.
The history of house music started in the late 1970s of Chicago. Frankie Knuckles, who was considered ‘The Godfather of House Music’ was a resident DJ at The Warehouse in Chicago which catered primarily to gay, black, and Latino men. From there, he and other DJs like DJ Chip E., developed ‘Chicago House’, an innovative fusion of disco, soul, electro-pop, hip-hop, and many other styles. In comparison to NY’s ‘garage’ style of heavier gospel and soul influences, Chicago ‘house’ was heavily influenced by funk music, with a more high-energy sound that featured driving percussion and higher tempos. This style of music was primarily created for black and LGBTQ audiences.
Chicago House became very popular through the 1980s and many DJs who performed at the club were invited to popularize the genre in Europe, where derivative genres like Acid House, which had a gritty and psychedelic style, were created.
The rise in popularity of ‘house’ and ‘acid house’ in the UK brought not only a lot of sales but also gigs for the DJs, who would often travel to Europe to play for a mostly white audience, while the local American market largely ignored the genre of music. While there was a demise of disco, the music scene didn’t die, it just returned underground and had a stripped-down, raw quality to it.
Throughout the ’70s, Detroit’s dance music history was split between sexual and racial diversity: Ken Collier used to DJ in the basement of L’Esprit, which was an up-scale club, but only the white DJs would get the main stage of the venue. A couple years later, Collier held a Saturday night residency at the gay after-hours club called Heaven. Detroit’s “techno pioneers” deemed Collier the “godfather” of DJ culture in the city, but with little mention in the history books.
As the sexual divide of nightlife in Detroit began to loosen, queer venues like Heaven and Todd’s were important points of contact between different generations of musicians. Many of the legendary techno DJs in Detroit got their start by going to venues where older generations of gay, black DJs were combining disco with the new sounds of house and garage. But these encounters are almost entirely missing from the story of Detroit techno. This is because these venues and their social following remained mostly “off the grid.”
Detroit’s LGBTQ-history didn’t end in the ’80s. DJs of the older generation continued to play at parties into the early 2000s, however, most of them have passed away now. Now, a younger generation of queer-of-colour dancers, producers, DJs, event promoters, label managers and venue staff have also come up in the scene, such as Curtis Lipscomb and Adriel Thornton. Lipscomb manages Kick, which comes from a magazine running since 1994, which puts together events serving the Detroit LGBT community. Thornton is a local promoter of both electronic music and queer culture, founding the Fresh Media Group and engaging in community activism with Detroit’s Allied Media Projects.
In contrast to the US, disco in the UK during the’70s was primarily enjoyed by white and straight people, which left room for acid house to take root and become a global phenomenon. Starting in the mid-80s, Chicago house appeared in the UK at all the parties in Manchester. Acid house quickly became popular in London. The gay nightclub Heaven was one of the first venues to host acid house nights. In 1987, Danny Rampling’s Shoom became the first club with exclusive acid house programming, opening in the city after Rampling returned from holidays in Ibiza with Paul Oakenfold and Nicky Holloway. A year later, Holloway would open another acid house club, Trip.
Things were almost too successful for Shoom and Trip, and both venues soon found themselves on the wrong side of London’s authorities. In order to avoid police pressure, many promoters began organizing underground events in warehouses. This would form the basis of the Second Summer Of Love, the period starting in 1988 when the UK’s rave scene blossomed and went international. Although rooted in queer, black and Latino nightlife — and while certainly different from “mainstream” club culture at the time — rave in the UK at the end of the ’80s had become a primarily straight, white, middle- and working-class affair.
By the beginning of the ’90s, the first rave events were being organized in New York and Toronto. With Chicago house’s success in Europe, the city’s first generation of house DJs were constantly busy with overseas bookings, and so a younger generation of Chi-town DJs emerged into the Midwest rave scene.
What we’ve presented so far only scratches the surface. There are also many other histories that need to be told, too. One of these is the history of ballroom culture. At the heart of it is the drag ball, a combination of beauty pageant, fashion runway and dance competition rooted in historically marginalized transgender communities. Ball culture of some sort can be traced at least as far back as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s when costume balls provided the opportunity for partygoers to circumvent New York’s strict laws against cross-dressing and same-sex dancing. In the 1970s, people in the drag ball scene began to organize themselves into “houses,” families-by-choice that would compete as a team at balls, share resources, practice their routines together and often live under the same roof. This scene came to public attention at the beginning of the 1990s.
Most — perhaps nearly all — of the dance moves you see in R&B and pop videos today come from choreographers who have been involved in ballroom culture. In the ’90s, the ballroom scene even developed its own sub-style of high-intensity house music.
Drag balls have historically been the domain of queers of color, although there has always been a minority of white, straight and/or cisgendered participants. In particular, these scenes give transgendered people spaces where they can enjoy a degree of social prominence and cultural authority. They’re not only central as performers and bearers of a living tradition, but many also hold positions of power within these scenes. Circuit parties, on the other hand, seem to be the polar opposite of drag balls. Instead of small-scale, community-organized events, circuit parties are large-scale, corporate-sponsored mega-events held in massive locations and populated mostly by affluent, predominantly white gay men.
They grew out of the seasonal parties that had been taking place at Fire Island, Provincetown, and other gay resort areas that had developed along the East Coast, after New York’s Stonewall riots in 1969 made sexuality a publicly-debated civil-rights issue in the US. Over the 1980s, these parties developed into a circuit of massive, all-night dance music events spread across gay tourism destinations. The sound of “the circuit” was originally hi-NRG and early house, but across the ’90s it turned towards hard house, tribal house and trance.
As a wrap up to our Pride month series, we will be spotlighting a few more areas in the world with LGBTQ+ musical influences. First we have the red light district along 42nd street in Midtown Manhattan, which offered gathering places for sexual outcasts, especially transpeople and sex workers. The relatively slow tempo of New York’s deep house sound in the ’90s; and the blues, another African-American musical tradition that focuses on melancholia instead of euphoria to engage with everyday problems. Then in Paris, queer women have played important roles in electronic music, contributing as DJs, event promoters, bar staff and fans. One of the most prominent artists to come out of this scene is Jennifer Cardini, a DJ, producer and label boss for Correspondent.
She got her start as a resident DJ at Le Pulp, a lesbian club that played a key role in promoting women’s involvement in electronic music in Paris. Being queer wasn’t easy during the ’80s and ‘90s — especially in the townships surrounding Johannesburg. The main queer-friendly house clubs during the ’90s were in the more affluent white districts, such as 4th World, Johannesburg’s first dedicated house club, Embassy Club and Idols. Although dance music scenes in cities all over the world struggled with racial divisions, the legacy of Apartheid was particularly palpable in Johannesburg.
In more recent history, in Los Angeles, A Club Called Rhonda has been going strong since about 2008, functioning as a sex-positive, queer-friendly, multiethnic monthly event. This isn’t to say that there weren’t challenges in creating an event where partygoers can feel comfortable playing with their sexual identities.
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