AnotherClub
“There’s this transition there around the 6, 61/2 minute point where it kinda builds, and builds you up. And you kinda loosen up for like, thirty seconds. And then it’s--BAM!--for the next five, six minutes it’s one, long, extended orgasm. And your mind is just blown after that.
That’s one of those songs where after it finished, Larry used to not play anything for the next 30, 60 seconds, just because it was so intense. After that, you just embrace the people you were dancing close to and just let things out, man--we just let it all out...”
You had to be there. It’s Saturday Mass at Paradise Garage--84 King Street in the Village. It’s the stuff of queer legend--Michael Brody’s parking-structure-turned-after-hours-gay-club, packed with a soaring mass of partygoers stretched out to the curb to hear Larry Levan work his magic fingers. They’re stripping off their tight-fitting tees and tucking them in the back of their jeans without missing a beat. They’re coursing through each other like a rush of blood--or amyl nitrite--to the head. There’s no AC, no booze, just dancing--all night.
It’s 1977, and Levan is debuting his Special 12” Mix of Sylvester’s “Over and Over.” The floor is flooded with the stories and voices and experiences and needs of its majority Black and Latino clientele; fluid, queer lifeworlds, bouncing and swaying, colliding and recombining to the beat of something like nothing you’ve ever heard. It’s Disco, and it’s Rhythm and Blues, and it’s Gospel, and it’s anything Levan could get his hands on, but it’s something else altogether. It’s got a pounding backbeat and sharp percussive character that can’t hold down its ascendent soul-diva vocals--all stitched together with a playfully unconcealed DIY attitude. It’s “Garage”--a person, a place, and a time wrapped up in a sound that would seismically transform dancefloors around the world. And it’s not alone.
The late-70s and early-80s saw an eruption of countless innovative approaches to dance music from the queer underground. In Chicago, Frankie Knuckles, who learned alongside Levan at the Saint Mark’s Baths, would became the godfather of “House” by remixing records live with sampled and synthesized percussion that drew rhythm to the fore. “House” is abbreviated from Warehouse--the factory-turned-members-only-gay-club co-founded by Knuckles in 1977 that predominantly hosted disenfranchised queer people of color; the style’s etymology and rapid proliferation in similar clubs testify to the formative influence of such sanctuaries of collectively improvised dance on musical innovation from the margins. Queer superclubs like the Saint, the Pyramid Club, and Palladium assumed the empty shells of urban decay, just as Hip-Hop, Hi-NRG, and Mutant Disco crawled out from the rubble of Disco Demolition. Transgressive combinations of people and sounds dismantled neatly-ordered genres and engaged social and political issues through the content of their music and the inherently subversive nature of their communal celebration. Buckland experienced the cultural reinvention in these settings as a kind of “bricolage”; she argues that “making something out of the resources available, seized, or stolen from any context was a practice of queer world-making, which, in appropriating the meanings of these artifacts and loading them with personal or communal meanings, in effect queered them.” In a fleeting moment of freedom, queer clubbers manipulated the signs and practices around them to envision liberatory possibilities for the future--enacting them in the present through dance.
In September, 1987, the colorful Paradise Garage flyers that had promised the continued projection of this queer future through endless weekend parties assumed a different tone. In lieu of the eye-catching graphics of the past, these sheets featured a solemn note from the founder. Brody wrote:
Every so often, something beautiful in our lives passes on. We find sadness in this because we can no longer see it, or feel it, or be near it. However, we must remember that these things live on in our memory, and in spirit. We have sad news to share with you. The lease of Paradise Garage officially ends October 1st, 1987. Paradise Garage will come to an end at that time […] The spirit of the Garage will always be there, and possibly one day in the future, we'll all be partying together again.
The Garage was the first of many clubs to close its doors after SOHO residents opposed the renewal of the lease. This opposition came from within a flurry of anxieties about the culture of queer nightlife. The dance floor became the target of a moral panic when mainstream media portrayed clubs as dangerous vice-dens laden with illegal drugs, unsafe sex, and, centrally, HIV infection; derogatory notions of queer people as morally abject were refracted to justify discriminatory zoning regulations and unprecedented, targeted enforcement of licensing laws restricting public dancing. AIDS-phobia claimed the Saint Mark’s Baths, He’s Gotta Have It, and Palladium. At the Saint, a three-day “Last Party” sent long-time patrons out into the night with a final mix of Jimmy Ruffin’s “Hold On to My Love” and the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. The architectural marvel was bulldozed to make way for a seven-story-luxury-apartment-complex-turned-unasuming-Apple Bank-branch.
Before their demolition, these spaces were vital outlets for safely expressing compassion and commiseration during the AIDS-epidemic. By the Garage’s closure, 71,176 people had been diagnosed with AIDS–a grief inexpressible through language, which now could not be shared through collective dance. In 1992, Levan passed on from AIDS-related complications, joining the 198,322 taken by the virus. The voices of the founding generation of queer DJs were lost. As such, there was no one to push back against the recording industry’s simultaneous commodification of the underground’s transgressive “difference” and flattening of representations of racial, sexual, and socio-economic deviation into a whitewashed, universalized “rave music.” Through the 90s and 2000s, dance music became the amorphous, apolitical, pop-fueled party fodder disproportionately centering straight, white, cis-gendered audiences and artists that remains pervasive in today’s festival scene. As minoritarian subjects became subject to the structural violence that they dreamed a futurity outside of in the nightlife that they created, it seemed that both the music and the movement had fallen to the same fate of the cultural artifacts that they’d queered. Their remnants became an appropriative remedy to the mainstream’s “perceived lack of vitality,” dissociated from their radical queer resonances and origins.
We are all condemned to silence— unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create. This is what composing is […] Playing for one's own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication. [. . .] It relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure in being instead of having.
Written in 1985, Jacques Attali’s recognition of the music’s potential to create the encourage the collective reimagining of present modes of being bears particular significance in the context of today’s queer electronic music scene. The blazing spirit of electronic dance music’s early instigators was not snuffed by EDM’s forceful migration to the mainstream, but rather retreated deep into the underground. In recent years, underground nightlife has been a bastion for politically-attuned DJs and dancers, allowing their inventive approaches to dance music to blossom in strange new forms under the radar and outside the commodifying eye of popular culture. Many queer countercultural spaces–like the gay Black and Hispanic drag balls that trace their roots to the early 1950s and gave rise to the phenomenon of “vogue” music–maintained through the tumultuous restructuring of the club scene; today, rapidly advancing communication technologies have enabled these scenes to call and respond to peers around the world, instigating a rebellious emergence of innumerable stylistic mutations that hold true to the subversive innovation of their predecessors. Artists like Honey Dijon, SOPHIE, Octo Octa, and Cakes Da Killa, LSDXOXO, and Mister Wallace (among many, many others) have pioneered an idiosyncratic mix of styles connected by a shared system of socio-culturally derived aesthetics that defies generic distinctions. This fluid, inclusive, outwardly political mix of sounds vaguely termed “post-club” music refigures style and cultural knowledge as semiotic indicators of belonging, performatively inheriting the mantle of queer legends like Levan and Knuckles through a kind of musical intertextuality.
DJs and dancers of today’s queer underground impart their messages by remixing and sampling history–not only musical history, but culturally significant identifiers of group belonging (like Commentor Buddah’s sample of congresswoman Maxine Waters in “Reclaiming My Time” and Hentai Girl 3000’s inclusion of the Grindr notification sound in their bootleg of Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night (TGIF)”). Moreover, artists and listeners alike imbue these compositions with their own personal history and identity, producing an uncountable variety of new meanings that reshape source material. While many queer artists like Queen Diva Big Freedia have attained mainstream acclaim by drawing from familiar heteronormative songs, their bricolage with queer themes not only draws homosexual desire to the fore, but implies its presence in unstable norms of heterosexual relations. Freedia has used her platform as the “ambassador” of Bounce music to assume a combative stance towards mainstream appropriation, staying true to the underground and refusing to sacrifice the sonic complexities of queer lifeworlds that bear witness to the painful ways in which queer communities of color have been forced to the margins. As club nights like A Club Called Rhonda recenter the overwritten racial and sexual liberation of Disco, House, and Techno’s “golden age,” underground DJ collectives and activist groups like Rave Reparations are confronting inequalities in the contemporary EDM mainstream by building relationships between Black queer-identifying artists and popular club promoters.
This modern movement is driving mainstream electronic music circles towards active inclusivity, accessibility, and historical consciousness preceded only by the irreplicable atmosphere of dance music’s queer beginnings. Nonetheless, an air of positive change should not obscure the realities of present crisis. Continued gentrification and administrative disregard for important queer spaces has led to a recent epidemic of club closures; like the Saint, Los Angeles’s Circus Disco, a prominent LGBTQ+ club founded in 1975 with primarily Hispanic patronage, was demolished in 2016 to make way for an expansive upscale retail development after it was deemed “inelligible for historic designation.” The COVID-19 pandemic has only amplified this trend, as the mass evacuation of dance floors has forced cultural mainstays like the Pyramid Club to permanently close their doors. As we reluctantly embrace a “new normal,” queer DJs and advocates are working hard through their music and collective demonstrations of resilience to protect queer lifeworlds. By reclaiming and remixing dance music’s queer history, they draw on a wellspring of vital expressions of sexual and racial difference, refiguring the work of yesterday’s legends to realize shared aspirations for a liberated future.