The queer and Black roots of club music

Clubs as shelter

In the Chicago lesson you met The Warehouse, where Frankie Knuckles played from 1977 to a mostly Black and Latino, largely gay crowd. The same year Paradise Garage opened in New York, where Larry Levan played for ten years. For people shut out elsewhere, such clubs were places where they could be themselves. Dancing there was more than entertainment: it was community.

Larry Levan and Paradise Garage

Paradise Garage put dancing and the DJ at the centre, which was not a given at the time. Levan played long, emotional sets mixing disco, soul, funk and early electronics. He also co-created music, including the Peech Boys' "Don't Make Me Wait" from 1982, which his sets turned into a club anthem. The club closed in September 1987 after a 48-hour party.

Detroit: a Black future

Detroit techno, from the Belleville Three to Underground Resistance, is the music of Black artists from an industrial city dreaming of the future. The duo Drexciya built a myth around their music about an underwater civilisation descended from African women thrown overboard from slave ships. It is one of the most moving examples of Afrofuturism in music.

Whitewashing the scene

When techno became huge in Europe in the 1990s, its faces were mostly white men. The genre's roots often disappeared from the story, and women, Black and queer artists rarely made it onto festival posters. Berlin's scene, including Berghain, which had its own lesson, kept its queer roots, but not everywhere did.

Who is changing it

In 1998 Viennese DJ Electric Indigo, who had worked at Berlin's Hard Wax record shop, founded the female:pressure network. It brings together women, non-binary and trans people in electronic music and counts how many of them appear on festival lineups. In 2014 Discwoman was founded in New York, a collective and agency promoting women artists. Its roster included Poland's VTSS. Honey Dijon, a Black trans DJ from Chicago, now plays the world's biggest clubs and speaks openly about trans rights.