A Look at the Gay, Black Origins of House Music

It's Pride Month, which means (even more than usual) we will be hearing the mixed club dance bops that reverberate through our chests, send our hands into the air and our hips side to side. "House Music," as it's more commonly known, is the successor to disco as the soundtrack to the gay experience post-70s. Where disco was peaking in the late '70s, House Music was just getting started in the gay clubs of Chicago. On Juneteenth, Instagrammer @Quinn.Solar shared a brief history of the Queer Black and Latinx men who invented House Music.

 

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As Queer Chicago DJ Derrick Carter said in 2014, "Something that started as a gay black/Latino club music and is now sold, shuffled, and packaged as having very little to do with either. [Resident Advisor] top 100, [DJ Mag] top 100, hell ANY top 100...show me the gay brown faces—Shit! Show me EITHER the gay or brown faces—and then discuss 'cultural smudging.'"

We figured we'd take an even deeper dive into who these badasses were and how they changed the world. So we figured we'd take an even deeper dive into the history of House Music and the badass Queer Black and Latino men who invented it.

DJ Frankie Knuckles

One artist is considered the godfather of it all: Frankie Knuckles. This Black, Queer man was a regular DJ at a gay club called The Warehouse, from which the iconic genre gets its name (before being shortened, the style was known as Warehouse Music). Knuckles would add basic elements of drums, pulse rhythms, and heavy bass to amp songs up into something dancers could feel deep in their bones.

But the connection to Disco wasn't simply an incidental one. Some of the first clubs Knuckles worked in were the gay bathhouses that were defining an entire generation through their sexual liberation tied to the disco revolution. Knuckles and best friend Larry Philpot DJ'ed at bathhouses like Better Days, Loft, the Sanctuary, and Tamburlaine. They also performed at the iconic Continental Baths of NYC's Upper West Side, which you may know of because of two other iconic singers who got their starts there: Bette Midler and her then-pianist Barry Manilow. But as RollingStone wrote upon Knuckles' untimely death in 2014, "At his Chicago clubs the Warehouse (1977-82) and Power Plant (1983-85), Knuckles’ marathon sets, typically featuring his own extended edits of a wide selection of tracks from disco to post-punk, R&B to synth-heavy Eurodisco, laid the groundwork for electronic dance music culture—all of it."

DJ Larry Levan

When the duo of Knuckles and Philpot started gaining more and more traction, Philpot changed his performing name to DJ Larry Levan. Levan's style leaned in heavily to the deep bass sounds that helped their music stand out from the rest, and Levan quickly gained steam as a genius in his own right; he became the main highlight of NYC's infamous Paradise Garage. If Knuckles was the Godfather of House Music, Levan was decidedly its messiah, carrying the message on. His genius was so profound, he was referred to as "The Jimi Hendrix of Dance Music".

DJ Ron Hardy

And with all good music genres there needs to be a bad boy as well, someone who adds a bit more mayhem to the order. Enter: DJ Ron Hardy. Another Queer, Black man in Chicago, Hardy performed at Chicago's famous Muzik Box club. He took the groundwork that Knuckles had laid down and flipped it on its head. His trademark style became playing songs in reverse, though he was also known for fucking with the equalizer, as well as the intense volume he would play the music.  Where Knuckles invented the House Music genre, Hardy took to the next level as the in-your-face revolution it was destined to be.

Like all great musical mediums, House Music caught on with bigger and bigger audiences, and eventually white Europeans starting branching out and adding in their own twists. There is no EDM music without House Music, and there is no House Music without Queer, Black men.

So if you're twirling your ass off shirtless this summer at your gay club of choice, and you feel the deep bass of the remixed music you've grown to associate with a night out in Gayville, then make sure you pause for second and thank the Queer, Black & Latinx men who gifted us with their brilliance.

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