Frederick Dunson was 17 when he first rode a rickety freight elevator to the sprawling industrial space where music history was being made. When the doors opened, the desolate Chicago neighborhood below fell away. The lights were dim and pulsing. The crowd was art-student chic. The music was the style that would come to be known as house. The men playing it were, like Dunson and many other attendees that night, young, black and gay. It was 1975, and the club at 555 W. Adams St. and local venues like it were sonic and social revelations. By year’s end, the venue had moved to a members-only space nearby that was officially named US Studio, but was called “The Warehouse” by attendees. Revelers shortened that name to “house” to describe the music DJs like Frankie Knuckles -- who would come to be known as the godfather of the genre -- played there, grafting gospel and soul vocals over kick drums made with the era’s emerging drum machine technology and played at 120-130 beats per minute. With a thrilling soundtrack, the gay men populating the dancefloor could freely express themselves. “Being ostracized as black, gay kids,” says Dunson, founder/president of the Frankie Knuckles Foundation, which works to preserve Knuckles’ legacy and support his causes, “this felt like a place where we could be who we were while being protected from the judgments of society.”

READ MORE How Troye Sivan Found Stardom Without Catering to Straight Fans “Chicago was kind of a racist town,” adds Warehouse founder Robert Williams, who relocated to the Midwest from New York in the early ’70s. He recruited Knuckles to be the resident DJ at his new club. The Warehouse “was a haven for the gay community, which also turned into the heterosexual community, because the gay kids were inviting their heterosexual friends who were dying to come in.” From Knuckles and company in Chicago to fellow house innovators David Mancuso and Larry Levan in New York, dance music’s roots in the gay club scenes of the late ’70s and early ’80s are well documented. Gay men, and particularly gay men of color, are widely credited with creating house music and planting the seeds of the many genres that have evolved from it. Walk into a Las Vegas club today, and you’ll hear music -- mainly, what’s known as EDM -- that draws on this earlier sound. Like the blues and other genres before it, it is music forged by a marginalized community that is now dominated by the heteronormative mainstream, with straight, white, cisgender men populating label boardrooms and festival lineups. While underground LGBTQ-oriented clubs continue trendsetting in major cities, in the most visible and lucrative incarnations of the scene they created, gay and black artists are in the minority.

House music pioneers Knuckles (top left) and Levan (top right) in Chicago and at New York’s Paradise Garage, respectively. Courtesy of the Frankie Knuckles Foundation; Bill Bernstein/Courtesy of David Hill Gallery, London Representation, particularly of women (of whom there were few even in house’s early years), has become a hot topic in the dance scene and industry at large, but for many event organizers, addressing the issue isn't a priority. “I find these subjects extremely counterproductive,” says Correal. “I look for the talent. I don’t want to let politics disrupt the focus on making the parties badass.” The mainstream EDM scene is, in theory, open to LGBTQ artists. In early May, house producer Kandy came out on social media and got support from stars like DJ Snake, Marshmello and Diplo. Diplo also recently pushed boundaries of EDM heteronormativity by kissing Brazilian drag queen Pabllo Vittar in Vittar’s video for “Então Vai.” Still, LGBTQ representation remains paltry. “Coming into the EDM scene as an aspiring producer, there were no standout LGBTQ-plus artists for me to look up to,” says Kandy. Longtime music journalist Zel McCarthy notes that the business model hasn't changed “because the people running the business are straight men.” As those men fortify their networks in a world designed after their interests, it stands to reason that they’ll keep occupying those positions. (Of the 74 executives, agents and industry figures on Billboard’s 2018 Dance Power Players list, 54 are white men.)