"From that point on it was very much like... even if people don't understand what's going on with the scene, we're going to give them new heroes. Someone new to idolize, someone who doesn't exist here. 'Oh, he's so talented, but he lives down the street from me. I can't idolize him because I see him take out the trash.' Or 'He fucked every one of my ex-boyfriends so I can't idolize him.' We gave them a headlining DJ from somewhere they've never heard of, someone they need to know. Not a circuit party DJ that you've heard a million fucking times."Around the same time Sperber was getting Honey started, Michael Trombley had his own idea in Philadelphia. He'd moved there from LA in 2005 and started throwing a party with Ron Morelli called Paradise at a "fossilized gay club that no one had touched since '86." The party was a success, and eventually it morphed into Macho City, which started in September of 2008 at another barely on-the-radar gay bar. A few months later, Trombley moved back to his hometown of Detroit, a city that faced that same problem as San Francisco."There weren't enough options in terms of queer spaces where you were going to hear good, underground dance music," he said. "It's still the same way to this day, unfortunately. In Detroit, Macho City struck a nerve with queers who didn't want to go to the club and hear commercial pop music."Even in the birthplace of house music, gay nightlife was lackluster. The streets of Boystown, Chicago's gayborhood, are lined with bars that play the same kind of circuit-oriented top 40 stuff. Though dance music was a little easier to find in Chicago, there were still no spaces with the combination of free-spirited energy and great musical culture that Honey was bringing to its hometown."I remember being at this one bar, really big, called Sidetrack, and a bar-back yelled at these guys for really fiercely making out," Jacob Meehan told me. "He was really bitchy and rude, telling them that Steamworks was down the street—directing them to the bath house." Meehan is a former art dealer and gallerist, and one half of the DJ duo Harry+Jpeg, who would go on to start Men's Room.Meehan wanted a party where guys weren't afraid to touch or kiss each other. He knew a spot called Wang's, just off the main drag in Boystown. Enter Anthony "Ace" Pabey, one of Wang's bartenders. In Pabey, Meehan found just the kind of personality he wanted for Men's Room: even over the phone, his blunt sense of humour was obvious. He has the kind of verve and no-holds-barred vocabulary that might make more conservative guys squirm. Already a hit as a bartender, Ace was quickly placed on the door."It was hard for them to deal with what I was giving them at the door," Pabey said. "Number one: I was trying to make sure that their mentality was right. It was nothing about the way a person looked, it had shit to do with if they were shy. They had to be open and a little hungry—hungry for more in their life. If I could smell that in them, then they got in."Though guys were generally open-minded about the music—a mixture of house, disco, techno, even industrial and post-punk—it took some time to get them warmed up to the sexier aspects of the party. Pabey did whatever he could to loosen up the vibe. He'd pass blunts around the bar, promise people free drinks if they took their clothes off, or get guys to pour shots into their foreskin, so that people would know that "you can have a dick in your mouth and it's gonna be OK.""I always try to get the line popping," he said. "I go out there and talk a bunch of shit, make people pull out their dicks just to get in. There's a process to get into Men's Room: once you get in, you have to go through another process of taking your clothes off and getting comfortable. My dream is to always make the linesexy—giving that feeling of like, 'Yeah, just have sex out here already if you want to.'"Men's Room is meant to be an overwhelming physical experience, though it's not merely a sex party. In spite of the name, people of all sexualities and gender identities are welcome (a spin-off called Femme's Room plays with the party's over-the-top masculine imagery). And for anyone who just wants to have sex, they've taken Men's Room to the Steamworks bath house, coming full circle from when Meehan first had the idea for the party. Though a men-only bath house caters to just a fraction of the queer spectrum, the fact that Harry+Jpeg can bring their style of music to Steamworks is significant in itself.Over in Pittsburgh, a party called Honcho has reclaimed the gay bath house entirely, making it a space for everyone to dance in. Bath houses, or saunas, are another relic of the pre-AIDS days, and of a time when queer people had to go about their business in secrecy. In younger gay communities they're seen as dated. But it's Club Pittsburgh, a bath house downtown, that now hosts the city's most influential party: Hot Mass.Hot Mass takes over the bottom half of the bath house. There's a dance floor, a DJ booth, the usual labyrinth of nooks and crannies (leftover from its past life), and that's about it. The minimalist space was originally home to afterparties for Aaron Clark's Humanaut events. They would start at whatever venue he was using at the time and then move into Club Pittsburgh after the 2 AM liquor cutoff. There was no booze, but people could dance all night. Humanaut was mostly straight, though, and Clark had trouble getting his gay friends interested in it, or in the music he was bringing. "It was like pulling teeth," he said.While all this was going on, Clark was invited to Gays Hate Techno, a private Facebook group created by Matt Fisher as a way to connect queer people who loved dance music—people who lived in places like Pittsburgh, where many felt like there was no real scene or no other like-minded people. Just the idea that there were other queer people around the US who loved techno was powerful."Gays Hate Techno took all the pieces of it that were scattered around and connected them all and glued them together," said Clark. "It's still active and it's really huge, but that initial wave of it was like, 'Holy shit! You exist?"After meeting folks through the Facebook group, Clark decided to spend some time in San Francisco. There, like most people mentioned in this article, he was inspired by Honey Soundsystem. When he got back to Pittsburgh, Clark and cofounders Clark Price and George d'Adhemar began a party called Honcho.

From left: Aaron Clark with crew

Honcho was supposed to hit its peak during Pittsburgh Pride in 2012, as a counterpoint to the official event's corporate sponsorships and antiseptic vibe. He found a two-story warehouse and booked Mike Servito upstairs, along with a drag show and some live acts downstairs. Tickets sold like hot cakes—over 300 of them, with more than 800 RSVP'd. This irritated Pittsburgh's gay establishment—they told the cops about the party and got it shut down before it even started. But Clark had Club Pittsburgh ready as a backup venue, just in case."We just let in pre-sale ticket holders and nobody else," Clark said. "It was super makeshift. Servito was playing on a folding card table. We found some booze downstairs, and people showed up with bags of ice that they picked up on the way. It just happened."In the time since, Honcho has earned a reputation as one of America's most unhinged parties. "Nobody cares what you're doing or who you are or what's going on," Clark said. "There's no windows, the room is right and the temperature's right. It's kind of like a time warp in there. The crowd is really reactive, they go crazy. DJs get heavy feedback from the crowd. You can get really adventurous, you can't really throw the crowd. They want you to push them harder and harder."Clark eventually took over the venue entirely, throwing parties there every weekend and keeping the bath house open and thriving. And aside from that men-only party during Pride, Honcho, like its spiritual sister events, is rooted in inclusivity. You can go downstairs from the bath house but you can't go up, which means no one accidentally wanders into a situation they don't want to be a part of (namely an orgy). Like Men's Room, you can have sex at Honcho, but you can also just dance to great music.Kevin Kauer is another promoter reclaiming gay spaces in the name of art, music and sex positivity. For five years he's been running a party called Dickslap at the Seattle Eagle, the city's long-running leather bar. It's a party so beloved it's been dubbed the saviour of Seattle's embattled nightlife.

Kevin Kauer hitching a ride at Dickslap

Throwing a party at the Eagle is meaningful in itself. The venue has a rich history in gay culture, with its roots going back to The Eagle's Nest bar in Chelsea in New York, which became a safe haven for gay men after the Stonewall riots and was the breeding ground for gay leather culture. The bar was so influential that almost every major city in North America, and some in Europe, has a gay bar called The Eagle, typically a place you go to pick up or have cheap drinks. They're fun, but art and music are rarely the focus.Dickslap brought a shot of political energy to the Seattle Eagle. Around 2010, Kauer had been doing low-profile parties on weeknights, slowly wading into the scene at a time when Seattle's municipal government was in the midst of a crackdown. They tried to find every excuse they could to shut down bars, particularly in the traditionally queer and alternative Capitol Hill neighbourhood. Officials from the liquor board enforced ancient ordnances against bodily and sexual contact, which primarily targeted gay bars. It created a repressive climate around sexuality.Hoping to stay open amidst all the fines and threats, most of the bars played along, going as far as toning down the kind of videos they showed on their TV screens. But when The Eagle was written up and fined for showing a video of a guy jerking off, Kauer decided he'd had enough."That sparked Keith, the owner, to call me," Kauer said. "He wanted to just give a big 'fuck you' to them. To throw a party that just did everything wrong, that broke all the rules. We're fucking adults, we can do these things. These are archaic prohibition rules and it's weird for such a progressive city. You can't even show male nipples, you can't show an ass crack—technically, a bar-back bending over to pick something up, if his ass crack comes out, that's illegal. Which is crazy."Kauer wanted it to have an equally fuck-you name, so he chose Dickslap, and titled the first event "Seattle Eagle vs. The Washington State Liquor Board." The party was an instant success, and Kauer won—he said since he started doing Dickslap, the liquor board and its inspectors "dropped off the map."Dickslap wasn't just remarkable for its in-your-face attitude. It was also a place to hear interesting music, with guests including people like Prosumer and Tin Man, remarkable for a mainstream gay bar. Seattle has no shortage of queer watering holes, but there aren't many where you'd go to hear great music, primarily because the interest isn't—or wasn't—there."If I had just said, 'Oh, it's this party, and there's house and techno and there's this cool DJ,' nobody would've come," Kauer said. "So, you know, obviously the beginning of Dickslap was because we're gonna break all the rules and do all this shit and it's just gonna be ridiculous. But really, all that stuff was bringing people in—then what I was doing was sort of forcing the music upon them later. Now you're here, you're in my world, you're in my bar, now you're gonna get this."Kauer's efforts beyond Dickslap have also had an impact on Seattle's queer scene. He does another monthly called The Make Out Party, and there's Bottom Forty at Kremwerk, a mixed-use venue that attracts a more diverse but still queer-centric crowd. Bottom Forty has since become a record label, enshrining the West Coast's section of the queer techno underground—their crew includes artists from Portland and LA—into something tangible. Seattle's gay bars are no longer the home of outdated music and bored dance floors—they're where new and interesting shit happens."The LA warehouse scene has always had a good mix of people at its events, but there were no disco, house or techno underground parties run completely by homos," Cruse said. "And frankly, I was feeling a little weary of going to parties thrown by straight people for a primarily straight clientele, capitalizing on the music historically created and championed by gays. I know it's not politically correct, but I imagined a space where gays could play gay music for gays to dance and hook up to. Where they could dance and interact with other people, rather than worry about how they appear."Motivated, musically at least, by the Sarcastic Disco parties (which became rarer after a article brought the wrong kind of attention), Cruse launched Spotlight in Glassell Park in 2012. It was a typical LA warehouse party, with a twist: a darkroom. The first one was an installation by artist Christopher Kreiling, "a maze of booths and gloryholes outlined in neon light" that initially confused partygoers, who didn't seem to realize what it was for."But then this exhibitionist guy pulled his dick out and asked guys to help him put on a cock ring. Then the whole concept made more sense," Cruse said. "Everybody's figured it out now."In addition to booking killer, and often queer, DJs like Prosumer and Honey Dijon, Spotlight has a conceptual bent, with a different theme every time. Cruse learned that potted plants are returnable so he threw a jungle-themed party. He hauled in a truckload of plants from Home Depot, and lined a camouflage-painted darkroom maze with them. (He managed to return nearly all the plants afterwards, much to the chagrin of the Home Depot employees.) Another party, for Valentine's Day, featured a seedy-looking white van where the seats were replaced by shag carpeting. He put it right on the dance floor, sprayed it with leather-scented cologne and made it so that the back entrance led to the darkroom."People were flashing the headlights until it killed the battery, and people were dancing on top of the van all night," he said. "I can't believe they took the van back—we kept digging cigarette butts out of the interior and there were dirty shoe prints all over the roof."Spotlight, happening in a city with a few established gay parties, is a good example of what separates these underground parties from the rest."A few years ago Rhonda and Fade To Mind were really the most interesting gay-adjacent music scenes," Cruse said. "They helped put Los Angeles on the dance music map, and they're still powerhouses today. But at this point, they cater more to mixed crowds. Rhonda is always in a legit venue, so it has to abide by certain rules as well. Fade To Mind draws a younger crowd, and isn't so sexually charged. And then there is West Hollywood, but none of our friends really wanted to go to those clubs to mingle with other gays—those spaces and crowds felt so homogenous and unadventurous, with awful paint-by-numbers music. So there seemed to be a bit of a void between all of those scenes, and we tried to create something to fill it."