

Loren Granic, Gregory Alexander of A Club Called Rhonda

In September of last year, Berghain held its Promote Diversity fundraising event, starting off as a concert and continuing on into the next morning as a party. The list of DJs for the party added up to a whopping 38 over 24 hours—so many, in fact, that the coat-check area was opened up as a third floor of music, while nearly every DJ appeared back-to-back with another artist for 1.5-hour sets.During that same week, similar Promote Diversity fundraisers were held in Munich ( Harry Klein ), Paris ( Rex Club ), New York ( Output/The Panther Room ), Tel Aviv ( The Block ), San Francisco ( Holy Cow/Honey Soundsystem ) and Zurich ( Heaven Club ). The ticket proceeds from these events were to be donated to All Out , a LGBT-rights organization that is active in several countries around the world. This was in response to Russia's recently passed legislation against "homosexual propaganda," which included wording that criminalized virtually any public statement in support of "non-traditional sexual relations." But why would the global nightclub community take action to support sexual minorities? What relevance do they have to today's club culture, anyway?The press release for the Promote Diversity fundraiser says, "Equality on all levels and tolerance are basic values that the club and music scene has always supported." Why is that so? Well, presumably because most of the music scenes that founded today's dance music genres—disco, garage, house, etc—were closely connected with marginalized groups, including gays and lesbians, transpeople, racial and ethnic minorities.Maybe we need to flip the opening question on its head: if the roots of electronic music are so sexually diverse, why do today's audiences need to be reminded of it? Have we forgotten about the queer nightlife worlds of the '70s and '80s? That's the problem according to Loren Granic, AKA Goddollars, co-founder and resident of A Club Called Rhonda in Los Angeles, who doesn't mince words:"We're currently experiencing a total mainstreaming of dance music in America," he says. "Many of these newcomers are straight/white kids who are very far removed from the LGBT community, despite fist-pumping by the millions to a music that was born from gay people of color sweating their asses off at 5 AM in a Chicago warehouse. It's easy for us to dismiss this as a corruption of the music we hold so dear by charlatans and assholes, but many of the newcomers will be drawn into the music for life, and I think it's important that we highlight the role that the gay community played and that we educate new fans of dance music to the ideals of community, equality and diversity that were so crucial to dance music's DNA from the beginning."And if sexual minorities were historically central to the emergence of dance music culture, where are they now? If you take a look at who is running the clubs, managing the labels, booking the artists, and playing the records, the demographics are starkly different from the crowds that got this music started. Considering how big a role the gay community played in the genesis of the music, it's strange to see that the majority of the stakeholders nowadays are of the straight male variety. It would be great to see promoters, artists, producers and club owners take a stronger stand to be more inclusive of the culture from which they take and profit so liberally."Despite this, queer dance music scenes continue to thrive today, even if they're mostly off the radar of mainstream dance music media. Why and how did that happen? Part of this might have to do with the scale of today's club culture: it's easier for minorities to remain central to a music scene when it's small, local and personal. Once it becomes a massive global phenomenon, it's much harder for marginalized people to stay inside the frame of attention. But another reason for this absence is that history is written by victors: as dance music became more mainstream and had more crossover success, the people writing its history followed the "more relevant" threads into primarily straight, white, middle class environments, quickly forgetting about the more queer and colorful scenes that were still dancing and making music.These days, it's clear that there is not one history but many histories. Everyone has an idea of how things happened and, as more people have access to writing, publishing, the internet, etc., more and more alternative histories crop up to contest the "official" version of events. Those who want to uncover the history of marginalized peoples have to search through the archives of historical documents—mostly written by the powerful about the powerful for the powerful—to find traces of what the less powerful were doing. The idea behind this feature is not to set the record "straight," but rather to re-examine club culture's queer roots, and then dig up the stories of the scene's queer undergrounds.