From Ballroom to Beyonce: the Black, Queer history of the dance music scene
/Do you know Honey Dijon? If you’ve listened to Beyonce’s Renaissance album, you’ve heard her work. Honey Dijon is a DJ and electronic musician and producer. Her work on Renaissance, along with the work of producers like Green Velvet, represents a larger trend of house music’s influence on pop music, and mainstream culture in general. But did you know that electronic dance music (EDM) is rooted in Black and Queer history? You may have noticed that in the song Alien Superstar, Queen B makes references to drag ballroom culture by the song being framed as a competition, and by the use of terms like “category”. This is no accident, as Honey Dijon wrote and produced this track, and intentionally paid homage to the NYC drag ballroom scene, and her origins in the Chicago and NYC club scenes. Long before Honey Dijon was laying down beats, these underground scenes in Chicago, Detroit (the birthplace of techno), and NYC were created by and for Black, Queer people, and provided a liberating space for self expression and community building.
Honey Dijon provided a house history lesson with a June 2023 instagram post when she wrote,
“In 1970s Chicago, gay people were unwelcome in bars, clubs and churches. Queer Black and Latino people - the communities at the heart of disco’s first explosion - were discriminated against the most. This negative treatment gave rise to a network of after-hours gay members clubs, warehouse parties and semilegal juice bars, where the seeds for a new form of mutated disco began to germinate. In these spaces, the sounds and ideals that rooted New York’s underground gay dance scene and its discourse of harmony and togetherness were elevated and intensified. This is where house music started and the queerness and blackness has slowly and intentionally been erased.”
Almost all music in the United States can be traced back to the Black people who created or influenced it; EDM is no different. House music originated as “Chicago House” in the early 1980s, and was characterized by “steady, propulsive beats” in 4/4 time (“four on the floor”) and disco and soul music samples. Building on electronic music styles which had been established by trailblazers like Wendy Carlos (music visionary who pioneered the use of the synthesizer, and first trans person to win a grammy), Chicago House developed as an evolution of the disco and soul music that ruled the 1970s. Frankie Knuckles, AKA “the Godfather of House Music” is quoted as saying, “House music is disco’s revenge”. Knuckles was speaking to the fact that house music developed in spite of, or maybe because of, the discrimination faced by disco artists and the genre itself. But why was disco so discriminated against? Because the genre centered Blackness, Queerness, and femme-ness. Disco discrimination was often expressed in the tagline, “disco sucks”, and was literally made explosive in 1979 with “Disco Demolition Night”, hosted during a Chicago White Sox game, in which a local shock jock, anti-disco DJ invited patrons to bring a disco record with them to the game, to be blown up on the field. The night descended into a riot as thousands of angry young white men stormed the field to destroy records produced by mostly Queer people of color, featuring the voices of mostly Black women. Regarding the cultural significance of the event, Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh wrote in 1979, “white males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they're the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist…”. Chicago political journalist Mark W. Anderson joined this analysis in a 2014 op-ed, when he wrote, “The chance to yell "disco sucks" meant more than simply a musical style choice. It was a chance to push back on a whole set of social dynamics that lay just beneath the surface… It was a chance for a whole lot of people to say they didn't like the way the world was changing around them, or who they saw as the potential victors in a cultural and demographic war”. This night in 1979 is often referred to as “the night disco died”.
But disco is far from dead; in fact, she never died, but she did get her revenge.
Since its creation, house music has evolved into countless subgenres, all influenced by different cultures and historical contexts, but all still centering Blackness, Queerness, and femme-ness, in a celebration of shared humanity. The song “My House” by Fingers Inc (a house anthem) speaks to this sentiment in the lyrics, “...once you enter my house, it then becomes our house, and our house music… no one man owns house, because house music is a universal language spoken and understood by all… you see, house is a feeling…”. House music is not just about political freedom, it’s also about personal freedom, and it reminds us that the two are one and the same. “House is a feeling” is also about embodiment; it focuses on the desire and pleasure of moving the body, and the joy and connection of moving our bodies together. The framework of “house is a feeling” creates a space and an experience in which we get to be in our bodies, together. There is incredible safety, trust, and healing in that, and the communities that have been built by and for this music are a testament to its power.
The history of house music that Honey Dijon describes in her post runs parallel to, and intersects with, the history of the NYC ballroom scene, and the “underground gay dance scene” at large. In addition to dealing with interpersonal discrimination and violence, as we know from our Stonewall history, when Queer identities were more broadly criminalized it was impossible to gather without threat of violence from the carceral system. So, people often gathered in private homes, or under-the-radar venues, which were sometimes, as was the case with the Stonewall Inn, run by the mob. If the mob bribed the cops enough and on time, they were less likely to raid their business and arrest patrons. This tenuous agreement brought hope for less raids, but the raids always came eventually. So, people fought back with rebellions and riots a la Stonewall and Compton’s Cafeteria, but they also created networks of alternative locations to gather and dance with relative safety. This is why early house shows, as gatherings of Queer people, were famously hidden in warehouses and basements. Twentieth century drag balls followed a similar underground path due to exclusion from more mainstream spaces. In the 1960s, there were established drag pageant circuits, in which almost all the judges, and almost all the winners, were white, despite the competitions being integrated for contestants. Fed up with whiteness, rather than merit, taking home the prize, Black and Latinx queens began organizing their own competitions, called “balls”. Although balls in the United States date back to the 1800s, Black queens Crystal and Lottie LaBeija are credited with establishing the first ballroom house, The House of LaBeija, in 1968, which kickstarted the ballroom scene in NYC. Then, and now, drag houses function as chosen families, in which “children” receive support and guidance from their “mothers and fathers” made up of more experienced members of the ballroom scene. These houses become homes.
Today, ball culture and rave culture have influenced not just music, but media, fashion, and language, just to name a few. Countless artists have been impacted by these cultures, including: Beyonce! In a 2006 interview for The Independent, Beyonce shared, “how inspired she's been by the whole drag-house circuit in the States, an unsung part of black American culture where working-class gay men channel ultra-glamour in mocked-up catwalk shows. 'I still have that in me', she says of the 'confidence and the fire you see on stage”. With the mainstream rise of EDM, many headliners at major festivals are now white men, and much of the history and culture of this Black, Queer genre has been, as Honey Dijon named, “slowly and intentionally erased”. But for the ravers who take seriously the “ideals that rooted New York’s underground gay dance scene and its discourse of harmony and togetherness”, the history and culture are alive and well. Black, Queer elders who carved out a place for authenticity and community in warehouses and basements have done us an insurmountable service by keeping the torch lit.
The house music scenes and the ballroom scenes were created from a place of resistance to oppression, but in their evolution they have created something beyond resistance: liberation. Liberation is to live as if we are already free. House music- its history, its culture, its feeling- invites us to get curious about liberation.
Personally and politically, how might you live your life today if you were already free?
How might you move your body, or show love, or build community, if you were already free?
Let’s listen and speak to that universal language of house, and let our bodies move us a little deeper into our inherent freedom.
