BLACK QUEER DJs MADE EDM

We
Who have nothing to lose
Must sing and dance
Before the riches
Of the world
Overcome
Us.

We
Who have nothing to lose
Must laugh and dance
Lest our laughter
Goes from
Us.

-Langston Hughes, Black Dancers (1925)

With Pink Haus parties drawing such huge crowds, it's difficult to imagine that at one point in Colgate's history, its residential space didn't exist. Even more astonishing is the fact that QTPOC only started hosting parties there years after its 2016 founding, following a hard-fought campaign by student leaders. For this year's Springfest, QTPOC felt it necessary to host a final Pink Haus party for the semester, knowing how inundated  many people of color feel by the pervasive Greek life cultural sphere dominating nightlife on campus. Pink Haus is a place where people feel empowered to outwardly express their sexual freedom, embrace their queer identity, and dance joyously with their friends without forcing themselves to the falsehoods of safety as they do at other parties on campus. Despite some of the recent community work from groups like Black Techno Matters in Washington, D.C., Mamba Negra in Brazil, and Dweller in New York City, the overall perception of electronic dance music is that it is a white genre. With this in mind, we have committed to hosting CLUB PINK this year not only because we want to continue our vision for queer liberation at Colgate, but because we seek to uplift and spotlight the many Black and queer histories that have been erased and forgotten by playing music that is often not heard in typical parties, which includes the works of Honey Dijon, Zebra Katz, and LSDXOXO.

The socio-cultural landscape of Colgate is structured in a way that allows fraternities to shape the nightlife experience for students. This includes determining who electronic music is primarily for, who participates in the nightlife scene, and whose narratives become part of mainstream campus culture. We have fraternities that can easily afford to book DJs, while queer students of color have to fight tooth and nail to get funding for queer artists of color, such as Baby Tate at The Mat this past March. "We're currently experiencing a total mainstreaming of dance music in America," says Loren Granic, a co-founder and resident of A Club Called Rhonda in Los Angeles, noting that electronic dance music has become another facet of white identity formation. "Many of these newcomers are straight and white kids who are very far removed from the LGBT community, despite fist-pumping by the millions to music that was born from gay people of color sweating their asses off at 5:00 AM in a Chicago warehouse." When we announced we were going to host a party where we play house music at Pink Haus, many of our closest gay friends denounced this idea as QTPOC hosting their own version of a frat party, despite Black queers building electronic dance genres from the ground up in cities like Chicago and Detroit.

News outlets have wrongly characterized David Guetta as the Godfather of House music, erasing the decades of efforts made by Black DJs for the genre. Festival promoters, record label executives, and other institutions centered on whiteness, such as fraternities hosting DJs, are not doing their part in learning the roots of Black genres like techno, house, and dub because they have the privilege of not having to, which leads to the further denigration and appropriation of genres that were once used as a political act of organized abandonment against systemic oppression. “Everyone can be a DJ now,” says Honey Dijon, a global house music icon who has now worked with the likes of Madonna and Beyoncé. “There’s so much mediocrity. If we’re talking about an underground dance movement, that time in history is gone,” she affirms. “It’s been colonized and commercialized, but it was created by queer people of color.” At Harvard University's Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of History, Professor George Aumoithe created a course and lecture series on the history of electronic dance music, which highlights forgotten histories of Black queer, femme, and non-binary people who invented the modern-day genre’s arrangement, composition, production, and distribution. Before electronic music became the soundtrack to a long night of drinking at fraternities, electronic dance music – whether house, dance, or techno – was a vehicle  for liberation, especially during the height of the AIDS crisis. She adds: “When you have a subculture being presented through a white heteronormative lens, they’re only going to know so much.”

Chicago promoter Robert Williams initially approached Bronx-born Frankie Knuckles, later known as the Godfather of House Music, in the late 1970s to start a club called the Warehouse. It was here that Knuckles created captivating drum patterns on his Roland TR-909 drum machine, attracting massive audiences from all parts of Chicago to a club that primarily catered to gay, Black men. In the early 1980s, house music emerged as a new genre from Black gay clubs like Chicago’s The Warehouse and New York City’s Paradise Garage. Evolving from disco, it retained disco's soul, funk, and gospel roots but adapted them to new technologies like synthesizers and drum machines, resulting in infectious dance rhythms. In “the beginning, it was a predominately black gay club [but] as people began to learn about it, we started renting the place out on Friday nights for a lot of fraternity parties,” says Knuckles in an interview with Ebony. "Those frat brothers and sorority sisters heard about what was going on on Saturday night when we played house music. Legendary DJs such as Frankie Knuckles, Ron Hardy, Marshall Jefferson, DJ Pierre, and Larry Levan were pioneers, alongside Black women like Jocelyn Brown, Loleatta Holloway, and Martha Wash, who often sang in their remixes. House music's rhythmic innovations and electronic textures developed as DJs reworked disco records, resulting in a distinct sound characterized by the stomping four-to-the-floor beat. Chicago house's influence extended beyond its local scene, with Detroit techno emerging as a parallel movement in the nearby city.

Brooklyn-born dance producer Kevin Saunderson relocated to Michigan at nine and attended Belleville High School, where he bonded with Derrick May and Juan Atkins over an eclectic mix of music. Their inspiration came from an underground radio show called The Midnight Funk Association, broadcast by DJ Charles Johnson on WGPR in Detroit. Together, they formed the Belleville Three, credited with creating the Detroit techno music genre. Their sound, influenced by Kraftwerk, blends synthetics and vocoders with the funk and soul of their hometown. Their music often explores themes of outer space and dystopian futures, drawing from Afrofuturism and science fiction, resonating particularly with marginalized Black youth in large city suburbs. Belleville's location played a crucial role in shaping the Belleville Three, as the rural setting provided a unique environment for experiencing music, with the trio often listening to records by Bootsy and Yellow Magic Orchestra outdoors, adjacent to automobile factories. 

In a recent interview with Billboard, Saunderson writes about the tremendous racial disparity within the electronic dance music scene, stating how the electronic dance music scene fails Black artists today:  

"[What we do] just doesn’t have the same market value, and also people don’t know. People come in and they’re 18 years old and they go hear EDM, they go hear Deadmau5 or whoever, and they think, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ But they don’t always get an opportunity to hear people like us. It’s perceived like the music comes from white producers from Europe and some Americans when it’s not really true. We don’t get the big platforms as much as we should. It’s not equal, that’s for sure." 

The disregard for the Black origins of techno music reflects the broader treatment of Black culture in the United States. Millions of white Americans consume various music genres for pleasure without acknowledging that none of them would exist in their current form without the past innovations of Black artists. Today, queer DJs of color are still pushing the boundaries of EDM. Many showcase dance music from the global south and emphasize remix styles that blend hip-hop and EDM, highlighting the enduring influence of black music on the genre. Acts like Chicago’s TRQPiTECA, a performance and production collective focusing on women in house music, and GHE20G0TH1K, created by DJ Venus X, have radically transformed New York City’s nightclub scene through their overtly political approach to DJing. When it opened its doors in 2009, GHE20G0TH1K has influenced newer parties that address the material realities of queer people of color.

General conceptions of electronic music assume it is meaningless and devoid of substance when, in reality, these notions are ahistorical and reflect a normative refusal  to delve deeply into the legacies of the genre. This notion is only gaining legitimacy after white cisheteronormative men have co-opted the culture like everything else. In 2019, techno music legend Jeff Mills stated in an interview with Mixmag that the genre has become too middle-class, catering to those who live a comfortable lifestyle, whereas, in the late 1970s and 1980s, electronic dance music was an inherently political genre used to highlight issues of racism, brutality, and violence. “I don’t know why it has become really heteronormative, white, male culture,” says Dijon. “It’s really profound to me. There are still a lot of people of color making this music, but there’s not a lot of people of color in the clubs.”

Delving deeper into the histories of electronic dance music not only demonstrates the power of playing house and techno at Pink Haus, but also highlights the complete disregard of Black queer history when associating these genres with white fraternity culture, as dance music has historically been a call for liberation and a mode of resistance. With the active whitewashing of the genre, Black communities have prompted calls to action to Make Techno Black Again, protesting against the lack of diversity in DJ lineups and actively creating festivals and platforms that amplify the voices of Black electronic artists. Dweller, an independently funded platform, has an extensive library featuring sources detailing Detroit's club scene from 1973-1985, techno as a call for urban revitalization, and the many Black pioneers who have created electronic music genres. Therefore, we must historicize the genres we hear and enjoy at parties.nd before we call ourselves DJs, we must have a real reckoning with the genres we play, and collectively understand and recognize them as Black music – specifically Black queer music –  which has and always will be a form of protest. 

Spotify Link to Highlight Black Queer Electronic Musicians

-Jose Arriaza ‘25