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EDM and LGBTQ: A Queer History of Techno

EDM and LGBTQ: A Queer History of Techno

techno

Photos by :: Javier Aguilar

If house music is as American as apple pie and pre-existing conditions, then techno is the bridge between the American Midwest and the rest of the world. While Chicago queers found a haven in the Warehouse, a different type of storm brewed in Detroit.

As house music burned up the dance floors in Chicago, Detroit faced myriad, complex issues that influenced the direction of electronic music. White Flight held Detroit tightly within its grips, catalyzing rapidly growing economic decline. The riots of 1967 forced the city of Detroit to critically examine, above other issues, the discriminatory hiring practices running rampant throughout the city.

This led to a massive push to hire minorities, feeding into the reasons behind white people deciding to move to the suburbs. Factories began melting away, as the automotive industry spiraled.

Throughout the 60s, Mayors Jerome Cavanagh and later Coleman Young squandered public funds on lavish, new building projects and an impractical monorail system rather than invest in education—all the while racking up enormous debt, having plundered funds set aside for pensions and retirement healthcare.

“While the 1967 riots are seen as a turning point in the city’s fortunes, Detroit’s decline began in the 1950s, during which the city lost almost a tenth of its population. Powerful, historical forces buffeted Detroit’s single-industry economy, and Detroit’s federally supported comeback strategies did little to help,” said economist Edward L. Glaeser.

All these elements came together in a style of music that appealed to a marginalized, underground population by embracing themes of Afrofuturism through the repurposing of technology. Especially within the context of Detroit, where the rise of robotics led to a massive loss of jobs around the time that techno came about, technology felt almost inescapable.

Building off the groundwork set up by Frankie Knuckles, producers Juan Atkins and Derrick May in particular led Detroit’s techno movement. Rather than retreat from the technology transforming their landscape, Atkins and May embraced technology as a tool to create a better future. As house music was having its moment in Britain in 1987, Derrick May’s “Strings of Life,” took the European dance market by storm, succeeding in exporting Detroit’s sound.

May, along with Atkins and many others, drew influences from proto-techno artists like Kraftwerk—so naturally, it made sense that techno had come full circle. Detroit producers such as Chez Damier, Alton Miller, and George Baker, inspired by the solidarity and momentum of the movement in Chicago, started a club of their own in downtown Detroit, The Music Institute.

The advent of the club united a previously scattered scene into an underground “family,” giving space for collaboration, and helped inspire what would become the second wave of Detroit-area techno. After the initial wave of Detroit techno, the second wave washed over the city with likes of Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, and Octave One who took the sound further into the stratosphere with a harsh, hardcore sound full of riffs and industrial bleakness.

The club scene created by techno in Detroit served as a way for suburban black folks to distance themselves from “jits,” slang for lower-class African Americans living in the inner-city. “Prep parties” were obsessed with flaunting wealth and incorporated many aspects of European culture including club names like Plush, Charivari, and GQ Productions, reflecting European fashion and luxury. This Europhilic attraction was a double-edged sword as well, as by the mid 90s, the European strain of techno had veered into the direction of vulgar anthemic and cheesily sentimental sounds.

The names of these clubs also may have harkened back to the high days of ballroom culture where luxury served as a form of protection from violence, often based in some form or another of discrimination. In addition, prep parties were run as private clubs and restricted who could enter based on dress and appearance. In these ways, the queer pillars of dance music and culture were being weaponized to discriminate rather than unite.

However, identity politics of Detroit techno focused mostly on race in that a constant, progressive desire to move beyond essentialized blackness stood out as a persistent rallying cry. Despite the classist nature of techno, the artists and producers sculpted their own vision of idealized spaces existing in different, alternative societies. These alternate societies aimed at moving beyond the terrestrial limitations of social attitudes at the time. In essence, the Detroit techno movement embraced the same ideals as the Chicago house movement in the longing for a safe space to just be.

Adding to the growing canon of club music, techno grappled with issues that plagued queer communities: racism and classism, both of which divided Chicago during this time. However, the larger embrace of dance culture around the globe also carried with it the idealistic goal of a safe dance floor, free to love and free to move. With each addition to the club music movement, the embrace of queer identity in all its permutations grew as well.

This is part two of a series exploring the queer history of dance music. The first addition in this series, “A Queer History of House Music,” ran in a previous issue. 

 

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