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Borderless Musical Imaginaries Mixtape: House, Chances and RecuperatingQueer Genealogies

Micah Salkind and Latham Zearfosswith Mister Wallace, Precious Davis, Juana Peralta, Rosé Hernandez and Ali McDonald

Part of The Extinct Entities ProjectCurated by Erin Nixon, Anthony Romero and Anthony Stepter

Links HallJanuary 26, 2014

Track One:

Latham Zearfoss (LZ): I was having dinner one night with a small group of

friends. Most of us had worked together in some capacity on the Pilot TV project in

2004. Pilot TV was an makeshift, temporary television station aimed at producing

“experimental media for feminist trespass.” The project was successful on its own terms,

but had also fomented friendships and collaborative potential amongst a loose group of

queer artists and activists. At this dinner we lamented not seeing each other more

enough, which lead to further laments on the true lack of queer social spaces, of feeling

alienated at gay bars for a variety of reasons - some for being trans, some for being

female or feminine-presenting, some for being POC, some for simply feeling ugly and

undesirable in the highly policed, fetishistic schema of Boystown. All of us felt

disconnected from the bland, trance techno that was the particular musical flavor of

Chicago’s gay male scenes. My friend Bruce Wiest and I decided we would take this on as

our project - to create a “techno-free” dance party that was a safe space for all gender

expressions. I remember thinking this was one of those plans that we wouldn’t actually

follow through on. But a while later, we rekindled the conversation. We wanted

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something dingy and dirty that would invoke DIY potentiality in tandem with cruisy,

pervy possibilities. We decided on the Big Horse Lounge, a taqueria in Wicker Park that

had a large rear-end area with a bar and a stage. My now-defunct band played a show

there and in my opinion, it was the best we’d ever sounded. Bruce walked into the Big

Horse and straight up said to the owner, “We want to throw a queer party here.” The

owner said, “OK. When?” Bruce and I decided, “The third Monday.” The owner said,

“OK.”

We had to bring everything ourselves. We borrowed turntables and asked a few

friends to DJ. We decided folks would play 5 song sets and rotate round-robin style

throughout the night. This was an attempt at making a democratic, musically diverse

soundscape whereby one DJ could take risks, but if they lead the party too far astray, a

new DJ would follow shortly after, and “turn the beat around.” This also meant that

those beautiful freaks who dance to music no one else can dance to would have space to

do so.

From the beginning, we wanted Chances to be a trans-inclusive space. We would

fashion these quick little drawings that said “Gender Neutral Bathroom” and stick them

up with tape onto the restroom doors, covering up any MEN or WOMEN signs in the

process. This seemed like a really cute, almost bratty gesture at the time, but folks really

responded to it in a positive manner, so we continued to put these up and over the years

they’ve become somewhat of a calling card for Chances. The signs also get used by other

bars and parties throughout the city. The Whistler and the Hideout both have their own

copies of the signage and use them at non-Chances events.

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Micah Salkind (MS): As queer people we have the onerous responsibility, and

privilege, to assemble the branches, fruits and flowers that we include in our family trees.

We graft on the buds, prune the excess foliage, and encourage nesting birds. This process

takes a lifetime. Sometimes we shed all our leaves, flowers and fruits and start again. We

retain the sense memories of our queer genealogies in the rings around our trunks.

In the mid­1970s a group of intrepid queers and their friends became family while

sharing their love of a party, and their mutual affiliation with a project that came to be called

US Studios. It was eventually established as a not for profit corporation, a

membership­driven social club producing the underground loft party they hoped to invite

their friends to.

US Studios’ success, indeed its transformation into the seminal house music venue

“The Warehouse,” was predicated on the fact that it was run by a collective and that

everyone helped out with the glamorous and non­glamorous labor of producing the party:

promoting, DJing, hanging decorations, and setting up snacks … the legacy of The

Warehouse is as much connected to sociality within and without the collective as it is about

the sound, space and vibe of the event itself. Collective labor and mutual aid shaped not

only the business model of the party, but also this social model. By selling memberships to

friends, the collective built an organic promotional engine and disbursed the sweat equity

needed to develop their audience among a diverse group of (mostly) queer of color music

lovers.

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Members could bring friends, and the door people would often let in folks who

seemed particularly eager to party in what the straight house people called the “alternative,”

scene. The space was, for legal and practical purposes, a private members club, but it was

functionally accessible to a broad range of curious, music loving queers who were using

dance as they always had in the Black and brown neighborhoods of Chicago: as an

affirmational ritual, a source of pleasure, and a way to workaround the limits of a recording

industry that insisted on segregating the musical marketplace using un­interrogated, often

racist, generic labels.1

To the US Studios Collective, Chicago felt like a backwater compared to the

combustive powder keg of lower Manhattan. Michael Matthews, Benny Winfield, Benny’s

wife April and brother Greg, Fred, PJ, Donald Crossly, and Vicky ­ a group of them would

travel to New York whenever they could and dance all night to the sounds of Larry Levan at

The SoHo House or The Paradise Garage, or to Nicky Siano at The Gallery, or David

Mancuso at his Loft. They wondered why nobody partied like this in the Black Metropolis.

Chicago’s underground loft parties, inspired in part by NYC nightlife, started in Fall

of 1973 at a private residence on Belmont. The party was broken up after just 30 minutes,

but the reputation of the US Studios clique was established. By the time they threw their

next event at the private live/work loft space of a Black revolutionary haberdasher named

Maxine on South Clinton, they would have no trouble filling the dance floor.

1 Robert Williams. Interview with Robert Williams, n.d. deephousepage.com.http://www.deephousepage.com/robertwilliamsinterview.htm; Mirani, Czarina. “Who Is Robert Williams?”5 Magazine, December 2005; Hope, Larry. House Music Oral History. Interview by Micah Salkind,December 7, 2013. Personal.

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It would still be several years before Robert Williams, the most long­term NYC

resident affiliated with US Studios, was able to woo a young Frankie Knuckles to Chicago.

In the intermediary years between 1973 and 1977, US Studios would move first to 1400

South Michigan, to the former home of Impressions front­man Jerry Butler’s writer’s

workshop, and then back to the West Loop at 555 West Adams. Eventually the original

clique parted ways with Robert Williams, who was always a bit bemused by their lack of

business acumen. Michael Matthews and Benny Winfield opened up The Bowery just a few

blocks away from 206 South Jefferson ­ the old faucet company that would come to be

known as The Warehouse. Williams and Knuckles were pulling together a new team of

supporters who would begin building the reputation of their new space.

Williams was well­versed in the alchemy of the New York City scene ­ he knew that it

was fueled not only by who was in the room ­ and that the best parties were predominantly

Black, Latino and gay ­ but also that it required obsessive attention to high­intensity sound

and an adventurous approach to musical repertoire. To put it another way, the sound

shaped the way people interacted and how they interacted shaped the sound. To create

the powerful sonic environment he knew from NYC, he brought SoHo House and Paradise

Garage acoustic engineer Richard Long to town to install The Warehouse sound system.

According to Williams, he couldn’t pay Long, but the legendary engineer agreed to

customize and install The Warehouse system and its powerful crossover in exchange for a

few dates that Robert promised to set up for him while he visited Chicago.

Williams offered the residency at the venue that would come known as The

Warehouse to Larry Levan before he offered it to Frankie Knuckles. Levan was the known

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entity after all. He had an established following, and Knuckles was really only known for

being his bestie and sidekick DJ/lightman at the Continental Baths. When Levan declined

Williams’ invitation, Knuckles reluctantly agreed to come and play a few one­off sets. His

fluid and vocal­laden New York playing style, which incorporated sound effects and other

generic surprises, ruffled the feathers of some Chicago dancers at first. But the sound

Knuckles was spinning wasn’t so far apart from that which had already been developing in

queer spaces like Den One, The Bistro and The Rialto. It quickly became the sonic

template for Chicago’s queer, Black and Latino avant garde.

Track Two:

LZ: Chances started as a duo operation but quickly became a collective venture.

This was instigated out of necessity but also desire to collaborate with fellow queer

artists and activists whom we loved and admired. Neither Bruce nor I owned turntables

or a mixer and only I had DJ experience. Almost immediately, the organizing body grew

exponentially, with Davey Ball, Dylan Mira, Megan Palaima, Aay Preston-Myint, Ben De

La Creme, Chris Pappas, and Rita Bacon joining in the collective labor. We were not

getting paid anything at this point, so it also helped to offset the minor costs associated

with flyers, thematic accoutrements and wardrobe costs for our host Ben De La Creme -

who went by Teena Angst at the time.

All of the original organizers spent formative years in punk spaces. The creative

possibilities of so-called punk and DIY musical and performance spaces offered a

liberatory model of creation and expression. To a point. There was a palpable level of

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disenchantment with these types of venues as well, as they often replicated

heteronormative, patriarchal and racist ideologies, often out of uncritical and privileged

lenses that we could not relate to, and grew, frankly, bored of. Alienated from the

alienated, and too freaky or brown or queeny or grungy or fat or whatever for the gay

bars. Too femme for the dyke bar. Our positions were in question and we all urgently

needed a social space that felt representative of both our individual identities and our

collective one, the one we name QUEER. This is the promise and problematic of

queerness; that it offers a tentative empathic sameness amidst a sea of difference - both

hereditary and acquired. It offers a promise of communion with those whom we’ve been

segregated from. But this is not miraculously achieved. It happens through work work

work. Work in promotion, work in inclusion, working on your personal shit, holding

spaces for other’s personal and political shit. We needed to do this work together in order

for it to feel, but also LOOK, like TOGETHERNESS. To create a space that included

feminist, body-positive, sex-positive, anti-racist, gender-affirming and even punk

potential, we needed a poly-vocal collectivity and that is what we, more or less, made.

MS: Creating a seamless queer genealogy in the decades following the

devastation caused by the twin ravages of drugs and HIV/AIDS will never be easy. We

must interrogate the methods we use to connect with and learn from a generation whose

stories and cultural contributions are largely unarchived. But we also must recuperate the

memories of the ancestors in ways that acknowledge our own historical biases while

imagining, and connecting to, the utopian possibilities of the queer worlds that might have

been.

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In this mixtape I’m pause­buttoning with Latham, I am attempting to ride the rhythm

of some of the late José Muñoz’ unfinished work on a “Brown/Punk/Punk Rock Commons.”

Muñoz passed far too soon and I’m not sure what will become of his unfinished writing, but I

heard him speak on his recent scholarship twice last year and took frantic notes. I hope that

by sharing some of the theoretical insights I gleaned from an invited lecture and conference

paper, and applying his developing analytical frame to Chicago’s queer dance cultures and

nightlives, that everyone here will be able to think about not only concrete projects, but also

the might­have­been projects of their ancestors in generative ways.

I was thrilled to see how Muñoz’ new project on a Brown Punk Commons build off

his incredibly useful interventions in Disidentifications and Cruising Utopia. I heard him

developing a language to address a "we" articulated beyond heteronormative kinship

relations. He called it a we that formed after the “affective turn” of the early 1980s; a we

formed out of desperation; a we constituted in opposition to being scattered; a Reagan­era

corollary to the trumped up individualism of the moral majority and the “shredding” of the

great society.

Muñoz said he wasn’t interested in composed protest music. Instead of addressing

explicitly rebellious lyrics, he was imagining the affect of punk as a bright sister in the

shadow of neoliberalism’s cultural front; an affect that one might experience if they are too

poor, dark­skinned, gender­queer or emotionally connected to assimilate properly into the

cult of individualism. As he put it in Cruising Utopia, the queer/punk as a toolkit for, “those

of us whose relationship to popular culture is always marked by aesthetic and sexual

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antagonism.” Perhaps Muñoz offers us the possibility of a “punk worldliness,” as he called2

it, predicated on mutual aid and fearless cultural integration.3

Track Three:

MS: The Warehouse was imagined as a place of musical exploration, but also a

safe space for queers of color, particularly African Americans, to ritually comune. I love how

LA Times columnist Ernest Hardy locates house spaces in a cultural lineage that is

“unmistakably hot.” One where the, “prophesizing sissies crowded into dark and sweaty

New York discos and Chicago warehouses circa the late ‘70s and early ‘80s,” are

connected to revelers at, “stank Harlem rent parties from the ‘20s, sepia soul shouters and

blues crooners spread over decades,” prior. This genealogy reminds me of E Patrick4

Johnson’s brilliant article, “Feeling The Spirit in the Dark.” Johnson unpacks the ways that

Black queers, often attached to the institution of the Black church through kith and kin but

not through feelings of full inclusion, have made spiritual homes on dance floors since long

before the Warehouse days. The juke/buffet flat/loft was an alternative site of ritual

communion ­ a place where the ecstatic embodiment that might otherwise be experienced

fully in the church could be explored among one’s queer or chosen family.

In addition to the ways that spaces like US Studios addressed the needs of queers

of color disenchanted by the dogma of the Black church, they also obliquely addressed the

2 Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Sexual Cultures. New York:New York University Press, 2009. 111.3 Muñoz, José Esteban. “X and The Wildness of the Punk Rock Commons.” In Feeling Historical: Pop andthe Unstoried Present. New York, N.Y., 2013.http://www.empmuseum.org/programs­plus­education/programs/pop­conference/2013/emp­pop­conference­2013­new­york.aspx.4 Hardy, Ernest. 2006. Blood Beats: Vol. 1 Demos, Remixes & Extended Versions. RedBone Press, May15. 59.

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problem of racial quotas in Chicago’s bars and discotechs. Near North Side bar and club

owners had a habit of forcing non­white gays and lesbians to produce several valid forms

of ID if they arrived after a “racial quota” was met in their venues. These informal quotas at

popular bars and discos like Den One, The Bistro, and Auggie’s & CK’s, were codified in

verbal rather than written agreements between door staffs and club owners, but they had

the effect of re­segregating Chicago’s queer commercial spaces even as gay liberation

promised new, less contained, possibilities for queer conviviality.

LZ: In the beginning, in 2005, and for a while afterward, and in reaction to the

monotonous, gym-tits soundtracks of the trancey gay bars of Boystown, we advertised

Chances as a “techno-free” dance party. This now seems snarky to me, but at the time it

felt necessary. Nobody did gay bars with musical diversity. There was, of course, the

awesome Saturday nights at the now-defunct Lesbian bar Stargaze in Andersonville,

where primarily queer women of color would dance into the wee hours to funk and soul

and house music. That was super fun and super good energy minus the staff who would

occasionally police femme-presenting people they deemed “straight.” And of course,

there was Spin in Boystown, which had accessible drink specials and a really fun 80s

night which transitioned into a 90s night. But then, that was also where my friend was

questioned about his genitals by a cisgender gay dude who insisted he wasn’t being rude

or overstepping his bounds. Ugh. Bad news.

So yes, we advocated for a techno-free space because “techno” felt too symbolic of

homonormative culture and its gender-policing. We still played dance music, but

operated with an expanded notion of what that could be. Funk, soul, house but also Yoko

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Ono or Dolly Parton, music made outside of the U.S. and Europe, music made right here

in Chicago by people you most likely have never heard of, music made by, and often for,

brown folks. We played 90s rock. We idolized Sylvester and played their music

frequently. And of course, Fleetwood Mac. I even remember some 70s lesbian folk

getting rotation earlier in the night. It was a time before the total ubiquity of iGadgets

and MP3 players and laptops, so we used our vinyl collections and cast a wide net,

having 4 DJs in one night, taking turns with their 5-song sets. There was a staunch, very

punk-influenced, amateurism at the time that felt political. We were interested in

separating the hierarchy of DJ/audience, to make a collectively achieved moment that

was free from the power dynamics of traditional authorship and celebrity DJ culture. We

also wanted to use music as a tool of representation, to make an inclusive space that

could foster dance floor magic for a variety of bodies and genders and skin tones. Also,

we wanted everyone to feel cool enough to be there. If we, the DJs, were “nobodies” then

the cache of the party hinged more on the party itself than who was selecting songs. The

rotation of the DJs lent anonymity. I remember people not knowing for a long time who

the organizers or DJs of the party actually were, and this, then, was desirable to me.

Track Four:

MS: According to Muñoz, post­modern philosopher Frederic Jameson's "waning of

affect" might also be thought of as a "waning of genre," or even its obverse, the

"proliferation of genre.” Ongoing urban renewal, disinvestment in public housing, and

spatial reorganization on Chicago’s Near West and Near South Sides during the 1970s

echoed neoliberal calls for individual enrichment over collective betterment. DJs and

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dancers inhabiting the marginal loft spaces left over from Chicago’s industrial heyday

developed capacities to hear, think, and dance through both the past and future, using old

and new sounds together to work against the atomizing logics of late capitalism.5

Muñoz thought about the ways that generic wildness rose as mass culture became

colder and less structured around interpersonal affective exchanges and obvious depth of

feeling. Punk was a sustained anachronism evident in a wild mix of musical styles that

pushed against the assumed cultural divisions of generic homogeneity. But, as Muñoz

pointed out, genre holds on crudely even as it wanes. Punk and other expansive musical

styles, like house, eventually became codified under generic terms in and of themselves

rather than gaining traction as heterogeneous approaches to cultural consumption and

production. In this process, punk often became what Muñoz calls a dystopic mode of

comprehending belonging, a commons in desperation rather than exaltation.

DJs spinning in what would come to be called Chicago’s house music scene

created punk spaces of exaltation, even if they did so in part because their audiences

needed ways out of the psychic violence and structural deficits of mainstream nightlife

cultures. Cultural historian George Lipsitz has called for more critical attention to the

inventive, world­making dimensions of racial segregation in his book How Racism Takes

Place . I’m riffing off his conceptual “Black and white spatial imaginaries,” which he uses to

describe the ways that race and space are made simultaneously in the mind and on the

landscape. We might think of the musical worlds of house and its queer cultural

descendents as borderless, polyvocal musical imaginaries; ones where genre distinction

5 Muñoz, José Esteban. “X and The Wildness of the Punk Rock Commons.

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sometimes bears mention because of its familiarity, but not because it determines social

value or implies cultural isolation.6

Post­disco musical mixes incorporated sounds from the fringes of European

electronic music, American new wave, r&b, soul and funk as well as other danceable

frequencies from across the Afro­diasporic soundscape. These sounds hailed diverse

cultural sensibilities because they represented distinct but overlapping cultural

experiences. Dancers, whether they were Latino, African American or Caribbean Black,

from the South Side, West Side or North Side, could hear themselves in those punked­out

live mixes by Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy as well as in the radio mixes that would

eventually spread the house sound far beyond the loft scenes of the Near West and South

Sides.

Because the nascent house sound was formed in the seamless flow of the

beat­matched, long­form, DJ set, the parts didn’t compete for primacy with the whole. The

Warehouse and The Muzic Box showcased Black, queer DJs co­authorizing the

performance of a continuous, beat­driven sound along­side ecstatic, interracial performing

audiences. The house DJ’s accountability to the floor has become a model from which7

other borderless musical imaginaries found in queer social dance cultures have continued

to evolve.

LZ: Throughout the ten years I’ve been DJing, its become clear that folks are

most inclined to dance to 1/songs they know and 2/songs with a good “danceable” beat.

6 Lipsitz, George. How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.

7 Butler, Mark J. Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 47.

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In that order. Chances has riffed on this in a number of ways, teetering between a

populist and a progressive/provocative approach. We expanded sometime around late

2007 and started a new party that was intended to provide a venue for the weirder,

nerdier impulses of our collective and DJ’s. This was called Off Chances and it happens

monthly at Danny’s Tavern in Bucktown. We initially called it the laid-back,

dance-optional sister of Chances. Partially because the space is a renovated house made

into a bar, dimly lit and cozy, people are more likely to dance to weird shit. This party

started as a way of allowing Chances, which had now moved locations and become a

guaranteed dance party environment, to live out its populist destiny of being a

high-energy, crowd-pleasing party. Simultaneously, we had a new venue where we could

throw down a Cocteau Twins or Kate Bush track alongside weird0 disco and so-called

backpack hip hop.

Attendance was fairly low, but we developed a nerdy following of people more

likely to come up and passionately converse about a particular song, than physically

interpret it on the floor. But nonetheless, dance party magic would happen. We loved the

night so much, that we tried to figure out practical ways to entice folks into coming. We

were also getting paid 10% of the bar for the event, so we had a little money to work

with. We decided to provide offerings for our attendees. These took the form of mix CD’s

and baked goods. Both for free, for whoever showed up. Each organizer would take a

turn making a mix CD, making original cover art and printing about 20-30 copies.

Another organizer would take on the duties of making some type of shareable treat. At

the time, there were lots of conversations happening around the idea of radical

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gift-giving, the radically anti-capitalist potential of providing without the end-goal of

profit. We felt this subtext was an important one in our world-making mission that

intended to challenge/subvert/destroy - perhaps just temporarily - the individualistic,

segregationist, patriarchal and corporate drive of late-stage capitalism.

These ephemeral gifts were warmly received. Attendees started to look forward

to that month’s mix, and to feel regret for not attending and missing out on them. We

decided an accessible archive for the mix CDs would be a more inclusive mode of sharing.

The archival potential of the internet was making itself well-known, so we opted for a

podcast version that anyone could sign up for, free of charge.

As attendance at Off Chances increased, so did the energy and it became an

edgier but no less energetic dance party. Chances, as a project, has always been aimed at

evolving based on the needs of its community and the capacity of its voluntary

organizers. Making the mixes and podcasts for Off Chances provided a space for the DJs

and organizers to express and share their musical interests, to maintain that

conversational aspect amongst those who feel passionately about music and its creative,

transformative potential, while allowing for the event itself to organically transition from

a listening party into a dance party. The mixes also became somewhat of a calling card,

establishing previously circumvented DJ identities for each of us.

Track Five:

MS: It’s redundant to say Chicago is a deeply residentially segregated city. It has

been since waves of Black migrants began arriving at the end of the 19th century. Legal

real estate redlining, block busting, anti­integration terrorism in neighborhoods like

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Bridgeport and near­West suburbs like Cicero, as well as the consolidation of organized

crime and vice economies on the South Side, helped ensure that Chicago’s Black

population would become the exception to the rule of ethnic succession, stuck in the most

dilapidated inner ring urban neighborhoods on the edge of the Loop while new mid­century

housing opportunities opened up for white folks in the suburbs.8

Yes, over a half­century of legal residential segregation haunts the social

geographies of Chicago today, but cultural production has never been so neatly

segregated, especially since the beginning of the phonographic age. Sounds traveled to

and from Chicago via sheet music, and later 12” records, mixtapes and over the airwaves,

creating diffuse listening and dancing communities that have often remained blissfully

unaware of the ways that their musical tastes cut across their social differences.

House mixes, both in the clubs and later on the radio, allowed Chicago’s post­disco

musical cultures to touch, but perhaps not to fully integrate. By the late 1980s, Frankie

Knuckles had moved to New York and Ron Hardy’s 1992 death marked an end of an era.

Queer of color nightlife at The Warehouse, The Muzic Box, and The Powerplant was over,

but the legacy of musical innovation contributed to by Knuckles and Hardy flourished in The

River North neighborhood’s Black gay underground, even as house fell out of fashion with

Chicago’s straighter Black audiences on the South Side.

Beginning in 1986, Club La Ray at 3150 North Halsted hosted the crowd from The

Muzic Box for Tuesday and Friday night sets. La Ray closed at the end of 1989 and

promoters Sam Davis and Bob Yeaworth opened The Clubhouse at 440 N. Halsted. The

8 Ford, Richard G. “Population Succession in Chicago.” American Journal of Sociology 56, no. 2 (September1, 1950): 160.

Salkind and Zearfoss 17

venue exploded onto the scene, eventually helping break global house stars like Cajmere

and Ron Carroll. Yeaworth and Davis always believed that their project extended La Ray’s

legacy; they even incorporated the bar’s drag host Tasha Thomas and legendary disco DJ,

Michael Ezebukwu, explicitly acknowledging the continuity in the scene even as things

continued to shift and change with the gentrification of Boystown.

In 1995, a club called The Generator, managed by DJ Dana Powell, opened up at

306 N. Halsted, just down the street from The Clubhouse. The Generator eventually

surpassed The Clubhouse as the biggest venue in the Black queer house scene. After the

Generator closed, Bernard Johnson and the R.A.I.L.S. collective carried on the Black queer

house party tradition at The Prop House at 1675 North Elston. The group’s name,

according to Johnson, acknowledged the ways that musical freedom could feel like the

physical freedom promised by the underground railroad.

The Prop House was a true labor of love for Johnson and his R.A.I.L.S crew. As he

puts it, he was only recently able to fully recognize the extent to which his community took

ownership of the venue, ensuring its continuity through more than just patronage and

promotion. Johnson notes that he, like members of the US Studios collective, traveled

widely for inspiration, cherry picking ideas from the interlinked Black gay club scenes in

DC, Atlanta and New York. This outward looking, regionally­connected vision of Black

queer musical collectivity helped the venue become a welcoming space for vogue kids and

house purists alike, with DJs like Chicago’s own Cameron, as well as Baltimore­based

Spen & Karizma, holding down residencies alongside resident hip hop/R&B DJ Steve

Miggidy Maestro.

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Prop House was an important venue for queer Black Chicago to reconnect with the

sonic cultures of hip hop and R&B scenes that had fallen out of touch with house in the

1990s. After years during which queer of color house audiences were assumed to hate hip

hop, they were finally getting to hear it played in a space promoted by Black queers. This is

not to say that hip hop didn’t have its place in Chicago house sets consistently since it first

hit the city, but rather to note the connections between the expansive punk tradition that was

part of house culture’s initial appeal to queer audiences, and the ways queer of color music

communities began to reclaim hip hop and r&b as sonic and social compliments to

contemporary house music during the late 1990s and early aughts.

LZ: Chances has been built, from it early days, by collective, democratic effort.

Our organizing body has always included women and people of color. We have oscillated

over the years, as organizers have left or joined the fray, between male-identified and

female-identified, between white and POC majorities. Whatever the make-up has been,

we have strived to achieve some semblance of authentic inclusivity - across gendered

and racial difference, but also skill level, cultural background and musical tastes.

Similarly, we are an organizing body of artists and social (justice) workers, folks invested

equally in divergent methods of creative problem-solving and undoing myriad societal

ills, of questioning and dismantling the harmful cultural norms inscribed on our backs.

Chances is a political project. One that aims to create a temporary utopian moment for a

marginal and fractured community.

In the early days, we had a hostess named Teen Angst, now Ben De La Creme

(who will be a contender on Drag Race this season) and themes. We were also kind of the

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only explicitly queer thing happening on a regular basis at the time. These themes and

Ben’s magical presence inspired many folks to bring fabulous lqqks to the parties -

cr0wns, gold lamé, glitter of all kinds, sheer drape-y fabrics, wigs, heels for days. When

Ben left to move to Seattle in 2007, we continued the thematic structures of the parties,

but could not replace that shepherding presence of our former queen. Ultimately the

themes felt like more work and less rewards. We dropped the themes, but after a time

missed the creative and expressive potential of those early parties.

At the same time, we began to make more money. We had left the Big Horse

because they were abusing their workers. A bartender we had formed a kinship with

informed us that they were no longer allowing her to keep her tips but giving her a

flat-rate instead and keeping the tips for the owners. Our night become very popular so

this was a significant pay decrease for her and just a fucked up and weird thing to do. We

felt we couldn’t continue to work with the space in good conscious. We visited several

locations and decided on the Subterranean because we knew a transwoman who worked

sound there and in our meeting with the owner and booker of the venue, they all used

correct gender pronouns. They, more or less, GOT IT. We began to get a percentage of

bar sales. As we doubled our event schedule with the addition of Off Chances and deleted

our themes from Chances, we found ourselves comparatively flush. We had never

considered paying ourselves, and in the earliest days, Chances functioned at a loss.

SIDENOTE: There is this somewhat idealistic and self-loathing tendency amongst artists

and activists to deny themselves compensation for their work. Despite the fact that

these types of work are often thankless and emotionally taxing and can incur a variety of

Salkind and Zearfoss 20

expenses, both direct and indirect, it can feel like adding a figure or fee to these efforts

cheapen (pun intended) the emotional investment of the culture/social worker. More on

this in a bit.

So now we had this money, and with it, the responsibility to do something

productive with it. Chances and Off Chances had become regular dance parties, and

though they were still affirming and fun, we organizers were desiring a meaningful way

of fostering creativity and self-expression within our community. We discussed all sorts

of possibilities. At some point, my co-organizer Aay Preston-Myint mentioned the

possibility of a granting program. It felt like the perfect project for us to take on. I think

it was also motivated, somewhat selfishly, by our desire to make Chicago a more

sustainable home for artists. So many of our friends, many former Chances organizers,

had moved to New York or L.A. to pursue their careers as creative professionals. We

missed them. But we also understood those transitions. The Critical Fierceness Grant

was initiated in the winter of 2008, with Rebecca Mir receiving $300 and Rebecca Kling

receiving $500. It was our way of contributing to a more viable future for queer artists

in Chicago.

Shortly after this first cycle, we were invited by Jeanine O’Toole, then the

booking agent for The Hideout, to begin a monthly residency for their Saturday night

dance party. All Chances events had been free before this. The Saturday night parties at

the Hideout have a $5 entry fee, with the majority of that money going to the DJs. We

felt conflicted about this at first. We liked not having a financial barrier between the

parties and attendees. On the other hand, it was a Saturday night and if we didn’t do it,

Salkind and Zearfoss 21

someone else would. And we’d still have the other two free parties, and we’d be able to

give away more money in grants. Ultimately, the pros outweighed the cons and we went

for it. The current schedule is Chances at the Hideout every first Saturday, Off Chances

every second Tuesday, Chances every third monday. We have since increased our

biannual grant to $2000 in awards every 6 months. We also created the Mark Aguhar

Memorial Fund in 2012, in part due to a significant amount of money given to us by

Mark’s family after her tragic passing earlier that year. This grant is $1000 and is for

feminine-spectrum queer artists of color.

And finally, we came to the realization that we would be constantly bumping up

against fatigue - like the earlier soul-searching moment I mentioned - if we didn’t find

some way to reward ourselves for the work we were doing. We started buying food for

our monthly meetings - we eat together once a month, which is important - and we

started paying ourselves. After we’ve settled all our expenses - mix CD’s, the podcasts,

baked goods (which we now outsource to Paper Moon Bakery), DJ equipment, cab rides

home from the club, making the Critical Fierceness Grant solvent - we pay ourselves

equally with whatever is left. This can range from anywhere to $40 in month of high

expenses and/or low attendance to the very flush summer months where we can make

around $200. I cannot stress enough how important this was in making this work

sustainable.

Track Six:

MS: I’m endlessly troubled and fascinated by the ways my students and peers

casually consume EDM as though it had no connection to Black, Brown and musical queer

Salkind and Zearfoss 22

people in Chicago. This misremembering of house leaves the queers of color central to its

development on the cutting room floor.

I’m excited to think about the ways that archiving a more expansive Chicago house

music history, one that connects house back to its collective embodiment and frictionless

musical priorities, can support existing and new visions for queer sounds, dances and

spaces. My research proposes that more expansive approaches to queer dance music

cultures can help work against the cultural ventriloquism and appropriation made possible

by house music’s disembodied dislocation. When house moved outside queer, Black and

musical Chicago via phonograph records, radio waves, and mixtapes it became culturally

untethered. Thinking through it again and again, re­remembering it as connected to racially

diverse queer bodies, helps connect it to the fertile musical and social ground of Muñoz’

Brown punk commons, and helps connect its living torchbearers to an empowering set of

social practices.

LZ: So back to 2005. Bruce and I met up at the Beechwood to make some final

decisions before heading over to make our big proposal to the Big Horse Lounge, where,

for the record, I made Bruce do all the talking. Most pressing at this meeting was the

task of finding a name for our party. After brainstorming a bit, the conversation took a

tangential and nostalgic turn toward our divergent but similar pasts in rural towns - he

in Texas and Illinois and I in Ohio. We fondly recalled experiences in so-called small

town gay bars, where folks of all deviances, persuasions and presentations, would gather

to socialize and dance and drink and be GAY AS HELL. Like some of the people, you

could tell, were being truly themselves for the first time that day, or that week, or even

Salkind and Zearfoss 23

occasionally, in their lifetime. In Dayton, this cross-pollination was intergenerational,

interracial, and multi-gendered. The emotional stakes in such a scene were so high, the

need to be seen so acute, that all who saw and needed to be seen were welcomed. No

doubt, this was more of a promise or a possibility - a rose-tinted and deeply nostalgic

view of small towns at their best, that two longtime cityfolk were conjuring. Nonetheless,

it was this promise of togetherness, in queernees, outside of normativity and divisive

social codifications - utopia, essentially - that inspired the name Chances.

Gay bars - particularly the harder to find ones - have a habit of re-using a certain

set of nouns as their names. There is an Eagle in like, every medium-sized city in

America. But often these are names that hint at some type of clandestine social

exchange. Think: Liaisons, Secrets, Celebrations, Expressions. Or Chances. The name,

like the bars its named after, invokes a small risk and a (potentially) great reward: that

is, to momentarily set aside the prescribed pessimism of the American hate machine,

and open up to a transcendent moment of kinship and dance and intoxicating, sensual

togetherness, in your body in real time. You are staging a utopian, albeit temporary, act

of blissful resistance. I’ll return to the Muñoz quote from earlier: "For those of us whose

relationship to popular culture is always marked by aesthetic and sexual antagonism,

these stages are our actual utopian rehearsal rooms, where we work on a self that does

not conform to the mandates of cultural logics such as late capitalism, heteronormativity,

and, in some cases, white supremacy."

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MS: When we reconvene with our panel of invited respondents, we will dig into the

ways that this joyful work on the me and the we takes place in Chicago and beyond,

thinking critically about memory, history and the might­have­beens, as well as the utopian

yet­to­bes.