CHICAGO IS THE CITY that nurtured Barack Obama. It's also the city where House Music was born, taking its name from a club filled on any given night by a predominantly black, predominantly male and predominantly gay audience.

Yet today - despite the ever-present talk of unity and the deep craving for change that elevated our former senator to the highest office in the land - the scene is fragmented into a million little pieces. Latinos, whites, blacks, gays and straights and everything in between - we all seem to have our own little scenes. Just like the city itself, there are invisible lines dividing our neighborhoods that we do not cross.

It wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be this way...

THE LAST TIME I saw a dancer jack, the last time I saw a person make love to the speaker or fall to the floor in ecstasy, it was at the Prop House. The pedigree of residents and regular guest DJs at the Rails Marketing Group's Friday event at the Prop House (1675 N. Elston) is second to none in this city, starting with DJ Spen and including Karizma, Lego, Craig Loftis and Sedrick.

Now going on ten years, the Rails' Friday events have always mixed House with Hip-Hop, starting with Steve "Miggedy" Maestro, the DJ that spun Hip-Hop at their first event 4th of July weekend in 1998 at the Warehouse on Randolph.

The Prop House is about the jack - Hip-Hop or House, you won't hear downtempo, sleepy lounge tunes here. "In the early days at the Prop House, we had nothing - just the floor and the DJ booth," Bernard Johnson of the Rails Marketing Group says. "There weren't people sitting down. When I looked at someone just losing their mind to the music, I could feel them take over the room with their energy. It's spiritual. They can't control themselves. That's what we were aiming for. I've been in love with House since 1981 and I had my time. Being black and gay - now but especially back then - was hard enough. I wanted them to get their relief."

It's this raw energy, this lose-your-mind controlled chaos, that many say is lacking from the House scene today. But the jack is still alive here.

I told Bernard of a friend of ours - white and straight but one of the most open people I've met in this scene - who really wanted to see Karizma play in Chicago but blanched at the thought of going to the Prop House.

It's the fear of the unknown. The segregation of Chicago goes beyond the political machine and the politics that divide us. It's self-segregation - and in a scene in which, not so long ago, straight boys and girls would often go to gay clubs simply because the music there was the best.

"I'm so surprised to hear someone say that. I would say we had a balanced crowd then," Bernard says. "It was 50/50 of black/white, gay/straight, however you want to put it. But maybe that was the perception of it.

"Do you know what I always say? As long as we stay in our own community, we have the illusion of safety. We also never grow. It cuts both ways."