+ Jack! The State of House Music in Chicago's Gay Black Nightlife Scene
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...
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."
"In New York, my Sunday night at Langston's is more integrated. But even still, I have a female friend sitting here with me right now who has told me that there can be 'too many men' at Langston's.
"The music is universal, we know that. It's really very strange, but there it is."
In fact, the segregation in the House scene in Chicago, at least when it comes to gay and straight, may be just an extreme example of a national phenomenon. Almost unknown to even some die-hard Househeads, there's a national circuit of black gay nights across the Midwest and the East Coast but generally falling along a Chicago-Miami-DC-New York axis.
Baltimore's Karizma made his name in this scene (most of those years as the weekly resident at The Prop House) before breaking through on an international level. One of today's top DJs on the black gay circuit is likewise almost unknown among many Househeads - frequent Prop House guest DJ Sedrick.
"Sedrick is a people's DJ," Bernard from the Rails says. "He plays what you want to hear. More than that, he has an uncanny ability to know what you want to hear.
"But you have to remember: Sedrick and today's DJs are playing for a crowd that may have never heard a House Music song in their life. That's the reality of where we are today."
Sedrick is also, in Bernard's words, "the only DJ in the country that can hold down Black Pride weekend in a town all by himself." A DJ with a foot in both of Chicago's fractured House communities once told me that Sedrick was "like Frankie Knuckles to the Vogue Ball kids." Bernard doesn't exactly agree. "I don't think he's a Ball DJ as much as he is a people's DJ. He can see a woman in the corner and eye her over and know what song she came out to hear. That's an important skill and why he always has a packed floor."
AND THAT BRINGS US to perhaps the most vibrant aspect of Chicago's black gay scene - Vogue Balls. The Ball scene is far beyond the scope of this article - so intrinsic to House Music and the black gay experience that it deserves a few thousand words on its own.
Many of the top DJs in the black gay scene play balls as well as in traditional clubs, including Craig Loftis, Stoney, and Sedrick (though Cameron laughs, "The people from the Ball scene here have said I play too straight for them!") There's some crossover in the crowd too, though not as much as one would think.
"It's not the same crowd but we do have them," Bernard says. "Last week, for instance, I had Stoney playing, and I told him that to play for them if he spotted any ball kids in the room."
And that's it - right there, that's the point of this all. The Ball kids may not be regulars, but they're welcomed home at the Prop House on Fridays, too. This kind of attitude, this kind of love among strangers who may have nothing to say to each other while standing in line but share their heart on the dancefloor is why I fell in love with this music. It's why I believe that some sort of salvation for the House scene is out there right now, in the energy of the clubs and balls and events where all are welcome, provided we can, thirty years into this thing called House Music, still leave our baggage at the door.
:: posted apr 3 by terry matthew in features, february 2009 issue
