The clubs that changed Tim Lawrence's life

Author of Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, Tim Lawrence shares the parties that have inspired him the most, from Hot Wednesdays at the Hacienda, to Feel Real at The Gardening Club, Body & Soul in New York and beyond.

If anyone knows how to party, it's author and promoter Tim Lawrence. The British born party boy, turned academic, has not only hosted parties with the late DJ legend David Mancuso but also written three books on the dance floor experience; Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music, looking into disco, decadence and beyond; Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor; a detailed history of 80s NY, and how the dance floor not only brought different worlds together but laid the foundations for Hip Hop, House and Techno. Featuring interviews with over one hundred DJs, party hosts, producers, musicians, artists, performance artists, dancers and more - including Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat and Fab 5 Freddy - it's a must read for anyone with a passion for understanding how music subcultures are directly shaped by social and political events of the time.

Fast forward to the here and now, and Tim works at the University of East London, where he teaches music and is the Professor of Cultural Studies. He is also the co-founder of Lucky Cloud Sound System, who have been hosting legendary Loft-style parties in London since 2003; some of the best of which saw night turn into day at Shoreditch's notorious now sadly defunct Light Bar. We caught up with Tim, on the re-release of Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, to find out the parties that have inspired him the most… From Hot Wednesdays at the Hacienda, to Feel Real at The Gardening Club, Body & Soul in New York and beyond, these are the clubs that changed his life...

Hot, Wednesdays at the Hacienda, Manchester, summer of 1988
"One summer, while studying Politics and Modern History at Manchester University, I stayed in the city to work at a camp for kids. Some non-uni friends had heard that the Haçienda was supposed to be good on Wednesdays so we went to take a look. That night I heard house music on a sound system for the first time and was immediately captivated. It must have taken me all of ten seconds to get from the entrance to the nearest podium and hurl myself into the tribal dance. I later learned that we had walked into Hot, one of the formative nights of the Summer of Love."

The Gardening Club London

Feel Real at the Gardening Club, London, c. 1992
"This was the first place where I felt as though I'd found a party home. A collective of four DJs led by the Rhythm Doctor, Feel Real held down Friday nights in this intimate basement spot in Covent Garden. It was the first time I was exposed consistently to New York house and I soon started to give the Rhythm Doctor a lump of money to buy me whatever he was buying, i.e. I was hooked. When "Little" Louie Vega showed up to play a guest spot I more or less decided I was going to move to NYC."

Rhythm Doctor and Little Louie Vega, The Gardening Club

Sound Factory Bar, NYC, 1994
"I moved to NYC in the autumn of 1994 to study on the doctoral programme at Columbia University (I'd grown a little weary of my day job) and dance to Louie Vega's selections at the Sound Factory Bar every Wednesday night. At the time every Louie mix was essential and the SFB was the place where he played them first. It was my first experience of the multicultural NYC dance floor. The live shows were also something else—India, Barbara Tucker, Tito Puente… I felt like I was at the epicentre of the dance music universe."

Body & Soul, NYC, 1996
"I'd heard Joe Claussell play in Dance Tracks, where I bought records every Friday night, and I'd danced to François Kevorkian's selections in the basement of the Sound Factory Bar, where he supported Louie Vega and mainly stuck to disco classics. But something took over when Joe and François teamed up with Danny Krivit to launch Body & Soul in Club Vinyl. It was fun to see three DJs share the decks and each introduced their own flavour to create what seemed like the perfect blend. The dancing was intense!"

The NYC Loft, 1997
"I interviewed David Mancuso for the first time in the spring of 1997 and soon after went to my first Loft party. Initially I didn't know what to make of the experience. The party took place in a private apartment, the sound system sounded positively quiet and at the peak of the party there might have been six people in the room. But there was something compelling about the open atmosphere, the clarity of the sound, the range of the music and the absence of DJ trickery, and by the time Mancuso held his 28th anniversary party the following February the floor was ready to explode with community happiness."

David Mancuso

The Loft, London, 2003
"As Love Saves the Day was going through production, David Mancuso approached me and Colleen "Cosmo" Murphy to propose that we start to host Loft-style parties in London. Joined by Jeremy Gilbert, we held our first party at the Light in Shoreditch in June 2003. David stayed in London for five days to shape the party in the image of the NYC Loft, from checking the size of balloons to visiting sound system companies to working out where to position the equipment to thinking through the lighting. Attended by friends and friends of friends, the party was one of the most joyous I've attended. Thanks to the foundations laid by David over a period of years the parties are still running today."

David Mancuso presents The Loft, 1999

The NYC Loft, 2016
"I travelled to New York in October 2016 to launch a new book, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83, and timed the trip to coincide with a Loft party. David was kind enough to offer for the book to be sold at the party but didn't attend, having pulled back from attending his own party incrementally, in part because, radically anti-ego in outlook, he wanted to get to a situation where the parties would run successfully without him. The community vibe, beautiful sound and shimmering atmosphere of the October party confirmed that his dream had been realised. He passed away a month later."

This article was originally published on i-D, you can access it here (pdf). 

Remembering David Mancuso and the Loft

David Mancuso outside Prince Street Loft, New York, 1988. Photo by Pat Bates

When David Mancuso passed away on November 14, 2016, he left behind a legacy that enjoys no obvious precedent. Celebrating the Loft’s 46th anniversary this past February, he oversaw what must surely be the longest-running party in the United States’shistory—and perhaps even the world’s—having hit upon the right combination the night he staged a “Love Saves the Day” Valentine’s party in his downtown home in 1970 and initiated Loft-style parties in Japan and London 16 and 13 years ago, respectively. With all three manifestations rooted in friendship, inclusivity, community, participation, and collective transformation, the host has secured the life-after-death future of the party while demonstrating the effectiveness of a simple vision, the purity of which he never knowingly compromised. In this manner, the Loft has come to offer consistent light to a darkening terrain.

In one of the numerous interviews I conducted with David, I once asked him to explain how he would advise a newcomer to start a party. First, he replied, it’s necessary to have a group of friends that want to get together and dance, because without that there’s no basis for the party. Second, the friends need to find a room that has good acoustics and is comfortable for dancing, which means it should have rectangular dimensions, a reasonably high ceiling, a nice wooden floor, and a level of privacy that will enable people to relax. Next, the friends should piece together a simple, clean, and warm sound system that can be played at around 100 dB (so that people’s ears don’t become tired or even damaged). After that, the friends should decorate the room with balloons and a mirror ball, offering a cheap and timeless solution. They should also plan to prepare a spread of healthy food in case dancers become hungry during the course of the night. Finally—and as far as David was concerned, this was really the last thing to put in place—the friends should think of someone to select records that those gathered would want to dance to. Ultimately there could be no room for egos, including his own, if the party was to reach its communal potential.

Also rooted in friendship and the desire to party with freedom in a comfortable, private space, the Loft—as David’s guests came to name the party after it had been running for a few months—didn’t amount to an original moment so much as it pointed to a time when a number of practices, some of them decades’s old, came together in a new combination. The children’s home where David was taken days after his birth imbued him with the idea that families could be extended yet intimate, unified yet different, and precarious yet strong. Sister Alicia, who took care of him, put on a party whenever she was able to, and even went out to buy vinyl to make sure the kids were musically fed. The psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, who invited David to his house parties and popularized a philosophy around the psychedelic experience that would inform the way records came to be selected at the Loft, also became a power echo in David’s party scenario. Co-existing with Leary, the civil rights, gay liberation, feminist, and the anti-war movements came to manifest themselves in the egalitarian, rainbow coalition, come-as-you-are ethos of the Loft. And the Harlem rent parties of the 20s, in which working-class African Americans put on shindigs in order to raise money to pay the rent, established a template for putting on an intimate private party that could bypass the restrictions of New York City’s widely loathed cabaret licensing regulations. These streams travelled in different directions until February 14, 1970—when they met at 647 Broadway.

The homemade invitations for the February party carried the line “Love Saves the Day.” A short three years after the release of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” the coded promise of acid-inspired things to come swapped The Beatles’ gobbledygook with a declaration of universal love. The invitations also reproduced an image of Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory,” which suggested not Sister Alicia nor the children’s home—because David had yet to have his latent memories jogged into revelation—but instead, the chance to escape violence and oppression by entering into a different temporal dimension in which everyone could leave behind their socialised selves and dance until dawn. “Once you walked into the Loft, you were cut off from the outside world,” explained David. “You got into a timeless, mindless state. There was actually a clock in the back room but it only had one hand. It was made out of wood and after a short while it stopped working.”

When David’s guests left the Valentine’s Day party, they let him know that they wanted him to put on another one soon, and within a matter of months the shindigs had become a weekly affair. Inasmuch as anyone knew about them—and few did, because David didn’t advertise his parties, because they were private—they acquired a reputation for being ultra hip, in part because 647 Broadway was situated in the ex-manufacturing district of downtown New York, where nobody but a handful of artists and bohemians had thought about living. The artists (and David) moved in, because the district’s old warehouses offered a spectacular space in which to live as well as put on parties, and the inconvenience of having to have one’s kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom hidden from view (in order to avoid the punitive eyes of the city’s building inspectors) turned out to be a nice way to free up space in order to do things that weren’t related to cooking, sleeping, and washing. Outside, the frisson of transgression was heightened by the fact that there was no street lighting to illuminate the cobbled streets, and because David didn’t serve alcohol, he was able to keep his parties going until midday (and sometimes later), long after the city’s bars and discotheques had closed for the night. “Because I lived in a loft building, people started to say that they were going to the Loft,” remembered David. “It’s a given name and is sacred.”

From the beginning, David constantly sought to improve his sound system, convinced that this would result in a more musical and therefore a more socially transformative party experience. Having begun to invest in audiophile technology, he asked sound engineers to help him build gear, including tweeter arrays and bass reinforcements, so that he could tweak the sound during the course of a party, sending extra shivers down the spines of his guests. Yet by the time the technology had come to dominate discotheque sound, David had concluded that such add-ons were unnecessary with an audiophile set-up and instead headed deeper into the world of esoteric stereo equipment, adding Mark Levinson amplifiers and handcrafted Koetsu cartridges to a set-up that also featured Klipschorn speakers. “I had the tweeters installed to put highs into records that were too muddy but they turned into a monster,” David once said to me. “It was done out of ignorance. I wasn’t aware of Class-A sound, where the sound is more open and everything comes out.”

As David relentlessly fine-tuned his set-up, the energy at his parties became more free flowing and intense. “You could be on the dance floor and the most beautiful woman that you had ever seen in your life would come and dance right on top of you,” Frankie Knuckles, a regular at the Broadway Loft, once commented in an interview. “Then the minute you turned around, a man that looked just as good would do the same thing. Or you would be sandwiched between the two of them, or between two women, or between two men, and you would feel completely comfortable.” Facilitating a sonic trail that was generated by everyone in the room, David would pick out long, twisting tracks such as Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl, You Need A Change of Mind” and War’s “City, Country, City,” gutsy, political songs like The Equals’s “Black Skinned Blue Eyed Boys” and Willie Hutch’s “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out,” uplifting, joyful anthems such as Dorothy Morrison’s “Rain” and MSFB’s “Love Is the Message,” and earthy, funky recordings that included James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa.” Positive, emotional, and transcendental, these and other songs touched the soul and helped forge a community.

The influence of the Loft spread far and wide. At the end of 1972, a Broadway regular opened the Tenth Floor as a Loft-style party for an exclusive, white gay clientele, which in turn led to the opening of Flamingo, which went on to become the most influential venue in the white gay scene. Objecting to the elitist nature of Flamingo’s self-anointed “A-list” dancers, another Loft regular founded 12 West with the idea of creating a more laidback party environment for white gay men. Meanwhile Nicky Siano, another Loft regular, launched his own Loft-style venue called the Gallery that mimicked David’s invitation system, hired his sound engineer, and even borrowed a fair chunk of his crowd when he shut down his party for the summer of 1973. The Soho Place (set up by Richard Long and Mike Stone) and Reade Street (established by Michael Brody) also drew heavily on David’s template. When both of those parties were forced to close, Brody resolved to open the Paradise Garage as an “expanded version of the Loft” and invited Long, considered by many to be New York’s premier sound engineer, to build the sound system. Meanwhile Robert Williams, another Loft regular, opened the Warehouse as yet another Loft-style venue after moving to Chicago. Heading to the Loft, where they danced and bonded, Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles went on to become the path breaking DJs at the Garage and the Warehouse, where they forged the outlines of what would later be called garage and house music. Other influential dance figures, including Tony Humphries, François Kevorkian, and David Morales, would look back on the Loft as an inspirational party. In short, the Loft was an incubator.

Like any party host, David had to face some unexpected hitches during his party’s 46-year run. In June of 1974, he moved to 99 Prince Street after city regulators pressured him into leaving his Broadway home. Ten years later, he bought a promising building in Alphabet City, only to see the neighbourhood slide into a virtual civil war. By the time he was forced to vacate a floor he was subletting on Avenue B towards the end of the 90s, things were beginning to look quite grim. But before he was forced to leave Avenue B, David received an invitation to travel to Japan, and although he was reluctant to put on a party outside his home, he ended up travelling on the basis that it could help him purchase the Avenue B space. Unfortunately, the purchase never came to pass. David returned to Japan to put on regular parties with a new friend he made during his initial trip, and he also started to put on parties with friends in London after he approached me and Colleen with the idea while “Love Saves the Day”—the book that charts his influence—was going through production.

As he went about putting on these parties, David stuck to the principles that have driven him from day one: stay faithful to your friends, find a good space for the events, get hold of the best sound equipment available, and smile when people welcome you as a guest. In the process, David drew on the life shaping experience of his orphan childhood to realize a profound philosophical lesson: homes can be built wherever you put down roots and make friends. Returning again and again to Japan and London, David realized his own universal vision, which was previously constricted to New York, but has now captured the imagination of partygoers across the globe.

Shortly after making his first trips to Japan and London, David hit upon a hall in the East Village that became the new home of the Loft, and though the parties were held on holidays rather than a weekly basis, David was convinced the dance floor that remained was as vibrant and energetic as ever. The fact David didn’t live in the space was a little inconvenient in that, with the help of friends, he had to set up his sound system each time he played, but even though he didn’t sleep in the hall, he was more comfortable in that space than any of his previous homes. “It’s in the heart of the East Village, which was where I always used to hang out,” he said. “I might have lived on Broadway, but for the other five or six days I was in the East Village. This is where I’ve been hanging out in the area since 1963. My roots are there. My life is connected to the area.” Forging new roots and connections, grandparents started to dance with their grandchildren on the floor of the New York Loft.

Thanks to David’s overdue recognition as an underpinning figure in the history of New York dance, it has become easy for partygoers to assume that the Loft has come to resemble a nostalgia trip for the halcyon days of the 70s and early 80s. Since February of 1970, however, David always mixed new and less new, even old, music, and he maintained the mix right to his final turns as a musical host. New faces in Japan and London might have arrived expecting a trip down disco alley, but that’s not what they got with David, because the party never became a fossil. Throughout, David remained committed to selecting records that encouraged the party to grow as a musically radical and diverse community. This sonic tapestry could sometimes sound strange to dancers who had become accustomed to a political climate in which communities were so casually displaced by materialistic individualism and nationalistic war, but the countercultural message was always powerful. “After a while, the positive vibe and universal attitude of the music was too much for me, but this moment of hesitation and insecurity only lasted for a few minutes,” commented a dancer following one party. “Then all the barriers broke and I reached the other side. Like a child, I stopped caring about what other people might think and reached my essence, through dancing.”

Confronted by the tendency of dancers to worship him—even though he never thought of himself as being a DJ, and was resolute in his belief that this kind of attention detracts from the party—David positioned his turntables so that partygoers would see the dance floor, and not the booth, as they entered the room. In a similar move, he also arranged his speakers so they would draw dancers away from the booth and towards the center of the floor. Admittedly in London (much more so than in New York), dancers tended to face David all the same, even though the effect was the equivalent of sitting with one’s back to musicians during a concert. At the end, dancers would applaud him as if in the presence of saviour, when he preferred to see himself as the co-host of a party whose job it was, when positioned behind the turntables, to read the mood of the dance floor. Reinforced by popular culture, which encourages crowds to seek out iconic, authoritative, supernatural leaders, the adulation made David feel deeply uncomfortable. “I’m a background person,” he noted.

Even if utopias can’t be built without a struggle, and can never be complete, the mood at the London parties was thrilling to behold during David’s visits and, in the ultimate test of his anti-ego philosophy, remained powerful after he stopped travelling on doctor’s orders. While some endowed David with a halo, a significant counter-group related to him as a friend, and the continuation of the applause in-between records and at the end of a party—when Colleen Murphy along with Simon Halpin/Guillaume Chottin picked up musical hosting responsibilities—suggested David’s argument that it was directed towards the music rather than him might be correct.

Ultimately, the party revolved around the simple idea of friends and friends of friends wanting to dance together in a comfortable and contained setting, with the music piping through clean, warm audiophile equipment, and a little talc helping participants get into the musical journey. David had indeed started the parties in London through friendship and during his time never once worked with an alternative set-up on the basis that one should stick with one’s friends. These foundations came to define the events. “It’s unbelievable,” one female dancer told me after her first party. “The people here—they make eye contact!”

David was all about contact. When he travelled to London, he was ready to accept a lower fee in order to be able to spend five nights in a hotel, not because he wanted to live it up but because he wanted to be in the city before and after each party so that he could build relationships—relationships that would feed back into the party and through the party back into the cosmos. This way of being imbued the way David related to strangers he’d meet who had nothing to do with the party. Whether we were going into a shop to buy groceries or visiting a hi-fi company to check out equipment or heading to his hotel at the end of a party, he invariably engaged with strangers as if they were all potential friends. He loved the telephone as a form of communication and for a while he was heavily drawn to the connections made possible via the Internet. Ultimately, however, he believed in the higher plane of the party.

Relationships built over a lifetime burst forth in the hours and days that followed David’s passing. Many knew David personally and spoke of him in the warmest possible terms. Others came forward as participants in a party who knew that they had entered into a nurturing environment in which social bonding and transformation were never compromised. It meant that David could live on in the knowledge that he had brought joy and hope to an incalculable number of people. “I don't want to go into the ‘I won’t always be here’ thing, but if I’m not here tomorrow, we now know what to do and what not to do,” he told me during a 2007 interview. That has come to pass as three parties in three cities in three countries in three continents are totally set to carry forward the Loft tradition in its remarkably pure form.

During dark times the Loft provided light and it will continue to do so. David understood the communal underpinnings of the party and its relationship to the universe like nobody else I ever met. Let us hang onto his words, his insights and his practice. In deepest grief, gratitude and joy, David, love is and will remain the message, music is and will remain love, love saves and will continue to save the day. 

This essay is an adaptation of a 2007 article originally written for Placed. The magazine folded before the issue was published. Tim Lawrence is the author of "Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture (1970-79)," "Hold On to Your Dream: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92," and the newly published "Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83." He is also a founding member of Lucky Cloud Sound System, which started to put on parties with David Mancuso in London in June 2003. 

David Mancuso's art of parties

David Mancuso outside Prince Street Loft, New York, 1988. Photo by Pat Bates

Disco historian Tim Lawrence, author of Love Saves The Day, remembers the late party purist's selection policy at parties in New York, London and Sapporo

David Mancuso made an incomparably profound contribution to the development of contemporary party culture. His vision was the simplest one he or anyone who knew him could imagine, and it inspired many. Yet as the culture stretched out his vision of the role of music within party culture went through turns and somersaults, a number of which took it to the point where it was barely recognisable to Mancuso. In ways that could seem dogmatic yet ultimately resonate as being profoundly ethical, insightful and even mystical, he barely wavered from his original vision during an unprecedented run that dates back to Valentine’s Day 1970. Inevitably he made some false turns as he made his way, yet any deviation only led him back to a path already established. When he passed away a week ago he left a legacy that was almost monk-like in its purity.

Mancuso’s musical philosophy placed music as a central component in a universe that in essence amounts to an unfolding party. Shaped through experiences that ranged from growing up in a children’s home to participating in the kaleidoscopic energies of the countercultural movement, he began to host private parties that combined the Harlem rent party tradition, audiophile stereo equipment, Timothy Leary’s LSD gatherings and downtown loft living with music capable of providing a form of life energy to enable his social gatherings to go further in their journey towards communal-transcendental transformation. Not even Francis Grasso, whose work at The Sanctuary paralleled Mancuso’s early efforts, was this far advanced. And Mancuso was only just starting out.

Prior to Mancuso, DJs were paid to “work the bar”, or whip crowds into a hurried frenzy before “killing the floor” with a slow number that contained the subliminal lyrics “It’s time to drink now”. There was no conversation, no flow. But Mancuso went about his work in the privacy of his own home, not a public space, and with alcohol set aside for the kind of stimulant whose initials inspired him to write “Love Saves the Day” on invitations to his February 1970 gathering, he was able to select music in relation to the energy of his dancing guests. The result amounted to a form of collective, democratic, participatory, improvised music making that was rooted in antiphonal conversation rather than virtuoso monologue. The practice of dancing to pre-recorded music had taken a great leap forward and there could be no shuffling back.

From that night onwards, Mancuso introduced an improbably wide range of sounds into the New York City party scene, with selections such as War’s “City, Country, City” , Chicago’s “I’m A Man” , Eddie Kendricks’s “Girl You Need A Change Of Mind” and Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa” becoming elements in a sonic tapestry that wove in Latin, African, rock, gospel, breakbeat and even country while prioritising explorative records that reached dramatic crescendos. The discovery that long records enabled the party to enter into a deeper socio-psychic plane spearheaded a collective desire that culminated in the innovation of the 12" single. Meanwhile Mancuso placed records on the turntable according to the signs and signals of his dancing guests, conscious that a ‘third ear’ combining the consciousness of everyone gathered would ultimate lead to a journey that loosely followed the three bardos of intensity outlined by Leary in his notes on the acid experience.

The practice of mixing between two records – a technique pioneered by Grasso at the Sanctuary – seemed somewhat insignificant within the context of The Loft, as guests came to name Mancuso’s parties. Instead Mancuso remained more interested in the way records could be knitted together according to instrumental signatures, lyrical themes, production values and energy patterns to form an unfolding journey that by the early 1980s could last for up to 18 hours. The means of segueing from one record to another was just a technical matter that shouldn’t become more important than the music itself.

Mancuso related to music within an ethical framework that sought to bring social progress to the world, albeit on a local level. He co-founded the first record pool, the New York City Record Pool, in order to help his peers receive free copies of records to play/promote without record company support. He refused to play bootlegs on the basis that the original artists wouldn’t get their share of the sale. He declined to speak of his music selections or his playlists, preferring to attribute everything to the collective endeavour of The Loft. When asked about his approach to playing records, he’d wonder about the premise of the question because the truth of the matter was he couldn’t even play a musical instrument. He kept sound levels to 100dB because anything louder might damage the ears of one of his guests, and why would he want to harm someone entering a social situation?

In order to take the party deeper and higher, Mancuso devoted much of his life to the perfection of The Loft’s sound system. He introduced audiophile stereo components from the get-go, and by the late 1970s had established the core element of a system that included Klipschorn speakers, Mark Levinson amplifiers and Koetsu cartridges. Early into The Loft’s run he also hired sound engineers Alex Rosner and Richard Long to respectively design tweeter arrays and bass reinforcements that enabled him to give records a frequency injection at key moments in the party, yet he ditched the kind of innovations that later became a major feature of discotheque sound system design aftter concluding that music was perfectly capable of speaking for itself when channelled through a sufficiently accurate system.

Such was his faith in the emancipatory power of music, Mancuso even removed the mixer from his set-up in the early 1980s, finally convinced that such equipment introduced unnecessary stages in the electronic circuit that lay between the needle and the loudspeaker. Why only go 97 per cent of the way up a mountain when you can reach the summit, Mancuso once asked me. Ultimately he came to believe that the system’s sole purpose was to reproduce the original recording as precisely as possible so that the music would “play us”.

From the very beginning through to the very end Mancuso thought of himself as a musical host rather than a DJ. His reasoning was simple. Whereas DJs usually operated as for-hire freelancers who entertained crowds by deploying a set of technical skills, Mancuso was the host of an entire party, an entire environment, with music just one of his responsibilities. Indeed he lacked the technical skills that most DJs could draw on, didn’t get paid for his work, and didn’t even see himself as an entertainer. Rather, he compared himself to the host of a rent party who in less developed settings turned to a record player tucked away in the corner of the room in order to give guests something to dance to. And while the peerless clarity of his sound system threatened to bestow authority upon Mancuso, he remained firm in his mind that the newfound power of music confirmed his humble place in the universe. As he told me in an interview conducted in 2007:

“I’m just part of the vibration. I’m very uncomfortable when I’m put on a pedestal. Sometimes in this particular business it comes down to the DJ, who sometimes does some kind of performance and wants to be on the stage. That’s not me. I don’t want attention I want to feel a sense of camaraderie and I’m doing things on so many levels that, whether it’s the sound or whatever, I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a DJ. I don’t want to be categorised or become anything. I just want to be. There’s a technical role to play and I understand the responsibilities, but for me it’s very minimal. There are so many things that make this worthwhile and make it what it is. And there’s a lot of potential. It can go really high.”

Save for the creation of the New York City Record Pool, Mancuso remained remarkably focused on his own parties, perhaps because the countercultural movement’s wider aspiration to change the world had in many regards ended in disappointment, with state repression playing a significant part. Yet the power of his parties attracted a dedicated crowd of dancers as well as a significant number of discotheque DJs, who’d head to The Loft once they were done for the night, and although each step only amounted to a baby step, by the end of the decade it would be possible to cite The Loft as the most influential party of its era. Many of the most influential party spaces – private parties such as The Tenth Floor, The Gallery, Flamingo, 12 West, The Soho Place, Reade Street, The Paradise Garage and The Warehouse – were modelled directly or vicariously on The Loft. Meanwhile many of the most influential DJs and remixers of the period – Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, Nicky Siano, François Kevorkian, David Morales, Tony Humphries – absorbed the “Love Saves the Day” vibes as they headed to The Loft on a regular basis. Even if he sometimes wondered about the way his model was adapted in some situations, especially when exclusionary policies crept in, Mancuso was largely happy for the message to spread. It’s like a good joint, he once told me, you pass it around.

Mancuso’s belief in the centrality of the party versus the musical host/DJ received its ultimate test when he was unable to play at a party himself. The first time this happened in London, where he had started to co-host events with myself, Colleen Murphy and Jeremy Gilbert, Colleen was able to step in seamlessly. The parties in London as well as Sapporo, Japan, also continued with barely a hiccup when a doctor suggested to David that he stop travelling internationally a few years later. Around this time David had started to effect an incremental, monk-like withdrawal from his own parties. The result is that, at the time of his passing, David had overseen the creation of three Loft parties in three cities that had been running for 46, 16 and 13 years respectively and were all set to continue along the purist lines he had maintained for a lifetime. He had fulfilled the dream of being able to disappear in the middle of a beautiful party.

As he told me in an interview: “I don't want to go into the ‘I won’t always be here’ thing, but if I’m not here tomorrow, we now know what to do and what not to do.”

Lucky Cloud Sound System party in London. Photo by Tim Lawrence

The article can be accessed here (online) or here (pdf)

The Legacy of David Mancuso by Tim Lawrence

Last week, the dance music world lost one of its founding fathers when David Mancuso passed away at age 72. Here, Tim Lawrence—the author of canonical disco history texts 'Love Saves The Day: A History Of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979' and 'Life and Death On The New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983'—remembers Mancuso the man and explains the countercultural appeal of his long-running and hugely influential New York party, The Loft.

Of the many paths that led me to David Mancuso, the final and most direct one came courtesy of Stefan Prescott, the co-owner of Dance Tracks. I was a Friday night regular at the store from 1994 on, having moved from London to New York to get closer to the city’s house music scene and enroll in the doctoral program in English Literature at Columbia University. My somewhat unbounded enthusiasm for dance culture had prompted a professor to suggest I write a “quick book” on the subject, and after landing a contract to write a history of house music, Stefan recommended I interview David, simply because David had been around since the beginning.

Preparations for the interview were halting at best. Later on I would track down two significant interviews with David: one conducted by Vince Aletti in the Village Voice in 1975 and another by Steven Harvey in Collusion in 1983. Yet neither were suggested to me as I asked about David’s influence and received puzzled shrugs in reply. Concerns that the interview would turn out to be a waste of time increased when a writer who was on the cusp of completing his own book on house music and had interviewed a significant number of people for his research told me that there was no real need to speak with David. Although he had cultivated a unique audiophile sound system, he exerted no obvious influence on the wider scene. But by then I’d set up the interview and resolved to go ahead with it just the same.

David and I met in a homey Italian restaurant in the East Village in April 1997. For three hours, I battled to track what he was saying as he reeled off a miasmic rush of names, parties and sounds that were almost entirely foreign to me (the exceptions were Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage). I tried to keep a grip as David insisted that I begin my account not even with disco but instead the pre-disco dance scene that began in early 1970. I quickly sensed just how much time I would need to straighten out David’s tangled story. I also realized that even if it was only a quarter true it would still transform our understanding of the history of dance culture.

I also liked David a great deal. A cross between a disheveled vagabond, biblical prophet and cuddly bear, he was atypically passionate, philosophical and political. He led me to immediately wonder if I’d ever met anyone whose discussion of dance culture was so firmly rooted in ideas of community, integration and social potential. David’s investment in civil rights, gay liberation, feminism, the anti-war movement and the broader countercultural movement was immediately transparent, as was his commitment to having his parties contribute to a more equal world. Even if the countercultural movement found itself on the defensive by the end of the 1960s, David was clear that the movement’s energies could take root and flourish in his party setting. We ended the interview with a hug and a commitment to continue the conversation.

I later came to understand that what happened next was absolutely central to David’s outlook on life. Five messages were waiting for me on the answering machine by the time I got home, all of them from people David had contacted after the end of our meal. I liked that he felt enough of an affinity to accelerate the communication, yet didn’t grasp how, having grown up in a children’s home, he had come to invest the same level of trust in friends that many reserve for families. He could only think about doing something if he did it with friends, who formed the bedrock of his life and his party philosophy.

As the interview with David unfolded, I attempted to hold on to the idea of writing a history of house. Meeting up with legendary figures such as Frankie Knuckles, David Morales and Tony Humphries, I asked each of them if—and I acknowledged just how improbable this might sound—they had heard of or even knew a somewhat outré guy named David Mancuso and a party called The Loft. As if pre-programmed, all three launched into a mini-speech about David’s profound influence on their formation and about the way they had learned about the power of music and dancing on the floor of The Loft and about how they even sought to bring David’s sensibility into their work as DJs. When I fed back the surprise acclaim to David, he was a little underwhelmed and wondered out loud why they had fallen out of touch. The quality of human interaction was always uppermost in David’s mind.

During this period I went to my first Loft party, held at a new space David had recently moved into on Avenue B, having bounced from home to home after losing his final main location on Third Street. (Previously he staged parties on Broadway and then Prince Street.) I remember acclimating to the unusual environment: a low-lit home that was largely dedicated to a dance floor flanked by tall stereo speakers and a lavishly decorated DJ booth. David occupied his own strange space within this strange space. He barely responded when I said hello, as he was already deeply immersed in the sonic and psychic space of the party. Slightly disturbed by his affectless presence, I struggled to tune my ears to the gentle sounds emitted by the speakers. By 1 a.m. there might have been a total of six people in the room.

David’s commitment to fundamental principles rewarded him with a room packed full of an ecstatic dancers by the time of his anniversary party the following February; that night I began to grasp what The Loft must have been like during peak years in the 1970s and early 1980s. But a short while later David was forced to start all over again when the friend from whom he was subletting the space defaulted on the rent. This marked the moment when David was forced to vacate the last home that was spacious enough for him to throw a party, which in turn suggested that The Loft had come to an anticlimactic end. David seemed to go downhill during this period, and there were times when he became harder to reach. It seemed incredible that the person who was beginning to seem as though he might turn out to have been the most influential figure in the history of dance culture had reached the point of losing everything.

David’s contribution to dance music was profound. Even though he thought of himself as a musical host, he helped to pioneer the democratic and conversational principles of contemporary DJing by picking out records in relationship to the energy of his dancing crowd. His efforts were paralleled only by Francis Grasso at The Sanctuary, yet whereas Grasso focused on mixing between the beats, Mancuso explored the parameters of an expansive musical set and brought the next record in via a brief segue or, from the early 1980s onwards, dropping the practice of mixing altogether. With time on his hands and counterculture as his compass, David also introduced a panoply of records, many of them long album cuts, that stretched out the sonic as well as social parameters of the party.

The Loft—a name attached to David’s parties by his dancers—inspired generations of people who looked to emulate and disperse its transcendental message and community ethos. The owners of the Tenth Floor, Gallery, Soho Place, 12 West, Reade Street and the Paradise Garage modeled their venues directly on the Loft, while Flamingo and The Saint were also intimately linked to Mancuso’s party, given that they had been modeled on the Tenth Floor. Over in Chicago, Robert Williams had been a Loft devotee before he opened The Warehouse. Meanwhile DJs Nicky Siano, Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles followed by the likes of Tony Humphries, François Kevorkian and David Morales spent formative years at The Loft before they went on to become scene-setting figures in their own right. David also co-founded and became the most prominent figure in the New York Record Pool, the first organization to arrange for DJs to receive free promo records in return for feedback and dance floor play. At times it seemed as though all paths led back to the Loft.

David faced challenges during The Loft’s peak years. After being forced by city officials to vacate his Broadway home in 1974, he endured a titanic struggle to re-open on Prince Street. Yet his biggest crisis came after he moved to a new space he had purchased on Third Street in Alphabet City, having been served notice by the owner of the Prince Street building, only to witness Ronald Reagan cancel plans to regenerate the destitute area. The move immediately cost Mancuso two-thirds of his crowd and, although he made a partial recovery, a trail period came to a close when he lost the building altogether. But early into his time on Avenue B he broke the habit of a lifetime and agreed to play outside his home—in Japan—in order to raise funds to purchase his new residence. The trip didn’t go as planned but it at least introduced him to Satoru, the owner of Precious Hall in Sapporo, and with a new friendship established David began to make regular trips to Japan, forging Loft-like conditions and relationships along the way.

The Japan experience encouraged David to subsequently travel to London to mark the release of his David Mancuso—The Loft compilation on Nuphonic Records, and following that one-off party he contacted me and Colleen Murphy, a New Yorker living in London who had worked as musical host at The Loft, to ask if we would be interested in co-hosting Loft parties in London. With my friend and colleague Jeremy Gilbert joining the team and with Adrian Fillary and Nikki Lucas also contributing to the first cycle of parties, David devoted himself with improbable energy to make his party vision work in a second faraway city. True to form and against standard practice, he requested a relatively modest fee in exchange for staying five nights rather than one night in London, because that way he could start to form deeper friendships that would find expression in the party.

From the get-go David was obsessed with building the best possible sound system for these parties. I accompanied him as we hired equipment that invariably left David dissatisfied, and I also dealt with the sound system guys who would sometimes have tears in their eyes as David tore into not only their gear but their very understanding of sound reproduction. With the situation unsustainable, Colleen, Jeremy and I agreed to divert the significant sum of money we were spending on hiring the best possible equipment into a loan that would enable us to purchase David’s preferred equipment. We’d already managed to buy a set of high-end Japanese Koetsu cartridges. Now Klipschorn speakers and other paraphernalia followed, with Jeremy overseeing the process and David working every possible favor on our behalf.

David had already dedicated most of his adult life to creating a sound system that would maximize the experience of dancing to music. During his time on Broadway he asked sound engineers Alex Rosner and Richard Long to respectively create tweeter arrays and bass reinforcements so that he could accent certain records at key moments during the night. This innovation came to transform the way sound systems were designed and installed all over the world, yet David, constantly restless, ended up ditching these new components on the basis that there was no need to interfere with the balance of the original recording if the playback equipment was of a sufficient quality. Many, including Larry Levan, looked on and learned. “To Larry, David was a quasi-mystical figure with supernatural power because David was so dedicated to providing people with the ultimate experience of the song,” François Kevorkian, a close friend of both David and Larry, recounts in Life And Death On The New York Dance Floor. “Larry understood how deep David went in order to focus strictly on the essential part of the music, which was to play the song in the closest possible form to the original recording without adulterating it in any shape or form. Although you could get a lot more bass and sound pressure when you heard a record at the Garage, at the Loft every single detail and quality would come through.”

Nevertheless the sound system remained just one element in The Loft ecosystem, and relatively early into our run I began to wonder about London’s ability to reproduce one of the finer yet absolutely critical aspects of the New York City parties. On the one hand, David was committed to divesting himself of his ego in order to enhance the communal experience on the dance floor. On the other, David’s tendency to disappear during his own parties came under pressure as dancers began to see David as a legendary figure bestowed with shamanic power. The issue had been contained in New York, where Loft dancers had long been trained to focus on the floor rather than the booth, but in London dancers were long into DJ worship, and with David’s reputation growing in the slipstream of the Nuphonic compilation, the 2004 publication of my first book, Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79, and the accumulating renown of our parties, there was no straightforward way to encourage them to shift their attention to the communal floor. Some even began to point phones in David’s direction, leaving him feeling distinctly uncomfortable. We put a stop to the cameras and phones, yet the tendency towards “DJ adulation” remained a concern.

The conundrum seemed fundamental, and I kept thinking about the time I asked David about the principles of preparing for a party. He had replied that the party could only begin when a group of friends decided that they wanted to find a place where they could dance. The next step required them to find a space in which they could relax, be intimate and party. After that the friends needed to assemble a sound system that emphasized the musicality of any recording. Then they could send out invites to others, with each friend allowed to bring a guest so new relationships could build, as well as begin preparations to decorate the room and provide wholesome food. Only then might the friends start to think about someone who could select music that would be attuned to the taste of the gathering. It followed that if the musical host was the least important part of the jigsaw that component should be the easiest to replace.

During an interview I conducted in 2007, David further explained his philosophy. “I’m just part of the vibration,” he replied. “I’m very uncomfortable when I’m put on a pedestal. Sometimes in this particular business it comes down to the DJ, who sometimes does some kind of performance and wants to be on the stage. That’s not me. I don’t want attention. I want to feel a sense of camaraderie. I’m doing things on so many levels that, whether it’s the sound or whatever, I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a DJ. I don’t want to categorized or become anything. I just want to be.” He added: “There’s a technical role to play, and I understand the responsibilities, but for me it’s very minimal. There are so many things that make this worthwhile and make it what it is. And there’s a lot of potential. It can go really high.”

It was within this context that I started to wonder what would happen if David’s philosophy were put to the ultimate test. Would the parties still work if the reticent musical host didn’t show up? Would the energy be just as strong?

The test arrived when David flew in to London, became sick and confirmed on the morning of the party that he was too ill to attend.  We agreed that Colleen should step in. We also agreed to offer David diehards the option of a full refund. Although she had next to no time to prepare, Colleen fulfilled her musical hosting responsibilities in a way that thrilled the dance floor, in part I suspect because we all realized at this moment that the parties could not only survive but also flourish in David’s absence. David was correct—the Loft party could run without him being present.

It is easy at this time of loss to eulogize David Mancuso as the sole originary source of party culture. That theory should be supported over all others, because the Loft ultimately went deeper and long survived parallel developments at other early discotheques. Yet it’s important to remember that the uncannily insightful party host has never been comfortable with the idea that he started anything, which helps explain his earlier absence from histories of dance culture. As far as David was concerned, the Loft simply took its position in a universal dance that dates back to the beginning of time. Entering the cycle, he simply drew on various practices—the age old history of social dance, the rent party tradition, hi-fi sound, the downtown loft movement and Timothy Leary’s LSD parties—and folded them into a new situation that was really a very old situation. As Jeremy Gilbert recalls: “David made this remarkable observation to me once, that he sometimes thought there was one big party going on all the time, and occasionally we just try to tune into it.” It’s precisely in this way that David saw the Loft as a microcosmic element that contributed to a much larger, universal continuum.

In a further demonstration of his innate philosophical sophistication, David was equally uncomfortable with the idea of endings. When it came to the point where he was required to vacate Prince Street, partygoers started to refer to it as the “last party,” but Mancuso refused such terminology and instead wrote a letter to his invite list that spoke of the party moving to a new venue after June 9, 1984. “We wish to develop a Loft foundation whose primary function would be to ensure the Loft’s continuation for years to come… more on this later,” he added. Bouncing back from the loss of Third Street and Avenue B, Mancuso enjoyed a halcyon period of community partying in three countries, yet started to confront the question of another ending eight years ago when he turned 64—a symbolic age for any Beatles fan. How long would he continue to travel or indeed continue to throw parties in New York? How would a body, not always cared for, hold up under the strains of international travel and the challenge of hosting eight-hour parties in New York City?

A doctor addressed the first question by telling David that he should hold back from international travel after a health check produced results that suggested a need to slow down. The news came as a shock to us in London, and I can imagine the experience was similar in Japan, yet we had already reached the point where the parties could run independently of David. So a near-seamless transition took place in which a group of thoroughly inducted Loft devotees knew exactly how to continue David’s party philosophy in the absence of its pioneer, fulfilling David’s ultimate ambition for his party. As for New York, David enacted an incremental withdrawal until there came a point when, almost unnoticed, he withdrew from it altogether—in body if not in spirit.

The New York Loft party of last October confirmed that it had reached the point its London and Japanese counterparts had been forced to arrive at more abruptly. David was nowhere to be seen, but his philosophical outlook could be felt everywhere, from the gloriously detailed sound to the diversity of the crowd to the warmth of the room to the ecstatic energy of the dancers. David had achieved something that no other party host has come even remotely close to achieving. He was the founder of a party that had been running for 46 years, and he had co-founded parallel parties in Japan and London that had been running for 16 and 13 years, respectively. What’s more, the core principles upon which all three parties had been established meant that each party could function without David’s presence. There would, it transpired, be no ending. Even if David missed going to his own parties, he could rest in the knowledge that he had tuned into the “one big party” in an utterly profound, inclusive and enduring way.

Many of us sensed that David was slipping away during the months that preceded his death. Knowing he was experiencing some difficulties, I started to wonder how he was holding up when he didn’t get around to proofing the extracts that referenced the Loft in Life And Death On The New York Dance Floor. I called him several times to try and at least confirm his quotes with him before the book went to the printer but he sounded distracted, albeit happily distracted. I was left with the impression that he was slowly withdrawing from a world he had done so much to shape.

Shortly before I travelled to New York to launch the book, David surprised me by calling to say that he would like to meet up with Colleen and me around the time of the October party–because I was supposed to attend with the new book and David had invited Colleen to share the responsibility of musical hosting with Douglas Sherman, who had been asked to carry that responsibility more or less alone after David began to step back. But no date was placed in the diary, and during the ensuing Loft party I became concerned when Elyse, one of David closest friends, mentioned that David wasn’t only staying away from his own parties; friends weren’t getting to see him at all. I called David several times during a hectic trip but was unable to get past his answering machine.

David was a family-minded person. Even though he was an orphan and experienced a disrupted upbringing, he remained as close as he could to his family and felt a particular affinity with Sister Alicia, the nun who raised him during his early years. He came to see Loft dancers as part of his extended family, as if they were an extension of his upbringing in the children’s home, and he provided employment and even shelter to those who were most in need. Every time I spoke with David he would begin by asking about my family before launching into incredibly intense conversations about how to improve some aspect of the party in London, with the focus almost invariably linked to making the parties more comfortable, or more homely. In London, as in New York, the group of dancers who came to together to make the parties happen soon began to relate to one another as if they were part of a wider family. When news broke of David’s passing it felt as though a family member had passed away.

It can now be concluded that David held on to a remarkably purist set of beliefs through to the day he died. Not once did he advertise a party. Not once did he run the Loft as a club. Not once did he work as a DJ. Not once did he go on tour. Not once did he play a bootleg. Not once did he compromise the dream of running his parties as a space where everyone was welcome as equals. Not once did he play music at a level that could damage the ears of his dancers. Not once did he select a record that he thought was less than optimal for the situation at hand. More than anyone I ever met, David understood the fundamentals of not only the party but also of existence. “David was not just a guru, but a satguru: not just a teacher, but a teacher of teachers,” Jeremy wrote after David’s passing.

In today’s compromised world, where space in global cities is in short supply and prohibitively expensive and where prevailing social conditions are almost entirely hostile to the bedding down of a vibrant, socially-minded party culture, it seems unlikely that another David-like figure will emerge. And yet these conditions and times have produced a scenario in which the importance of David’s life and work, his vision of the party and of music, and his theory of society and its potential for positive transformation seem more urgent than ever before. It’s as much as we can do to continue to attempt to understand his ideas and put them into practice.

David always insisted that The Loft stay rooted in community participation, audiophile sound and an expansive musical palate because the combination of the three would deepen the transformative potential of the party, which would in turn make a small contribution to social progress. This vision exceeded David’s being and will survive his passing, just as it will survive all of our deaths. That is because the dance, in the final instance, is embedded in the fabric of the universe, and it is therefore beholden to us to support that social energy when the opportunity arises. When we do so, our lives and the lives of those around us will improve. For we have learned nothing from David if we haven’t learned that, as he was so fond of saying, “music is love, and love saves the day.”

Life and Death on the Pulse Dance Floor: Transglocal Politics and Erasure of the Latinx in the History of Queer Dance

Life and Death on the Pulse Dance Floor:

Transglocal Politics and Erasure of the Latinx in the History of Queer Dance

Abstract

Although the dominant response of politicians, journalists and campaign groups to Omar Mateen’s 12 June 2016 massacre of forty-nine people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando revolved around the repetition of already established arguments about terrorism, this article will outline how the massacre amounted to a specific attack on the Latinx community.1 It will also argue that, although distinctive, the discursive erasure of the specifically queer Latinx finds a partial echo in the way that Latin culture has been marginalised in writing on dance culture. An outline map of the somewhat opaque Latinx contribution will be offered as a small tribute to those who have lived for and now died on the Latinx dance floor. The account of the dancers who gathered at Pulse, the music they danced to, and the unstable, marginalised and dynamic networks of musicians, dancers and party spaces that preceded them will be considered within J. Blake Scott and Rebecca Dingo’s (2012) evocation of the “transglocal”. If transglocal encounters “can generate new meanings and subject positions” (Blake Scott and Dingo: 7), so the dancers at Pulse can be seen to have moved resourcefully, dynamically and creatively between the local and the transnational as they sought out new modes of expression and community in a darkening global terrain.

Keywords:

Pulse, Orlando; Latinx; LGBTQ; DJ culture; terrorism

Deepening divisions in the US political landscape (Berman: 2016), combined with social media’s decimation of the once seemingly frenetic twenty-four hour news cycle (Alejandro 2010), fueled the near-instantaneous rationalisation of the Pulse massacre through the prism of ongoing debates about terrorism and gun control. Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had already thrown out the casually fascistic suggestion that all Muslims should be banned from entering the US when he tweeted: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism, I don’t want congrats, I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!” (Trump 2016). Obama described the attack as “act of terror and an act of hate”, and although he remarked that the place where LGBT Americans “were attacked is more than a nightclub—it is a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds, and to advocate for their civil rights”—he maintained that “this could have been any one of our communities”, that an attack on “any American […] is an attack on all of us”, and that the massacre served as a “further reminder” of the need for gun control (Time 2016). Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton framed the massacre as both “an act of terror” and an “act of hate”, and pointed to the need to defeat “international terror groups” and keep guns “out of the hands of terrorists” (Briefing 2016). The New York Times summarised the massacre as “a tragedy that combined gun violence, a hatred of gays and ties to Islamist terrorism” (Shear 2016).

Talk of terrorism, the nation and the West escalated to the point where the specificity of the massacre became hard to discern. Barely twelve hours after it had elapsed Adam Schiff of the House Intelligence Committee declared that evidence indicates “an ISISinspired act of terrorism” (New York Times 2016). The following day FBI Director James Comey noted that despite there being no indication of outside direction the intelligence community was “highly confident that this killer was radicalized at least in part through the Internet” (Shabad 2016). Two days later the FBI agent in charge of the investigation called the massacre both a hate crime and an act of terrorism (RT.com 2016). Meanwhile it took the Republican governor of Florida Rick Scott almost forty-eight hours to recognise that the massacre was perpetrated against the LGBT community, with Florida’s attorney general Pam Bondi equally evasive (Wolf 2016). In the UK commentator Owen Jones left Sky TV’s studios when presenters insisted that the attack wasn’t homophobic, after which the Irish Independent rounded on Jones for failing to point out that the homophobic attack was “religiously motivated” and for propagating “identity politics at its most exclusionary and grotesque” (O’Doherty 2016). Some weeks later the FBI maintained that the investigation “hasn’t revealed that he [Mateen] targeted Pulse because it was a gay club” (Goldman 2016). Even if the scale of the shooting was undeniably shocking, it also became commonplace to overstate Mateen’s spree as the “deadliest” in US history (Breen 2016; Broverman 2016; Guardian 2016; Ravitz 2016; Teague 2016), situating it as an attack on the nation while papering over bloodier massacres perpetrated against Native Americans.

In fact, the framing of Mateen as an Isis-inspired terrorist was based on spurious evidence. He attended his local mosque, the Islamic Center of Fort Pierce, but only infrequently. He twice went to Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage in 2011 and 2012 to perform umrah, making him one of six million Muslims who do so annually. In 2013 he claimed to be aligned to both al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, and citing two groups who are sworn Sunni-Shiite enemies. Concerned when it heard about these claims, the FBI investigated Mateen only to close its inquiry when he explained he had made the comment in response to being teased for his Muslim faith. A further FBI investigation into possible links between Mateen and a US citizen from the same mosque in Fort Pierce who took part in an al-Qaeda affiliate attack led nowhere. Mateen’s claim to know people who were linked to the brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing turned out to be fictional. On the Saturday before the massacre he posted messages declaring his allegiance to the leader of Isis, calling on the U.S. and Russia to stop bombing Isis, but the declaration bore no relation to patterns of strict religious conduct or ideological support of Isis. All the same, a CBS poll published on 15 June showed that three-quarters of US citizens believed Mateen’s attack was either an act of terrorism or an act of terrorism as well as a hate crime, while Wikipedia reported matterof-factly that the massacre constituted “the deadliest terrorist attack in the U.S.” since 9/11 (Salvanto et al 2016; Wikipedia 2016).

 The depiction of Mateen as typical of the Orientalist male outlined by Edward Said (1995)—effeminate yet sadistic, simple yet duplicitous, outwardly functional yet psychologically unstable, intelligent yet irrational—provided further presumptive evidence that his actions were driven by so-called Islamic terrorism. Abusive behaviour within his first marriage appeared to affirm long held views about patriarchal violence within Islam while parallel stories of his pursuit of sexual encounters with other men via the gay dating app Grindr as well as the Pulse dance floor raised the thought that the massacre was rooted in his inability to reconcile his sexuality with his religion, which was repeatedly cited as being intolerant of homosexuality. Reports of Mateen’s increasingly angry demeanour, including a certain broodiness displayed during some of his visits to Pulse, pointed to an individual wrestling with conflicting cultural affinities and desires that were bound to culminate in an uncontrollable explosion. Citing no sources, the Guardian linked the massacre to Islam when it reported that Mateen was “said to have enrolled in online courses taught by a homophobic imam” and added that “homophobia and jihadism are anything but mutually exclusive” inasmuch as “Isis executes people it says are gay, stones them and throws them from roofs” (Ackerman and Siddiqui 2016). Particular prominence was given to Mateen’s father’s Facebook video comment that “God himself will punish those involved in homosexuality” (Sullivan and Wan 2016). Referring to the father’s story of his son’s expression of revulsion when he saw two gay men kissing while spending time with his second wife and son, the Washington Post noted that if Mateen was “interested in men, it would have been difficult to tell his father” before asking: “Was it Islamic State ideology or some personal demon that drove him to target gay people?” (Sullivan and Wan 2016).

The overall depiction reaffirms Jasbir K. Puar’s argument that constructions of terror and terrorist masculinities are “metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body” as well as permeated by “perverse, improperly hetero- and homo- Muslim sexualities” (Puar: xxiii–xxiv). Puar and Amit Rai note how the personality defect model has been developed within Terrorism Studies as one of two main explanations of the “terrorist mindset”, with terrorists assumed to display pathological defects that are rooted in unconscious feelings of hostility towards their parents (perhaps because of abuse or adolescent rebellion) or of exaggerated identification (perhaps because of perceived suffering experienced by their parents) before the pathology becomes narrow, extreme and absolutist in adulthood. It follows that if terrorism is a symptom of a deviant psyche, or the breakdown of the psyche of the heterosexual family romance, then monster-terrorists are products of a form of “failed heterosexuality” (Puar and Rai: 124).

Yet people who experience sexual conflicts or display psychotic symptoms don’t inevitably go on to carry out terrorist attacks, just as the people who carry out such attacks aren’t necessarily conflicted or psychotic, and while it remains possible that more compelling evidence will come to light, for now Sima Shakhsari is right to suggest that Mateen’s lastminute declaration of allegiance to Isis might well have been made to give a “heroic” gloss to his homophobia, with Isis a “deterritorialized imagined community where anyone who wants to defy certain social rules can claim belonging (or is assigned belonging)” (Shakhsari 2016). Ultimately the terrorist label stuck to Mateen because of his Afghan background and Islamic heritage, just as, conversely, no terrorist sympathies were attached to the white man who was arrested before carrying out a planned attack at Pride in Los Angeles on the same day as Mateen carried out his massacre. “The Muslim feigns patriotism and practice of American customs, but it is a trick, so he must be watched for signs of savagery as he prays in the mosque and goes about his business”, notes Roqayah Chamseddine of the Orientalist view of the Muslim. “The Muslim American is a hyper-visible yet invisible being who will have his American-ness stripped from him the moment he errs” (Chamseddine 2016).

 The rush to affirm Mateen’s pathological terrorist intent just so happens to support a nationalist discourse that positions the US as the hub of global democracy, liberalism and morality, with a generalised Islamic East posited as an overt or covert threat to those values and their associated way of life. In perhaps the most remarkable of these interventions, Trump, not previously renowned for his dedication to LGBTQ rights, figured the attack on “gay and lesbian citizens” as “a strike at the heart and soul of who we are as a nation” because it enabled him to figure the liberal West as being at war with illiberal Islam, thereby justifying his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US. “The bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place was because we allowed his family to come here”, he argued, adding that Mateen’s father comes from a culture where 99% of people support Sharia Law (Trump 2016). “That is a fact, and it’s a fact we need to talk about”.

As much as Trump’s claims to liberalism might amaze, his contention sits within a widely accepted discourse that gives the US permission to enact illiberal policies, ranging from foreign wars to the maintenance of Guantanamo Bay to the policing of people of colour, in order to defend its claim to being the bastion of western liberalism. To point this out is not to argue for the equivalence or non-equivalence of the US vs. the Rest so much as to note that, for all of the talk about US tolerance, including freedom for its LGBTQ citizens, levels of homophobia, racism and sexism remain high—one might even say surprisingly high given these underpinning claims to liberalism. Puar (2007 2) also points to the relatively recent rise of homonationalism, or a form of nationalism that embraces the idea of LGTBQ rights and policies around, say, gay marriage so long as those embraced under this banner are willing to articulate the nationalist concerns of the political establishment. In this manner queer liberals have been coopted to a cause that is quick to support the introduction illiberal measures to defend liberalism.

Meanwhile Muslim countries, intent on preserving relations with the US, lined up to denounce Isis and distance themselves from its ideology; Saudi Arabia’s problematic ties with Isis along with the United States’s generally strong diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia passed all but unmentioned; and the silence surrounding the bombing campaign in Syria also escaped scrutiny (even if the post-Pulse panic strengthened its underlying rationale). Nor was any mention made of the fact that the horrendous death toll recorded at Pulse continued to be matched on a near daily basis in Iraq, as tracked by Iraq Body Count.2 Such are the power relations that underscored the way Mateen came to be defined in the hours that followed his attack. “In a war-on-terror world, there is an injunction to grieve in public for American lives lost to terrorism in order to ward off suspicion and further targeting”, points out Maya Mikdashi (2016). “This injunction applies as well to the dead in France or Belgium, but not to victims of terrorism (state or otherwise) in Iraq or Nigeria or Syria. This phenomenon is directly related to the ways in which US political discourse on the war on terror has starkly divided the world into victims (Europeans and Americans) and perpetrators (Muslims and Arabs)”

As it happens the men who described their interactions with Mateen painted a picture of someone who enjoyed friendships with gay men and drag queens as well as someone who was able to differentiate between his own religious beliefs and the more conservative ideas of his father. In the longest testimony, a man going under the name of Miguel told Univision that he and Mateen had a relationship that was akin to being “friends with benefits” and that they met some 15–20 times in a hotel room over a two-month period before the relationship came to a close in December. “He say Muslim religion is a beautiful, beautiful religion”, commented Miguel. “It’s a religion where everything’s about love, where everybody’s welcome—gay, trans, bisexual, hetero, everybody”. He noted that Mateen never appeared to be violent. “He [was] looking for love”, added Miguel. “To be embraced”. Miguel hypothesised that Mateen carried out the attack as an act of revenge, angered that he might have become infected with HIV (even though the test came back negative) (Univision 2016). Other Pulse regulars remembered him as a sullen character, yet none recalled an individual unable to reconcile his desire with his religious beliefs—or a person who, assumed to be a frustrated gay Muslim, might channel his pent-up frustration on the very people his religion “forbade” him to desire, and in so doing give succour to the fake idea that being Islamic and queer could only result in that kind of rampage. Nor was there so much as a hint that Mateen lived his life according to the kind of hardline Wahhabist strictures advocated by Isis that might have made him want to carry out an attack on the group’s behalf.

The gay community’s response to the massacre expressed deep emotional shock while avoiding the easy temptation to characterise Mateen as a conflicted Muslim terrorist. At vigils staged across the world, speakers argued for the need to oppose those who sought to use the massacre as an excuse for anti-Muslim prejudice (Browne 2016). Yet they often did so from a compromised point-of-view, such as when Advocate editor Matthew Breen (2016) argued that talk of Isis was a “goddamned red herring” and that Mateen’s hatred was “homegrown” inasmuch as it expressed societal homophobia, yet also recirculated the possibility that he was fuelled by Islamic extremism, with the Latinx identity of the Pulse crowd left invisible by his broader evocation of a generalised LGBTQ community. Courtney Fry (2016) followed up with a piece that noted the mainstream media’s reluctance to identity the night as a queer night yet again generalised the attack by maintaining that all LGBTQ party spaces were now in “extreme danger” and that “a place that has always been known as an oasis from the bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, physical threats, assaults, and murders that happen in the outside world, has now been torn to shreds”.

The colourblind response spread to The Atlantic, which published research showing that “LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be the target of a violent hate-crime than Jews or black people”, and “more than four times as likely as Muslims, and almost 14 times as likely as Latinos” (Green 2016), as if LGBTQ people couldn’t be Jewish or black or Muslim or Latinx, as if killers could only be motivated “on the basis of one strand of hatred”, and as if white LGBTQ people are “more vulnerable than other minority groups”, as Jack Halberstam (2016) points out. A few days later the New York Times presented FBI data showing that LGBTQ people were the second most targeted group in 2005, behind “Jewish” and ahead of “Black”, “Muslim”, “Hispanic”, “Asian” and “White”, and were the most targeted group in 2014, only to note at the very bottom of the article the that “vast majority” of LGBTQ people killed were “black or Hispanic transgender people” (Park and Mykhyalyshyn 2016)—providing further evidence of the need, in Halberstam’s words, to “challenge this sense of an amorphous homophobic threat that separates homophobic violence out from the particular, convulsive expressions of racialized hate” (2016). As research (Waters et al. 2016) on attacks carried out against LGBTQ people between 2012–15 published by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) reveals, white gay men were in fact the victims in eleven of a total of eighty-eight homicides, with the rest distributed between black transgender women (39), black gay men (11), Latinx transgender women (8) and other (19).

It was primarily left to members of the Latinx queer community to note the erasure of the specificity of the attack.3 AM Foiles Sifuentes (2016) expressed her anger at the way “the same people that forced queer people of color to the margins are the ones hosting these public places of grieving” before asking: “Even in death—why is it okay for you to continue to force queer people of color to the margins? How can you find comfort in ignoring your collusion in their erasure?” Acknowledging the difficulty inherent in critiquing more powerful figures in the LGBTQ community because they also “shared in the vulnerability and trauma of the incident”, Ramón Rivera-Servera pointed out reactions nevertheless “distanced themselves significantly from the specificity of this as a Latino, primarily Puerto Rican, experience” (Kornhaber 2016). Several writers cited Christina Hanhardt’s (2012) research into the way past LGBTQ calls for anti-violence measures have often led to forms of increased policing that endanger queer people of colour and wider communities of colour. “The white LGBTQ community doesn’t face the criminalization and policing that our community faces every day”, remarked Jorge Gutierrez, founder of Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement (Vasquez 2016). “Not just at Pride, but every day, everywhere we go. That’s our life”

The everyday homophobia and racism experienced by queer people of colour offers a more obvious explanatory context for Mateen’s actions than any last-minute declaration of sympathy for Isis. There have, of course, been gains in the US in recent years, including the Supreme Court June ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that effectively made same-sex marriage the law of the land, the White House LGBTQ pride reception where transgender immigrant leader Jennicet Guttiérrez pointed to the plight faced by LGBTQ immigrants held in detention centres, and the Black Lives Matter movement’s demanding an end to police violence and anti-black racism (Waters et al. 2016). Yet during the same period a slew of anti-LGBTQ initiatives swept the nation in the form of “religious freedom bills” and “bathroom bills” while racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric spiraled. If anything the backlash intensified during 2016, with eighty-seven bills aimed at limiting LGBTQ rights introduced in legislatures between January and June—a marked increase on previous years (Mason et al. 2016)—with police shootings of black men continuing apparently unabated. “Outside, they call you an abomination”, author Justin Torres (2016) noted the day after Mateen’s attack. “Outside, there is a news media that acts as if there are two sides to a debate over trans people using public bathrooms. Outside, there is a presidential candidate who has built a platform on erecting a wall between the United States and Mexico — and not only do people believe that crap is possible, they believe it is necessary. Outside, Puerto Rico is still a colony, being allowed to drown in debt, to suffer, without the right to file for bankruptcy, to protect itself. Outside, there are more than 100 bills targeting you, your choices, your people, pending in various states”.

Figure 1: Flyer for Pulse’s Saturday night parties.

In terms of his personal location within this culture, Mateen sought out employment in violent settings and, perhaps not coincidentally, reproduced violent behaviour. He worked as a state prison guard at the Martin Correctional Institution and then for multinational security company G4S, a “hotbed of routine abuse, sexual violence, extremism and homophobia” where the “routine protection of violent, racist tendencies among its security officers appears to be an institutionalised global problem”, according to Nafeez Ahmed (2016) of the Institute for Policy Research and Development. Mateen was sufficiently obsessed with the idea of working for the New York Police Department he took a series of selfies dressed in one of its shirts. Some acquaintances remember a person who littered his speech with the invective of hate. He took excessive quantities of steroids as he built himself up into a muscle machine and was a wife beater. He also committed his hate crime not against the United States, but against the Latinx LGBTQ dancers who congregated at Pulse that Saturday night—otherwise why travel two hours to Pulse instead of one of the city’s two-thousand other bars?

Shakhasari (2016) wonders if it was Mateen’s “performance of a homophobic and misogynistic American masculinity enabled by everyday militarism, and constructed vis- à-vis the ‘failed masculinity’ of the Muslim other, that led to this massacre”. The critic acknowledges that the existence of violence, homophobia, transphobia and misogyny in the Middle East shouldn’t mask the “hypocrisy of an exceptionalism that assumes the US to be the bastion of freedom and progress”. Mateen’s expression of homophobic and violent sentiments might not offer final proof of his motivations, but in the final instance his actions were much more obviously homophobic and violent than inspired by the ideology of Isis.

Writing the Latinx Dance Floor into Pulse and the History of Dance Culture

 What, then, of the population that Mateen attacked—a population that has been, to varying degrees, left out of accounts of the massacre? Barbara Pomo and Ron Legler founded Pulse in 2004 in honour of Pomo’s brother, John, who died from AIDS in 1991, evoking his heartbeat in the club’s name. Located at 1912 South Orange Avenue, the venue promoted itself as “the hottest gay bar in Orlando”. Regular theme nights included Noche Latina on Mondays (featuring a Reggaetón dancehall soundtrack), Twisted Tuesdays (a talent night hosted by Axel Andrews and Kai’ja Adonis), College Night Wednesdays (hosted by Angelica Sanchez and weekly guests), Tease Thursdays (a burlesque show hosted by Lady Bri and Blade Matthews), Platinum Fridays (a hip hop night hosted by Angelica Sanchez) and Upscale Latin Night on Saturdays (hosted by former RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant Kenya Michaels). Offering three rooms and a chic interior, the venue carried the promise of style, fabulousness and an escape from hardship. “Guests are free to choose which best suits their present mood”, Diego Wyatt (2016) of Next Magazine reported in February. “Some fall under the spellbinding mystery of the Adonis Room, an intimate space filled with beautiful male and female go-go dancers. Some head to the Lounge, complete with a state-of-the-art lighting and sound system, a dance floor, VIP area and the main bar. And others go for the patio, which is undergoing some sprucing up to accommodate the relaxed atmosphere. Each area has its own DJ and vibe. Translation: There’s something for everyone”.

Prior to the attack the club attracted an eclectic crowd made up of LGBTQ people and straight friends of all ages and ethnicities, with Saturdays particularly popular with queer Latinx dancers. “I was too white to fit in with Latinos and I was too Hispanic to fit in with white kids”, one told Matthew Rodriguez (2016) of mic.com. “But on Latino Night on Saturdays I didn’t feel that way. It was just literally a time and place where everyone could be together and enjoy yourselves”. Numerous drag performers got their start at the venue and indeed two trans women of colour were featured on publicity for the party that started on 11 June and ended with the massacre. Queer women were also a notable presence and, as Trish Bendixson (2016) notes, featured among the victims of the attack. Non-Latin migrants— including Mateen—were admitted into the mix. “I think Pulse differs from tourist clubs, as well as other local clubs, for a couple of reasons”, Pomo commented in an interview with Billboard the day after the killing spree (Gray 2016). “One of our biggest goals was to create a warm, welcoming atmosphere that was family-like, with people who shared my vision”.

Continuing the legacy established by pioneering party spots such as the Loft, the Sanctuary, the Haven and the Limelight in early 1970s New York City (Lawrence 2003), Pulse operated as cross between a home, a refuge, a community centre and a pleasure palace. “Growing up in a black and brown community where hyper-masculinity was acted out as a form of survival, I actually grew up hating on Pulse”, dance floor regular Daniel Leon-Davis (2016) recounts in Fusion. “In my community, like in so many others around the world, my identity as a gay man was viewed as a form of weakness. So much so that even when I cam out, I refused to go to gay clubs because it meant that I would be one of ‘those gay men’ ”. Everything changed when he went to Pulse. “Over the next several years, Pulse became the place where my best friends learned to be themselves”, he adds. “Pulse was where I learned to love myself as a gay man. Pulse was where I learned to love my community”. Pomo also made a point of supporting local charities, raising funds for entertainers who wanted to enter pageants, educating around HIV/AIDS prevention and working in tandem with the straight community (Gray 2016). “We were never exclusive of any person’s cause”, she maintained in her Billboard interview. “Our doors were open to everyone”. Pomo added: “People who aren’t out, people who are exploring, people who are transitioning need a place to do this without judgment, they need acceptance; this is what Pulse was always about”

Operating at the intersection of race and class as well as sexuality and gender, Pulse is also rooted in the intertwining forces of colonialism and neoliberalism. With an estimated 1,000 Puerto Rican families currently relocating to Florida every month, the state is close to surpassing the total Puerto Rican population of New York (Alvarez 2016), and Orlando remains one of the primary destinations for this transitory population. The underpinning reasons for the movement are clear: Congress has historically refused to act on the unincorporated colony’s seventy-billion dollar debt, leaving it unable to file for bankruptcy; its economy has stagnated since 2011; its population is declining; and its unemployment rate is twice as high as mainland US, with poverty three times as severe (Chappatta 2016). As US citizens Puerto Ricans are also free to travel to the mainland, with Florida offering them the nearest landing point in the US as well as access to employers such as SeaWorld Orlando Resort, Universal Orlando Resort, Walt Disney World Resort and Legoland. In August 2015 the New York Times observed that the current wave of migration “is transforming a corridor of Central Florida that is increasingly viewed as economically powerful, culturally diverse and politically pivotal” (Alvarez 2015). LGBTQ Puerto Ricans joined the migration to Orlando in part because of the city’s nightlife, with its ten-plus gay bars matching the total in Detroit, a city three times Orlando’s size, and Pulse offering queer migrants an opportunity to escape the “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich 1980) of the city’s theme parks. Pomo notes that LGBTQ holidaymakers would head to the club as well (Gray 2016).

Saturday 11 June started out as a regular Latin night with DJ Ray Rivera, a.k.a. DJ Infinite, selecting a mix of hip hop, R&B and reggaeton, or “old school” as he put it in a Facebook exchange (Rivera 2016), with DJ Flawless and DJ Simo holding down the other two rooms. When Mateen began his rampage Rivera initially thought that someone was letting off firecrackers, reports Asawin Suebsaeng (2016); then he turned the music down and understood what was going on. Sourced from the biographical testimonies and photographs posted on social media by lovers, family members and friends, a person-byperson roll call of those who died conveys the connectedness as well as the pluralism of the social coalition that gathered on the floor that night (Mirkinson et al. 2016). “Maybe your Ma blessed you on the way out the door”, Torres writes in his tribute to the dead, imagining the multiplicity of circumstances that might have preceded their congregation (Torres 2016). “Maybe she wrapped a plate for you in the fridge so you don’t come home and mess up her kitchen with your hunger. Maybe your Tia dropped you off, gave you cab money home. Maybe you had to get a sitter. Maybe you’ve yet to come out to your family at all, or maybe your family kicked you out years ago”.

Figure 2: Flyer for the Saturday night party at Pulse on 11 June 2016.

Torres offers further scenarios that articulate the way the sonic and social underpinnings of the Pulse dance floor stretch across time and space in transglocal fashion, to cite J. Blake Scott and Rebecca Dingo’s (2012) evocation of culture combines the global and the local while “moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something”, in the words of anthropologist Aihwa Ong (1999: 4). In the run-up to Mateen’s attack the Pulse floor connected the disparate yet intertwining experiences of, to reference Torres’s diverse community further, the dancer whose lover decided to stay at home to the one who is allowed to stray, the one who is flush to the one who is broke, the one who doesn’t speak Spanish to the one who barely speaks English, and so on, until he finally asks after the dancer who might be undocumented, a common experience in the Latinx community, not solely in terms of the estimated eleven-million migrants who lack authorisation to live in the US (Kronstad and Passel 2015), but also in terms of societal location.

The lack of authorization extends to Latin music, which until recently barely figured in a field that was assumed to consist of a binary exchange between black and white musicians and listenerships. John Storm Roberts addressed the erasure when he argued that “Latin music has been the greatest outside influence on the popular music of the United States” (Roberts: ix), and Ned Sublette developed the analysis by showing how the “commonplaces of Cuban music became commonplaces of American music” (2004: 571) by 1951. Raquel Rivera carried the analysis to hip-hop, noting how New York Puerto Ricans were “integral”to the culture since its inception (2003: 3). Ed Morales went on to trace the Latin influence on rock, hip hop and other sounds in Latin Beat: The Rhythms and Roots of Latin Music from Bossa Nova to Salsa and Beyond (2003), and Jim McCarthy and Ron Sansoe extended the analysis in the Voices of Latin Rock (2005). César Miguel Rondón’s Spanish history of salsa came out in English three years later (2008), after which the authors of Reggaeton (2009) pointed to how the sound emerged as a transnational Jamaican, Nuyorican, Panamanian and Puerto Rican music with no singular place of origin. More recently, Juliet McMains (2015) has tracked the development of salsa dance in New York, Los Angeles and Miami as well as its relationship to salsa music. However, the Latin influence on DJ culture, disco, house music and other electronic dance sounds remains largely undocumented, and that left the impression that either the sound of the music or the sexuality of a significant number of its makers weren’t sufficiently Latin, or weren’t primed for easy integration into stories about national and diasporic musical movements. In this manner the queerest strand of Latinx culture has passed under-historicised, right up to the point when Mateen’s assault on the culture revealed just how easy it remains to erase Latinx queerness

Ramón H Rivera-Servera argues that the analysis of the utopian space of the queer Latinx dance floor requires an “engagement with the cultures of pleasure that characterize the club” as well as “the cultures of struggle that mark the multiple trajectories and negotiations undertaken by dancers on their way to and as a precondition for the utopian experiences of the dance floor” (2004: 271) What journeys, then, were undertaken in order for the dancers to congregate at Pulse on 11 June 2016, not only in terms of how they and the music they danced to coalesced that night, but also how previous generations of dancers and musicians (including DJs) combined to make Latinx dancers and Latin sounds become an integral part of DJ-led dance culture in the first place, from the pre-disco formation of the opening years of the 1970s through to the rise and fall of disco through to its mutant aftermath and the subsequent rise of house? While Rivera-Servera (2012) has developed an insightful ethnographic analysis of the Latinx dance floor that unfolded in eight clubs located in New York, Rochester, San Antonio and Austin between 1998–2003, and while José Esteban Muñoz (2009) has elucidated crucial aspects of Latinx performance in club settings, a history of the culture that locates its development within the broader conjunctural landscape of DJ-led dance culture has yet to be written. The point isn’t that key Latinx figures never get to be mentioned in other accounts of queer dance culture so much as their contribution tends to be mentioned in passing, as if they were incidental, when in fact it could be argued that, to adapt Sublette’s phrase, the commonplaces of Latinx music have become commonplaces of dance music.

Although it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a detailed analysis, a post-Pulse survey of DJ culture and disco during the 1970s confirms the extent of a Latinx presence that has only crept into writing on the culture. Any historical account would need to being begin with the year zero beginnings of contemporary dance music culture in 1970 when David Mancuso and Francis Grasso, spurred on by a convergent crowd that articulate the energies of gay liberation, civil rights, feminism, anti-war protests, the broader countercultural movement and bohemian culture, pioneered the practice that saw DJs begin to select records as part of a democratic, antiphonal conversation with the dancing crowd (Lawrence 2003). Although there were no Latin-specific discotheques in operation at the time, Latinx dancers formed a key contingent at the Loft and to a lesser extent other venues, their presence traceable to the “Great Migration” of Puerto Ricans to the US mainland during the 1950s and the passing of Hart Cellar Act in 1965, with the latter loosening up restrictions on non-European migration to the US. Their communicative presence can have only encouraged DJs to select records with varying degrees of Latinness into a mix that was largely yet by no means exclusively composed of African American recordings, with tracks such as Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican”, Barrabas’s “Wild Safari” / “Woman”, Joe Bataan’s “Latin Strut”, Chakachas’s “Jungle Fever”, Chicago Transit Authority’s “I’m a Man”, Gil ScottHeron’s “The Bottle” and WAR’s “City, Country, City” offering Latin elements. Publishing the first article to point to the rising number of DJ-led dance venues in the city, Vince Aletti (1973) described the emerging sonic amalgam as ‘‘Afro-Latin in sound or instrumentation, heavy on the drums, with minimal lyrics, sometimes in a foreign language, and a repetitious chorus”. How did Latin influences make themselves heard in these records? Who were the musicians and producers who spearheaded the development? What journeys did the recordings make en route to the New York dance floor? To what extent were the DJs who played them rooted in Latin culture?

Although Italian Americans dominated the formative years of the DJ profession (thanks in part to the Mafia’s presence in a number of discotheques), and although African Americans such as Tee Scott and Larry Levan became increasingly influential as the decade progressed, Latinx DJs also made their mark, with David Rodriguez (the Limelight) and Richie Rivera (the Firehouse, the Anvil, Flamingo) the most notable, and John “Jellybean” Benitez, Armando Galvez, Hector Lebron, Freddie Mendoza, Mike Mora, Eddie Rivera and Ray Velazquez also significant during this period. These DJs cultivated a range of styles that articulated their diasporic subjectivities in sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit ways. Calling himself the Contessa, Rodriguez selected records with unprecedented attitude as he told tempestuous stories by interweaving the lyrics of songs (Lawrence 2003). Meanwhile the shyer Richie Rivera emerged as one of the city’s most compelling DJs as he played alternate weekends at Flamingo, the most influential private party for the white gay male crowd, introducing such a high level of Latin percussion he acquired the nickname “Boom Boom Rivera”. Based at the Cork & Bottle, Eddie Rivera might have been the first DJ to introduce Latin imports into his sets, among them “El Bimbo” by the Chocolate Boys, a 1974 import (Aletti 1998: 87). Meanwhile John Benitez, whose mother migrated from Puerto Rico to the South Bronx during the early 1950s, integrated recordings such as the Latin-jazz-disco of “What You Need Is My Love” by Cindy Rodriguez (Aletti 1998: 231).

Latinx sounds became more prominent in disco during the second half of the 1970s. Van McCoy led the charge when he scored a number one hit with “The Hustle”, which tapped into the revival of the Latin dance style in suburban discotheques. Formed with the ide of Latinising the Philadelphia Sound after its Jewish-Syrian owners had mined the Latin import market, Salsoul proceeded to bring Roy Armando, Andy Gonzalez, Manny Oquendo and Peter “Choki” Quintero as well as conga player Larry Washington into the studio, so whereas Philadelphia International house band MFSB used only one conga/timbales player (Washington), Salsoul went “very Latin”, according to vibes player and producer Vince Montana (Lawrence 2003: 170). With Tom Moulton accentuating the Latin percussion in his extended mix of Patti Jo’s “Make Me Believe In You”, Vicki Sue Robinson heightening the percussion and flight in “Turn the Beat Around”, Karen Young combining Afro-Latin rhythms with jazz and R&B in “Hot Shot”, Walter Gibbons foregrounding congas, timbales and dramatic expression in his mix of Salsoul Orchestra’s “Salsoul 3001”, and Richie Rivera emphasising an insistent woodblock in his mix of Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell”, the kind of syncopation, colour and contrast that was more obviously typical of Cuban music than the R&B groove and swing that shaped early disco came to overtly infuse disco during the second half of the decade, with scores of other records incorporating the shift. Meanwhile Gibbons demonstrated how DJs could generate a Latin-inflected style behind the turntables when, paralleling DJ Kool Herc in the Bronx, he pioneered the technique of extending the percussive break by mixing between bongo heavy tracks such as “2 Pigs and a Hog”. With the partial exception of the salsa-ification of Salsoul, these significant developments have at best been acknowledged only in passing in writing about disco.

Certain institutional gains paralleled these developments, all of them unfolding within straight settings. On the discotheque front, the Copacabana, the Cork & Bottle and the Ipanema all targeted a Latinx crowd, with DJs such as Freddie Mendoza, Tony Gioe, Mike Mora and Eddie Rivera mixing disco with Latin tracks. As secretary of the New York Record Pool, an organisation co-founded by Mancuso to distribute free promotional records to DJs, Rivera convened a separate Latin Music Department before forming a breakaway organisation, the International Disco Record Center (IDRC). Straight Latin DJs followed Rivera while LGBTQ ones stayed with Mancuso and subsequently joined Judy Weinstein’s For the Record after Mancuso wound down his pool. Lacking a night marked as their own, LGBTQ Latinx dancers continued to head to the Loft as well as other private party spaces that catered to mixed crowds, including the Gallery and the Paradise Garage. “It [the Gallery] was never clearly defined along black gay lines”, notes DJ Nicky Siano of some of the non-normative aspects of Latinx queerness that require further examination (Lawrence 2003: 104). “There were so many people who were just sexual. A lot of black men would have sex with other men but didn’t consider it gay sex. Puerto Rican men, who would never have been caught dead in a gay club, were ‘Just hanging out, man, getting blow jobs, fucking some ass’. It wasn’t about gay or straight. It was about, ‘Hey, let’s party!’ ”

 By the end of the 1970s, as a national backlash threatened to wipeout disco, Latinx protagonists could reflect that they had little to lose given that their profile was already subjugated. Admittedly the most influential New York DJ of his generation, Larry Levan of the Paradise Garage, would soon cite David Rodriguez as one of the “the school of DJs” who had most influenced him (Harvey: 30). Meanwhile Richie Rivera held down his positio at Flamingo and Salsoul remained a hallowed label in the opinion of New York City DJs. Yet the LGBTQ Latinx dance crowd remained largely invisible to the wider public, in part because of its racial profile, in part because of the subterranean character of the private party network, while the Latinx contribution to the sound of disco barely registered as discussions framed the genre as either black (African American disco) or white (Eurodisco and the Bee Gees). It followed that when sales started to decline and the backlash gathered pace, the debate about disco’s status revolved around the argument that a culture born out of African American R&B had abandoned its roots by producing a bleached sound for a white audience. That, in turn, established the bifurcated framework that would enable the rise of rap music to be interpreted as a black working-class response to disco’s journey into white commercialism, itself an oversimplified analysis of the relationship between these two sounds (Lawrence 2016). The ongoing marginalisation of the Latinx weakened the position of Eddie Rivera when he attempted to persuade the wider Latinx music community of the benefits of supporting party DJs and making records that could be played in discotheques (Fernandez 1982; Billboard 1982).

A history of Latinx dance culture that extends to the 1980s and 1990s might take account of several key developments, including the rise of John “Jellybean” Benitez as one of the most influential party DJs of the early 1980s; the contribution of Shannon’s “Let the Music Play” to the emergence of freestyle as a uniquely Latin-flavoured dance floor sound, including Nayobe’s breakthrough contribution; the manner in which “Little” Louie Vega made a name for himself on the New York freestyle scene before becoming one of the most influential house music DJs of the 1990s; the game-changing impact of Vega’s Masters at Work and Nuyorican Soul collaboration with Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez, which saw the duo frequently team up with Latinx musicians as they established themselves as the most influential house music remix/production team of the decade; the contribution of Chicago Latinx DJs and artists, including Jesse Velez, Ralphie Rosario and Liz Torres, and New York DJ/producer/remixer David Morales; the pioneering role played by Cutting Records and Nervous Records when it came to showcasing Latinx house artists; the ongoing fluctuations of the New York dance floor, which included the rise of the House of Xtravaganza as the first Latinx ballroom house and the closure of the Garage; and the opening of a number of queer Latinx and cross racial party spots, including Escuelita and Suspect in Manhattan, Krash in Queens, and the Warehouse in the Bronx. Any analysis would need to consider the relationship between the straight and the queer as well as the white and the racialised. “The sexual economies of commercially driven Latin culture, generally assumed and marketed as heterosexual, are queered at the site of the local, reconfigured under a different cultural economy”, notes Rivera-Servera (2004: 282). “Likewise, the often unquestioned whiteness of the gay club is challenged by the virtuoso demands of the Latina/o dancer”.

Following Alexandra Vazquez’s call for an analysis of Cuban music that refuses attempts to craft the country and its culture “as a fixed, immobile, and nonchanging object” (2013: 11), so an account of Latinx dance needs to remain alive to the borders through which the music bleeds, the instrumental combinations it stimulates and the cross-genre flights it encourages, if only because these very qualities are compelling to Latinx dance crowds that often experience life as unfixed, mobile and disjunctive. As Vazquez further suggests, we also need to listen in detail to the music, including to deceptively incidental moments in any recording, such as the sound of the woodblock in Anita Bell’s “Ring My Bell”, originally written and recorded by Frederick Knight for Juana as a slow track before Henry Stone, the owner of TK Productions and distributer for Juana, came to decide, perhaps through breathing the Miami air that passes from Puerto Rico and Cuba to Orlando, that the Knight record would benefit from a Richie Rivera mix (Discoguy, undated)—after which Rivera accentuated or even introduced the woodblock. As they reveal the power relations that structure how music is recorded and how it circulates, these details can inform the analysis of Latin party music while encouraging us to learn more about its submerged history—including, as I have come to understand while researching this article, that Rivera also mixed latinised disco tracks such as Melba Moore’s “Standing Right Here” and Two Man Sound’s “Que Tal America”. How did the work of “Boom Boom Rivera” and others contribute to a viral economy of songs and moves that prepared the terrain for Pomo and others to congregate at Pulse?

Figure 3: Nuyorican Soul led by “Little” Louie Vega and Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez

If the sonic and social underpinnings of the Pulse dance floor stretch across time and space in a transglocal fashion, so do the threats that Latinx dancers face as they engage with the culture, with homophobic and racist violence hardly new, and the dance floor never straightforwardly constituted as a safe LGBTQ space. After all, until the New York law that forbade two men from dancing with one another was repealed in 1971, police officers routinely threatened to close establishments unless they received a payoff. An ensuing perio of relative tolerance faltered when the economic slowdown of the late 1970s engendered an overtly homophobic anti-disco backlash. By 1983, as gentrification gathered pace, New York City intensified its regulation of the city’s nightlife (Hae 2011) and within a couple of years a neighbourhood association forced the owner of the Paradise Garage Michael Brody to announce he would close the party when his lease expired. As crack-related violence spiralled, Brody also installed a metal detector. Meanwhile the AIDS epidemic led to a clamp down on all-male bathhouses and clubs, with Reagan’s drawn-out refusal to talk about the disease widely interpreted as a sign of queer disposability. Offering no obvious respite, Mayor Giuliani clamped down on party spaces as part of his “Zero Tolerance” campaign. Throughout and beyond, dancers of all persuasions faced the threat of fire, even if the blaze at New Orleans LGBTQ hangout the UpStairs Lounge in 1973 remains the only one to have been caused by arson. Jessica Ravitz (2016) surveys other attacks carried out against queer venues, some of them successful (Eric Rudolph’s bombing of a club in Atlanta in 1997), others unsuccessful (an attempted arson attack on a Seattle club in 2013). In terms of sheer concentration, however, Mateen’s act remains the most violent of all and has resulted in a heightened sense of precariousness

If the safe space of the LGBTQ dance floor has only ever been relatively safe, and if Pulse continues to welcome its LGBTQ crowd into a purpose-built environment with increased security measures, perhaps not that much will change. The Daily Beast might have introduced the strapline the “day the music died” into an article about the massacre (Suebsaeng 2016), but of course forty-nine people died on the Pulse dance floor, not the “music” or the broader desire to gather and dance to music with friends, and the commitment to continue the ritual has become pivotal to the LGBTQ community’s response. “‘Safe space’ is a cliche, overused and exhausted in our discourse, but the fact remains that a sense of safety transforms the body, transforms the spirit”, Torres (2016) notes of the culture’s inevitable bounce-back. “So many of us walk through the world without it. So when you walk through the door and it’s a salsa beat, and brown bodies, queer bodies, all writhing in some fake smoke and strobing lights, no matter how cool, how detached, how over-it you think you are, Latin Night at the Queer Club breaks your cool. You can’t help but smile, this is for you, for us”. Torres adds, poignantly: “The only imperative is to be transformed, transfigured in the disco light. To lighten, loosen, see yourself reflected in the beauty of others. You didn’t come here to be a martyr, you came to live, papi. To live, mamacita. To live, hijos. To live, mariposas”.

On hearing the news of the massacre, I couldn’t immediately imagine how Pulse might re-open and concluded instead that the mayor of Orlando should fund the opening of a new, purpose built LGBTQ venue while converting Pulse into a museum dedicated to the victims of the massacre as well as the history of queer dance culture. Having opened the venue as a life-affirming gesture in the first place, Pomo understood much more clearly that the show had to go on, and also established the onePULSE Foundation, which is committed to contributing 90 percent of funds to the National Compassion Fund and the remaining 10 percent to the creation of a memorial. Meanwhile the Orange County Regional History Centre collected some 3,500 items related to the massacre from inside the club as well a spontaneous memorials. Although no quick decision will be taken on the future of the collection, some items will be included in the pre-planned exhibition “Pride, Prejudice & Protest: GLBT History of Greater Orlando”. “This touched thousands of lives”, Michael Perkins, manager of the centre’s museum, told the Orlando Senitel (Hudak 2016). “We are trying to preserve it for generations”.

The totality of these elements show how Pulse negotiated the precarious divide between loss and creation, between violence and love, from the day it opened, and not simply the night Mateen entered the venue armed with a gun. Just as José Esteban Muñoz (2009) points to the way that queer racialised hope and loss come intertwined, with the work of building a utopia left to those whose lives have been damaged, so Pulse dancers have long been habituated to negotiating the violence of homophobia, racism and poverty. If Mateen’s attack took their experience of violence to levels none of them can have imagined, the utopian worldmaking goes on because it was already mandatory, because it cannot be extinguished, and because violence breeds resourcefulness. Pulse’s purpose has never been more urgent, its task to negotiating the local, the national and the transnational never clearer. At the same time, queer latinidad voices and sounds are resisting their erasure. Anger and grief are fuelling joy and resistance. As Pomo’s new motto puts it, “Our hearts are broken but our Pulse is strong”.

Figure 5: Pulse’s post-massacre flyer. Art by Meghan McDunnah

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Graham St John for encouraging this article and for comments as well as further editing suggestions by Jonathan Karpetz.

Notes

1 Latinx is used as a gender-neutral alternative to Latino that also references agender, gender fluid, gender non-conforming, queer and trans Latin people. Like Latinidad it understands connections that exist between Latinx people without reducing them to an essential characteristic.

2 See https://www.iraqbodycount.org/              

3 Exceeding the idea of Latinness, or the idea of a shared geopolitical identity, the floor amounted to a Latinx space that reflected the complexities and contradictions not only of immigration, colonialism, race, colour, legal status, class, nation, language and the politics of location, but also queerness, in line with Juana María Rodríguez’s framing of the queer latinidad (2003).

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Patti Jo. 1975. “Make Me Believe In You”. Disco Gold (remixed by Tom Moulton). Sceptre Records (LP): SPS 5120. <https://www.discogs.com/Various-Disco-Gold/release/1052277>.

Van McCoy. 1975. “The Hustle”. Avco Records (7-inch single): AV 4653. <https://www.discogs.com/Van-McCoy-The-Soul-City-Symphony-The-Hustle-Hey-Girl-Come-And-Get-It/release/263503>.

Vicki Sue Robinson. 1976. “Turn the Beat Around”. RCA Victor (7-inch single): PB 10562. <https://www.discogs.com/Vicki-Sue-Robinson-Turn-The-Beat-Around-Lack-Of-Respect/release/692440>.

Salsoul Orchestra, The. 1976. “Salsoul 3001”. Salsoul Records (12-inch single): 12D-2011. <https://www.discogs.com/Salsoul-Orchestra-Nice-N-Naasty/release/75606>.

Shannon. 1983. “Let the Music Play”. Emergency Records (12-inch single): EMDS 6540. <https://www.discogs.com/Shannon-Let-The-Music-Play/release/66766>.

Gil Scott-Heron/Brian Jackson. 1974. “The Bottle”. Strata-East (7-inch single): SES-19742-45. <https://www.discogs.com/Gil-Scott-Heron-Brian-Jackson-The-Bottle/master/7833>.

WAR. 1972. “City, Country, City”. The World Is a Ghetto. United Artists Records (LP): UAS-5652. <https://www.discogs.com/War-The-World-Is-A-Ghetto/release/428062>.

Anita Ward. 1979. “Ring My Bell (Midnight Mix)”. T.K. Disco (12-inch single): 124. <https://www.discogs.com/Anita-Ward-Ring-My-Bell/release/2906909>.

Karen Young. 1978. “Hot Shot”. West End Records (12-inch single): WES 12111. <https://www.discogs.com/Karen-Young-Hot-Shot/release/79289>.

This article was published on Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, you can download it here (pdf).

“Anfang Loft: The Sonic and Social Legacy of the 1970s”. De:Bug, Germany, July-August 2010, 13.

Translated into German by Sven von Thuelen, http://de-bug.de/share/debug144.pdf, scroll to page 13.

The 1970-79 period stands as arguably the most aesthetically and socially progressive period in dance music history. A barely fathomable number of technological innovations and generic subdivisions have led to the repeated recalibration of global dance since 1980, yet the core elements that drove the culture during the 1970s remain unchanged. Studio 54 and Saturday Night Fever continue to stand as the most prominent markers of that decade, but they were merely the most commercial articulations of much deeper and more profound developments.

The core relationship of contemporary dance culture was established at the very beginning of the 1970s when David Mancuso staged a Love Saves the Day Valentine’s party that would come to be known as the Loft, and two gay entrepreneurs known as Seymour and Shelley took over a flailing discotheque called the Sanctuary and began to admit gay men en mass. Mancuso and Francis Grasso, the DJ at the Sanctuary, pioneered the practice of selecting records in relation to the energy of the dance floor across an entire night. At the same time, partygoers at the Loft and the Sanctuary broke with the age-old social practice of couples dancing, and instead began to dance as individuals-in-the-crowd.

Drawing inspiration from the private rent party scene that dated back to 1920s Harlem, Timothy Leary’s experimental LSD parties, technological developments in audiophile stereo equipment, and the social potential of New York’s abandoned warehouses, Mancuso established the private party as the primary space in which dance culture could thrive. That was because private events could run long after public discotheques were required to close for the night as well as generate a level of intimacy and continuity that was much harder to achieve in public spaces. White gay private venues such as the Tenth Floor and Flamingo adopted the foundations of Mancuso’s model for their homogeneous clientele, while the Gallery, SoHo Place, Reade Street, the Paradise Garage and the Warehouse did the same for their more racially and sexually diverse crowds. Aside from generating the most intense parties, these spaces gave birth to many of the key innovations of the period.

The basic contours of DJing were established during the 1970s. Mancuso (who thought of himself as a party host rather than a DJ) grasped the potential of linking together records according to lyrical and sonic themes across the course of an entire night, while Grasso along with Michael Cappello, Richie Kaczor, Nicky Siano and David Todd explored the technical potential of beat-mixing. Siano also innovated the practice of spinning across three turntables, and he was also one of the first spinners to interrupt records in mid-flow when the energy felt right. Walter Gibbons perfected the art of mixing between the breaks in parallel with DJ Kool Herc, if not before, and to a much higher degree of technical proficiency. Coming to the fore during the second half of the 1970s, Larry Levan blended the approaches of Mancuso and Siano, and for many came to resemble the complete DJ.

The practices of these spinners had far-reaching consequences. Their willingness to hunt down rare records established the dance floor as a space where innovative, cutting-edge music that wasn’t receiving radio play could be heard, while the willingness of dancers to go out and buy their selections confirmed the dance floor could function as an alternative to radio when it came to breaking new records. Half-way into the decade, Mancuso, D’Acquisto and other spinners came to the conclusion that New York’s record companies should begin to supply them with free promotional copies in return for their de facto marketing efforts, and the first record pool was born soon after. By that point DJs had already made a point of hunting down long records, or buying two copies of a 45-r.p.m. single in order to create an improvised extended turntable mix, and their preferences persuaded New York’s record companies to introduce a brand new format, the twelve-inch single.

From 1970-73, dance recordings didn’t have a single generic name, and when the word “disco” was introduced to try and make sense of what was happening sonically, the term referred not to a regulated set of coordinates but rather to the diverse range of selections that could be heard in a discotheque (or private party) environment. Disco would go on to innovate the four-on-the-floor bass beat as well as give new life to the break, gospel-inspired female vocalists, and orchestral music. Exploring the aesthetic potential of the breakthrough twelve-inch format, Tom Moulton, Walter Gibbons and others pioneered the art of remixing. They worked repeatedly with music that was recorded by skilled instrumentalists—the 1970s marked a highpoint in terms of the sheer number of instrumentalists who were employed to record dance music—and from the mid-1980s onwards producers and remixers in search of samples and ideas treated these recordings as fertile ground. At the same time, Giorgio Moroder anticipated future developments in sequenced electronic dance music when he released “I Feel Love”.

Turntable and sound system technologies were also more or less perfected during the 1970s. (Contemporary DJs might play CDs and MP3s on digital sound systems, yet regularly mourn the loss of feel, warmth and organicity that so often comes with analogue formats and set-ups.) Mancuso was once again central when it came to deploying high-end equipment; employing Alex Rosner and Richard Long to put his ideas into practice, he pioneered the introduction of tweeter arrays and bass reinforcements, which enabled him to introduce added emphasis to the highs and the lows of a recording at any given moment. In fact Mancuso soon abandoned these innovations in order to focus more intensely on pure audiophile sound, yet they became central features of the sound system at the Paradise Garage, where Richard Long in association with Levan attempted to combine audiophile quality with brute power. For many, that system remains unsurpassed.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the 1970s remains the social and economic conditions that enabled dance culture to flourish in New York across that decade and halfway into the 1980s. The effective bankruptcy of the city combined with the flight of industry from downtown’s spacious and architecturally dramatic warehouses allowed party hosts to set up on the cheap while catering to ethnic and queer partygoers in search of an expressive-communal space. What’s more, there was no competition from MTV and the internet, which would go on to weaken the dance floor as the primary space for discovering new music and socialising with friends. People will always seek out spaces to congregate and dance, and they have continued to do so, but the costs are now higher, and the distractions are greater.