Lori Branch was one of the pioneering DJs of house music in the 80s. She reflects on the queer origins of the genre, how this history was erased, and why house music still resonates with so many queer people today.
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and the Outspoken podcast Network.
I was so excited. This place was allegedly mecca for like gay people and it was underground. Frankie Knuckles was the DJ. He was playing all kinds of stuff that I certainly had never heard before. I was just taking it all in because it was really the first time that I had seen people who identified as queer or gay in one place. And I remember, right as I was about to go down the stairs to go to the dance floor, I spotted these two young women sitting next to each other and they were holding hands, and I just remember my heart like beating fast, like I just had a flutter.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, being gay was the worst thing I could ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll meet Lari Branch, one of the pioneering DJs of house music. We'll learn about the queer Black origins of house music, how it's queer history was largely forgotten, and how Laurie has fought to preserve it. From my Heart podcast, I'm Jordan Gonsolves and this is what we loved. The first time I really heard a house music track, I was fourteen years old and I was deep in the closet, but I think it was fairly obvious that I was gay. I had just won tickets to a Lady Gaga concert with my best friend, and right before she came on, she put up a countdown video and the soundtrack was this house remix and it was an intro to her song Dance in the Dark, and I had never heard beats like that before. And as the music crescendoed, the tension of the song was building and building, and the beat dropped into this funky, sexy groove, and all the gay men around me were losing their minds. There was something about it that gave me permission to lose myself too, And looking back, it was really one of the first moments I felt truly free. I didn't care about acting manly or boyish like I usually always did. I was just me. It's not surprising because house music was created in queer spaces, by and for queer people as an escape from discrimination. My next guest, Lori Branch is a legendary house DJ now, but in the late seventies she frequented the Black Gay Club, where house music was said to be born, and it was the first place she felt free to be the queer person she was too. When was the first time that you realized you were a little bit different than the other girls? Oh?
Boy, I think I realized I was different as early as maybe eight or nine years old. But by the time sort of I think puberty started hitting and there was a physiological thing happening where I was like attracted to people, maybe twelve thirteen. I think that was initially to a girl in my class who was already developed and all the boys liked. And her name was Denise, and she was really beautiful, and I was this scrawny, little underdeveloped child. But I remember thinking it would be great if I could introduce Denise to my big brothers, and it was my way of sort of getting closer to her.
Your way of getting closer to your crush was sort of ironically introducing her and hoping she'd get together with one of your brothers exactly. So you know, what was it like growing up in Chicago as a queer kid. I presume you weren't out at that time, But what was it like sort of having those feelings and growing up in Chicago.
Well, yeah, I was. It was just it's like, really the early seventies and being in Chicago. I lived with a pretty conservative family. My father was a minister, my mom was a teacher. They were pillars of the community. Everybody loved and respected them. We had one of those kool Aid houses where everybody gathered, and I got signals early on, maybe as early as ten years old, that homosexuality was a bad thing. There was a moment where in my household we had the Ebony magazine. If you were black in America in the sixties and seventies, everyone had Ebony magazine. Everybody subscribed to it. Ebony and Jet those were the popular magazines. And I was reading an article about Johnny Mathis, and Johnny Mathis was this very popular R and B pop crooner from the fifties all the way up through like the nineties. He had pretty strong career, and I was sharing with my mom, like, he's so cute, and she had such disdain for him, and she said something about his homosexuality and the way she was describing it. And my mom's pretty sweet, so I hadn't seen her have that level of vitriol towards anything, so it kind of surprised me. And I said, well, what's wrong with homosexuality? And she got really angry and she said something like something really vulgar, you know for my ten year old ears. And I was just kind of distraught, and I realized that, Okay, so whatever he's doing is not good and I need to pay attention to that. I think it was more unconscious than anything, so I learned to, you know, be quiet.
Well, you mentioned that your dad was a minister. What was it like growing up religious? Were you going to church multiple times a week or anything like that.
Yeah. I'm from a couple of different religious backgrounds. So I'm part of the Kojik family. That's the Church of God in Christ. It's a very very conservative Apostolic faith that came out of Memphis, and my great grandfather was a bishop, very popular minister, and they are strongly homophobic. That was really a huge influence in my life. And my dad was a Baptist minister, and I recognized that all churches had no space for gay people, and it would come up once in a while in sort of non obvious ways, but all of those clues sort of added up in my head, like this is not kind of safe to be who you are where you are.
So you're living in this religious conservative family. When were you first introduced to dance music.
My first exposure to dance music that really stands out for me was actually an eighth grade party when we graduated from eighth grade, I think this was nineteen seventy seven, and I got asked to slow dance. This guy, Brian asked me to slow dance, and it was to Diana Ross's Love Hangover. And if you know that song, love Hangover, Yeah, it starts off really slow and then it breaks into a disco song. But I remember feeling released, like, oh, okay, this is like a dance song and we can sort of dance independently. I realized I loved dance music. There was something that was sort of liberating about it that you could do on your own and that it didn't depend on a partner. No one had to ask you if you wanted to dance. And that became even clearer when in nineteen seventy seven Saturday Night Fever came out and John Travota, who every girl in America had a crush on at the time, including me, was just like so sexy and dancing. And I was too young to actually see the movie because it was rated R and my parents, as I mentioned, were very religious, so I couldn't even sneak out for fear that I'd be caught. So I bought the soundtrack because I could buy music, and that's really where I was exposed to disc And then I started buying other dance music and playing it, and my parents were not happy at all. As a matter of fact, they called it that disco fever shit. We don't want that disco fever shit in our house, and it became kind of a punchline.
So fast forwarding a couple of years, you end up going to kind of a precocious high school that sort of exposes you to a lot of different kinds of people that you had never met before. Who were some of the people that you met there that kind of influenced you.
Yeah, I went to a high school called Limbulum Tech. It was way outside of my neighborhood. It was like an hour bus ride and most of the kids who went there were from all different parts of the city, and so I was exposed to know different kids from different races, different communities, different economic exceellons, different points of view, and it really opened my eyes to what was outside of South Side of Chicago. I recognized by the time I was fifteen sixteen that I was starting to be attracted to other girls. And I had other friends who were just, you know, beautiful young experimenting with in their minds. And they were these artsy guys who were just fun and quirky and interesting.
You said they were artsy, but I'm guessing they were queer.
They were. And we were all very closeted to each other because I think we were honestly trying to figure it out. Like I genuinely love these guys so much so that my friend Jean Pierre would spend the night at my house. John Pierre was this cute guy. He was half Japanese and half African American, and he was really pretty and he looked different than everybody else. Yeah, and so I was sort of drawn to that. And I think my parents must have known something, because that was the first time they ever let a boy spend the night at my house, you know. So I think they were wise to it. As long as we weren't talking about it.
There was an energy that you were attracted to.
Absolutely. He had a wide musical taste. He had all kinds of records and we would play in his basement and he would expose me to things I hadn't heard before. And I also considered myself a pretty good judge of good music. I had a lot of siblings and we who had music in our house. We all took lessons and piano and guitar and all that, but what he was playing for me felt different. And he said, well, there's a club called the Warehouse where you can hear this music. And it's a gay club, so it's a lot of gay people there. And I'm like, okay. So none of us were out, but I was intrigued. And I don't know how he heard about it because he was younger than me. I was seventeen, he was sixteen. You have to be eighteen to get in. But he figured we could get some fake IDs. We found a very i'm sure not reputable place on Maxwell Street in Chicago, and someone said, just go to that guy in the van on the corner. He'll make you fake ID. Sure enough, it was like, I don't know ten dollars and he said, what do you want on it? Took a picture of us, filled in what we wanted, laminated gave it to us and it did not resemble anything like a driver's license or a state I d nothing, and we ended up scheming to go to the Warehouse.
The Warehouse is said to be where house music got its name. It was a gay black dance club in Chicago that was open from midnight to eight am. There was a resident DJ there named Frankie Knuckles, often considered the godfather of house music. He was a gay black man from New York who would played disco records in gay bathhouses and gay clubs, but he wasn't getting very far there, so he jumped at the opportunity to move to Chicago and open the Warehouse in nineteen seventy seven. Over time, he began to develop a new kind of music there. It was everything from R and B to German electronic to disco, but mixing in his own effects and beats that people hadn't really heard before. The sound system was also state of the art, architected by Richard Long, the gay man who designed the sound system at Studio fifty four.
My family was not excited about me going to any after I was club. I dare not even mention that's what I was hoping to do. So once John Pierre and I decided we're going to go to the Warehouse, I had to come up with a scheme that would allow me to be out all night because this club didn't open until midnight. So I had an older sister, her name is Lynn, and Lynn had small children that I would occasionally babysit. So Lynn went along with the scheme that I would babysit and mom and dad would not be the wiser. And you get to the warehouse. It's an actual warehouse on the west side of the downtown Chicago area in the West Loop, pretty deserted, a lot of vacant buildings. But this music was pulsing, you know. We drove up and one of our friends had a car, and we drove up and parked and you could you could feel the thumping sort of pounding in the car as we approached the building, and it was like so exciting. I just remember feeling so excited. I'm like I'm just about to have this experience. I don't know what it is, but I'm excited. And we nervously walked up long flight of stairs to get to the doorman. We showed our fake IDs. He gave us the once over and said five dollars and we got in.
It's the late seventies. Laurie knew she was queer, but she was closeted. She came from a conservative religious family, but there was something about dance music that made her feel free. She heard that the Warehouse played the best dance music in Chicago, so she and her friends schemed a plan to get in and it worked, but she had no idea how the music and the people there would change her forever. What was it like when you actually get inside.
Yeah, I was so excited to be inside. This place was allegedly mecca for like gay people, and it was underground. I was just taking it all in because it was really the first time that I had seen people who identified as queer or gay in one place like that. And I remember, right as I was about to go down the stairs to go to the dance floor, I spotted these two young women sitting next to each other and they were holding hands or one of them had their hand on their leg. It was intimate, whatever the pose was, and I just remember my heart like beating fast, like I just had a flutter, and this kind of shill of excitement just run through me, like Okay, this is really cool, so let me call myself, follow my friends and go to the dance floor. And we descended these stairs into this room with like it wasn't a huge space, maybe at tops a couple hundred people, but it was sound that was unlike anything I'd ever heard before, this kind of surround sound, expertly ecue for your body to experience it, just to feel the base and the highs. Just everything was sort of crisp. Crisp but not loud. It's hard to explain it, like when sound is just so perfect, and I remember feeling that sensation and we were entranced. Frankie Knuckles was the DJ. You know, he's he was pretty famous. Not at the time, he was just kind of the club DJ, but he became famous over the years, and he was playing all kinds of stuff that I certainly had never heard before. And it's just a freedom that I got a taste of that night. That I was like, this is the coolest thing I've ever experienced, Like, this is the coolest thing I've ever experienced in my life up to that point, And like I was already thinking about next week, Like how do I get out of Like I can't babysit every weekend, but maybe I can, you know, how do I get here every week?
What about this music do you think spoke to you and your queer friend group that you were going with.
Well, I think that there was an energy that was unlike what we would see or hear at like a typical sock hop or something else that we had been exposed to, and the energy was queer. It was just energy. It was people who were liberated, who were dancing to you know, Rev and Carl Beans. I was born this way, and you know the village people. I mean, there was like, you know, there was a bit of a revolution going on in the late seventies for queer people. So going to the warehouse, none of us were really out out to each other. I mean I think we had sort of a silent understanding that that's what was going on, but no one had voiced it. And being in the warehouse sort of gave us the liberty to express ourselves differently, and it was it was a difficult thing for the guys. Even in an environment where they're surrounded by a gay men, they were still there was still some tension around that, and so we would we would dance in a circle with me in the center of it and my guy friend. Sometimes four or five guys dancing with me and I'm in the center of a circle. So they felt like they were still okay. I'm like, guys, you don't need to do this. And so that went on for maybe a few weeks and I saw someone who was kind of checking me out, and I'm like, I think I'm going to go dance over here with her, So I want to be with her. I want to go dance with her next to her, And that's what I did, and they were forced to dance with each other, and I think that was it. I think we were out after that. I think that's what gave us the license to actually talk about it, like, oh, who was that? I don't know. I was a girl, she was really cute. Did you get her name? You know? So then you could have like a real conversation about dating and what you want to do and who you like. And we were young, and we were lucky to be caught up in that moment, and so I think it represented like the perfect soundtrack for us coming out.
What did it feel like to be a part of this, you know, incredible underground scene where for the first time in your life, coming from this really conservative background, you are now around people that are like you.
The best way I can describe that is that it was very freeing to me, and it was very It confirmed who I was to me, you know, and it confirmed it really validated my existence in a way that there's nothing wrong with me. It just strengthened that resolve in me, you know, to be okay with who I was.
It's the early eighties. Laurie has been sneaking out going to the Warehouse several times. The music was breathtaking, and she loved the community. She found it was a safe space for her as a queer young person who was coming of age. One of her friends that she went to the Warehouse with, Eric, started a social club and began throwing high school parties where they'd playhouse music and charge money to attend. And he proposed something to Laurie that she couldn't resist.
Eric worked at a newspaper, like a high school newspaper called New Expression, and he was seeing how all these teenagers were throwing parties. And this guy was really smart and he was creative, and he was like, I think we could throw parties. I think we could make money this way, and so he started this group called Vertigo. It was a social club and it was not just limited to our high school. They were throwing parties, were teenagers from all over the city. And how old were you seventeen? Wow, they were you know, they were entrepreneurial for sure. And so they've been doing it for a few months when Eric and he's like, you should join our group, but you should join as a DJ because there aren't any women DJs in our circle, you know, that are doing this kind of music in these parties, and there weren't at the time. So I learned how to DJ, and then djaying was not as easy. I'm not trying to slight any new DJs. I know that it takes skills still, but we did not have the digital technology that is a great assist to DJs. Now. Everything was analog. You're playing with live instruments from so you didn't have the ability to sink anything, and you really have to. I mean, it took a lot of practice to be able to blend songs together. So I became the DJ for the group.
And did your parents know about this? Where were you kind of practicing?
Well, my parents knew about it because Vertical was the successful teen group. They would have hundreds of kids at these parties, so they at sixteen seventeen, they could leave with five thousand dollars at the end of the night.
Each kid would pay a certain amount of money to get in.
Yeah, it was like five dollars, you know, some four or five dollars. It wasn't a lot, but if you pack in you know, a thousand kids, you've made five thousand dollar. I mean some of these parties had like five hundred, six hundred and seven hundred kids up to a thousand. But my parents knew full well what I was doing, and they didn't They didn't disagree with it. They saw that I was very interested in that it was potentially making money. They even gave me money to help with one of the parties. So they were lukewarm about it, but they all that it was keeping me in the house because I had to practice all night, so they were okay with it.
So at this point, were you guys calling it house music?
We weren't calling it house music. And even as a young DJ, we were calling it punk out music because it had elements of punk and it had elements of disco, so we just called it punk out. But by nineteen eighty one eighty two, there was a record store called Imports et cetera, and that's where many of us DJs went to buy their records. They were so sick of people coming in saying I heard this song at the warehouse and here's what it sounds like, that they created a section called warehouse music, so so you could go in and like just go like, here's what Frankie played last week. Eventually, the warehouse closed in nineteen eighty two and that warehouse music was sort of less important, so they shortened it to like house music. I was talking to one of my buddies, Djlady D, and she said, well, we thought we called it house music is because it's what we were hearing we went to house parties. We were hearing this disco mixing at house parties, so we called it house music. And for some people that's their definition of it. I like to say that they're all right, but the warehouse was a huge part of that story.
Well, you know, now, it sounds like you have sort of this newfound confidence as a queer person, Like you have not only come out to yourself but to your friends, and you have this amazing community around you that is supportive of you and even encouraging of you to continue to find yourself. So what was it like coming out to your family who is pretty conservative?
Coming out to my family was not an easy thing. My mom was doing some spring cleaning and she found an old notebook from like my senior year in high school, and I was writing some kind of queer poetry with a gay friend, and we were writing like queer notes to each other, like little silly poems, and she was like, what is this. I don't understand you know what this is. Basically, she was confirming her suspicions. And while she may have known that all along, she didn't like that she was seeing something in writing and that I was taking on some identity that was a little bit more obvious. So she was pretty pissed. She said, I'm going to tell your father. He's not going to be happy about this. So my father came home. We went down to the laundry room to have a private conversation. He was pretty upset. He asked me if I wanted to be a man. He sort of thumped me real hard in the chest when he made that point. So you want to be a man, and I said no, I don't. Well he said, well you're out of here, you know, just get out, leave everything, leave your car, leave everything, you can take a bag, and you're out. You are dead to us. And that was that. I think I had a party to go to that night, so I didn't stay angry too long. I was like, well, let me get in gear, because either I was DJing that night or I was just going out. I had something to do. But I couch surfed for you know, a good while, maybe for like a month or two before my father sent my brother in law to look for me. And he found me and he said, your parents want you to come home. Not they're sorry, but they just want you to come home. I'm like, okay, I guess so, you know. I was tired of couch surfing, and so I went home and they had another talk with me, like you don't have to be dead to us anymore, but you do have to be in therapy. And you can't like bring this disco fever shit in the house. You can't like be gay.
So they had sort of begun to associate your involvement with house music with this sort of queer identity that you were now proud of and a part of.
Yeah, they definitely associated house music, disco dance with queer life and that they saw that as the worst thing in the world.
So while you were staying at your parents' house, were you still secretly going to play shows and still being involved in house music even though they had kind of told you that you couldn't.
Be I didn't stop anything at my parents' house. House music was an escape for me, and not only that, but the DJ part of it was really equally important, and it was so important that like I put everything else aside, Like school was so unimportant to me, you know. It was like I want to be in this energy as often as possible, and I want to be around these people as often as possible. So we went out every night. We were always finding something to get into. And most gay people in the eighties, you know, had these double lives, maybe triple life, you know, where you could be fully out in some places, somewhat out in other places, and not out at all in other places. But I don't remember carrying all that much. I felt like, I don't know, I was so cocky. I just felt like they were late. We caught them late. Everyone's late. Like we're doing the right things, like we are ahead of the curve, like this is where the nation should be moving, Like we're free and we're open. And I just felt like they didn't get it, that the rest of the world wasn't getting it, but my group was getting it, like we understood, you know where this music is going to take us, Like everybody should be free and liberated. I think house music was definitely a symbol of my freedom.
When we come back. Just as house music takes off, many of Laurie's fellow DJs begin disappearing, and she decides to leave djaying altogether. By the late eighties, house music was going global. It had left Chicago and traveled to Europe. Laurie was ecstatic the music scene that she helped shape was reaching new audiences she never imagined, but the queer DJs, producers and promoters that she pioneered this music with didn't seem to be benefiting from this commercialization. In fact, she was noticing that they were disappearing, they were dying of aids.
I would see that with these massive music festivals that were happening popping up, you know, at Abiza and all these other places all over the world, and when I would hear songs that I knew were influenced or informed or created by, you know, the queer community, and yet you would see who was getting paid to do these parties and paid as DJs promoters, and who wasn't just getting any shine, you know. I mean I felt sad about it. And part of it was that I was just connected to it so closely in the beginning, and some of those people who should have been there just weren't. They just they weren't. They were gone, or they just weren't getting the credit. And Frankie Nickles did pretty well. He had a pretty active career and was a part of a lot of those festivals. But even Frankie I felt like, was not given his propers. You know, he should have been a gazillionaire like some of these others. But we didn't control those circles. Like any other black art form that is commodified in the United States, leaves black hands pretty quickly. That's a history of it of the United States and black music.
Why do you think the pioneers were disappearing.
I think that the black queer pioneers were starting to disappear for a few reasons. Some of that was because AIDES was taking people out left and right. So some of the early vocalists, for example, some of the early DJs by the late eighties, you know, they were starting to disappear. They were getting sick, and you know, I remember feeling that loss of community, especially around the late eighties. While one part of the community was rising, another part was sort of going away.
The group of boys that you had originally went to the warehouse with, what happened to them?
Several of them died, you know. In the early nineties, we just had a tsunami for the people that I was hanging out with. Two of my best friends they died within a year of each other, you know, from HIV related complications. Others you know, got very sick, and others moved away. So some of my friends, seeing what was happening, were like, I need to Get out of Chicago.
Dads wasn't just taking the lives of DJs. It was also taking the lives of journalists that were elevating the profile of the Chicago house scene. One of them was a friend of Lori's named Robert Ford.
Robert was the publisher of a couple of zines, one called Think Ink and one called Thing Magazine that were so important for queer communities. He was promoting, like all the new tracks that were coming out, so he was interviewing artist. He was a pioneer, a thought leader, and a taste curator and you know, sort of a cultural icon. And I think it was around ninety three somewhere around there where he was joining a board of directors that I was on. I was on a board of directors of this organization called Horizons, but it was, you know, primarily for the LGBT community. It had a lot of youth programs, and I learned that Robert was going to join the as well, and I got really excited because he's, Oh, I haven't seen him in a couple of years. He's been doing so well his magazine and all that. And he shows up for the meeting and he looks so different than what I remember. I had just seen him like a couple of years before, but he was gaunt, and you know, he was still very spirited and had a lot of energy and ideas, and I was like, this is great, but I just don't think he's going to make it. I remember just like my heart dropping when I saw him, because he looked like people who were not doing well with HIV and not living long. And he didn't. He didn't live long after that, and I just was shook by that experience. I just remember sitting in that room and seeing him and just kind of taking it all in, like what it meant to lose somebody like him. I recognize all this untapped potential. You know that this is the guy who was making it, who was doing what we needed to be done, like taking our community to the next level, you know, promoting and publishing and getting in the right circles and meeting the right people and introducing the right people to the right people, Like that's who we need it. And I don't think the community really understood what we lost when he passed away.
How was all of this affecting you as a DJ.
I think that I was trying to prioritize my life as a young person, and it was a hustle and a lot of the people who built the house music community were hustling. But I was also growing up. You know, I wanted to start a family, I wanted to be in love. I wanted to move around the country, and you know, having crates of records that you've got to keep up with and equipment and small gigs that are not paying you very much kind of weighs you down. And you couple that with the fact that so many of your peers are getting sick and like looking terrible. I mean I kind of wanted to distance myself from it a bit, which is part of the reason that I left Chicago was that just it felt like people were you know, like it was being sort of co opted by these bye bye I shouldn't say co opted. It was being nurtured by folks who I didn't really hang out with a lot, you know, like straight guys on the South Side. But my core group was falling apart. You know, they were getting sick, they were trying to go away, they were addicted to drugs, and I wanted to distance myself from that. And you know, I had a college girlfriend who was from Ohio, and she was bright and bubbly and represented a total different life for me, and so I kind of took that path for a few years.
So it was sort of like the house music that you had been a part of from its beginnings was really different and it wasn't something that you wanted to sort of be close to anymore.
Yeah, I think I think that what I experienced, like like any anybody experiencing some thing when you are it's new and it's different and you're part of this great mix. You know, it gets old. It was still a part of me, but I really didn't come back into it until maybe like nineteen ninety one. So I took a few years off. When I moved back to Chicago, I was hanging out with one of my buddies. His name was Rob, and he was the one who was encouraging me. He's like, huld get back into it. You know, you still have your records there at your mom's house. Just get your stuff and we can buy new things. You can borrow mine and get back into it. And so he encouraged me, and I did. I stepped right back into it.
It sounds like you got back into the house music scene, but it was really different.
You know. I think that the absence of those people who are with me in the beginning has always motivated me to expand the definition of family and the definition of the queer community. And I've embraced that. I have new friends, I have young friends. There are people who were young when I was doing it who kind of looked up to me, and and now they're doing it big. You know. Honey Dijon was a friend of my little brother, my little brother Carl, and one day I met Honey at my parents' house and just the cutest little thing sort of reminded me of like a young Grace Jones, and she was very attracted to like our energy, and I could tell that she was kind of studying what was going on. And later on she would come and hang out with me and my girlfriend downtown in Chicago, and so we got to know each other very well. And she was, you know, I think, on the rise back then, you know, just way ahead of her time, just the way that she dressed and presented herself. And you know, it was with Beyonce's Renaissance album where Honey Dijon, you know, contributed to sharing the Chicago sound and the sound of house music with one of our most influential artists of the decade of the century, Beyonce, and where she recognized the importance of the queer community as contributors to that sound, and did that in a very public way during her acceptance speechs at the Grammys.
In July twenty twenty two, Beyonce released her highly anticipated album Renaissance, a house music record that fans and critics say pays homage to the black queer people that pioneered the genre but who were largely left behind in its globalization. Seeing Honey Dejon, a black trans woman from Chicago, produced music for the album, was special for Lori. Even though many of her friends who had helped birth the genre weren't around anymore. She was witnessing a new generation of black queer DJs carrying on their legacy. Beyonce publicly acknowledged the queer origins of house music at the Grammys when she won the award for Best Dance Electronic Album. After being forgotten for so long, Lori and her friends were finally getting the credit they deserved on the world stage.
That was a moment, you know, seeing that happen, and even the debates that happened afterwards. I felt like it sort of crystallized a moment for us, like you've got to recognize you have to recognize the importance of this moment, and that she is writing a wrong and that might not feel comfortable for everybody, but that's the truth.
So you had sort of witnessed the sunsetting of one queer generation that was part of this music, but now the rising of another one.
I feel like I was right in the crosshairs of that, Like I was lucky and privileged to have survived, you know, that era where many of my friends are not here anymore to talk about it, lucky enough to have been an inspiration for younger people who are doing it very well now.
And you know, we just mentioned kind of how you had lost so many friends. Did losing those friends sort of inspire you to then make sure that people knew the full history?
Losing my friends is the inspiration for me to continue to tell this story because they're not here to tell it. And I also tell the story for people who don't have the courage. Even today, I put myself out there for the people who can't do it, for themselves anymore.
Laurie has been so passionate about keeping the memory of her house pioneers alive that she teamed up with the Design Museum of Chicago for an exhibit on the history of house music. The exhibit recognizes the queer contributions to house music all the way from its birth up until now. You know, Laurie, it feels like almost every quick person I know, including me, loves this music. I don't know what it is about it, you know, And as someone who literally makes house music, what do you think is in this music that speaks to us queer folks across generations, across ages, across races, across genders.
Yeah. I think that house music helps people to be free, that there is an underlying current of love and energy and presence. And when you think about the queer community, you know, we spend a lot of time kind of defending our lives, you know, whether it's in our families or you know, making up stories, you know with the uber driver, Oh you know, who wants to know? Am I married? You know, it's a lot of energy that goes into that. And this is a place where you don't have to do any of that, where you are liberated, you are affirmed. It just allows us to be who we are. And not only that, it's a celebratory music, it's a movement that the through line has always been about celebrating who you are, not just accepting you, but celebrating you. You know, and that you know that's that's a very loving thing.
You know. Speaking of love, it's so clear that you have so much love for the queer folks that you pioneered this music with. What do you think they would want people to know about the music now that we love the house music, now that we love so much.
I think that they would probably want you to know that this was done for you, that this was this was planning seeds that they may not ever see grow, This was thinking about future generations, and this was about creating something that it was part of an evolution. I think that's what my friends and my associates who are no longer here would want people to know that this was for you. This music was for queer people, but that's who it was made for. And everyone else read the benefits of it, but that's who it was made for.
But we loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves New episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us at buttwe Loved at gmail dot com, or send us a message on Instagram or TikTok at butt we Loved. We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers are Shehino Zaki, Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey patt Our. Executive producers are Me and Maya Howard. Fact checking by Marisa Brown. Original music by Steve Bone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.