Marke B. on Energy 92.7 and the Death of Circuit

Ah, how great minds think alike. Just this morning, as I was pondering what I might get up to on Saturday night after a day of festing around the Love, I realized just how few gay dance options really exist. It seems that, in a total backlash to the circuit scene, alternaqueers decided that dancing, period, was the epitome of all that was despised, and that mixing was to be strictly forbidden. As I thought further I realized that, outside of Gus Presents events, and the tourist-oriented version of the same that goes on at Badlands and The Cafe, the only real queer dance-oriented events that happen on any regular basis are Lucky Pierre (a monthly) and Fag Fridays. In the past couple weeks I've been out to some nights that, for the most part, had okay music, but there was no dancing, and not even any real interest, from what I could tell, in stoking up the dancefloor. When I really want to go out and dance it's about going to nights that aren't strictly gay-identified (with the exceptions of one-offs from the likes of Honey Sound System and others).

And then, what do I find in my inbox but a teaser for Marke B.'s latest article it the San Francisco Bay Guardian on the topic of gay dance music, Energy 92.7, and the death of the circuit scene? Marke does a great job of surveying the current lay of the land for the gay club scene and club music, and discovers what I would describe as the club cultural vacuum; sure there are events that focus on very specific tastes, communities, body types, and cliques, but almost nothing that unites everyone in the pure good time of going out and getting down on the dancefloor. It's really a shame that the gay capital of America has become so fractured and factionalized that we no longer have any avenues for coming together and letting all our differences melt into the joy of ecstatic dance. I'm relieved that the next generation of queer kids, who don't carry with them the same baggage around DJ music as those who lived through the circuit era, are now looking to get out there and re-invent the world of gay dance music, but it's going to be a hard go until the bottom-line economics of The City change in such a way that these kids can get access to good venues and build up a new scene. Me, I'll just be looking for those signs of queers out at Kontrol, and at Space Cowboys parties, and hope that their presence, and mine, are indicators of a growing desire within our community for a new queer dance aesthetic.