Explore House Music’s Queer Roots With These 15 Fierce Tracks

House music is gay music. The sound emerged from the queer black and latinx club cultures of New York and Chicago in the ’80s. Strangely, these roots of the culture are not very well represented on the global touring club circuit today. There seem to be fewer big name openly queer touring DJs than their straight cis-gendered peers. Likewise, as techno and tech-house have become more popular, main room dance music has lost a lot of the queer qualities that it once had.

To combat this, we put together this guide, which is a chronological celebration of releases that express their queerness with pride. It covers everything from the early days of house music in the ’80s to ball room culture of the ’90s and beyond.