The Dancefloor Was
Never Just a Party
On the lineage Bathhouse Collective stands on. From Stonewall to District Six.
To understand what Bathhouse is and why we're building it the way we are, we have to understand the history we're standing on – and not in a nostalgic way or as a history lesson, but rather as a living argument.
The dancefloor has never been neutral. It has always been built by people who needed it for survival: people who had nowhere else to go, no institution willing to hold them, no law protecting them – they built safety for themselves, in clubs, at raves, on dancefloors, in community.
Every structure we've inherited from them was made under those conditions. So was ours.
By no means is this an exhaustive history of queer and POC revolution. Instead, this serves as a snapshot understanding of the history that we are born from, a recognition of the bravery of the trailblazers who put their lives on the line fighting for our right to joy.
The Stonewall Riots
In the late 1960s, America was a country at war with itself. The civil rights movement, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and in the middle of all of it, a bar called the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, New York.
Like most gay bars at the time, Stonewall was run by the Mafia due to the illegal nature of queer socialising and the lack of legitimate business owners willing to run such establishments. The contentious nature of the bar meant that it was constantly raided by police. On the night of 28 June, 1969, the community fought back after a particularly gnarly police raid. Butch lesbian Stormé DeLarverie shouted into the crowd. Trans women of colour, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, were at the frontlines (one of them threw the first brick, surely… and nobody died?).
The riots that followed are widely understood as the ignition point of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
But what matters as much as the rebellion is what it confirmed: that the state was not a neutral force; that the police were not there to protect queer people; that safety would never be granted by institutions.
Safety had to be built.
The conclusion drawn from Stonewall was not just that queer people deserved rights. It was that queer people would have to build the infrastructure of their own survival, because nobody else was going to do it for them. That principle – community as the only reliable protection – is the foundation everything else is built on.
It is the foundation Bathhouse is built on, too.
Disco Sucks
Out of that urgent need came Disco.
In the early 1970s, in the clubs of New York and Philadelphia, Black and queer people created something that had never quite existed before: a culture of pleasure as politics. Disco went beyond being just a genre. It was a built environment, a social contract, a deliberate construction of joy in the face of a world determined to make queer and Black life as joyless and invisible as possible.
The clubs where Disco lived operated on a different logic from everywhere else. At clubs like the Loft, founded by David Mancuso in 1970, and later the Paradise Garage, where Larry Levan presided as one of the most gifted DJs of his generation, the door policy was radically different from anything that existed in mainstream nightlife. You were not assessed by your wealth, your connections, or your conformity to a particular look. The question was whether you were there for it, whether you brought the energy, whether you understood what the space was for.
Inside, the hierarchies of the outside world were suspended. Race, gender, sexuality, class: none of it organised the room the way it organised everything else.
The dancefloor was a laboratory for a different way of being together.
And then there was the music itself. Artists like Sylvester, openly and unapologetically queer at a time when that was an act of genuine courage, made music that was irreverent and euphoric and deeply, deliberately joyful. Disco was tongue in cheek and over the top and completely sincere all at once. It understood that joy is not the opposite of resistance. It is one of its most powerful forms. To dance with abandon, to sweat and sing and take up space in your body, to refuse the diminishment the world outside demanded: this was political.
The dancefloor was not an escape from the struggle. It was another site of it.
The mainstream eventually noticed, and when it reached in to take what it wanted, it destroyed what it touched. The "Disco Sucks" campaign of the late 1970s claims to have been a “music criticism movement.” In reality, it was homophobia and racism dressed up as “taste.”
The burning of records at Comiskey Park in 1979, the relentless media ridicule, and the deliberate erasure of a culture and its creators were deliberate and political reactions to the threat of Black and queer joy existing loudly and publicly and without apology.
The message was clear: Your pleasure is dangerous; your visibility will be punished.
The lesson was equally clear: The mainstream was not a place to seek validation. It was a machine that would consume queer and Black culture, strip it of its politics, sell it back at a profit, and discard the people who built it. Every time a culture built by marginalised people crossed into mainstream visibility, it faced the same fate.
The only protection was to go deeper.
House at The Warehouse
And so they did.
In Chicago, Frankie Knuckles – an out-gay producer, remixer, and DJ, also known as the Godfather of House – was spinning at a club called The Warehouse, playing to a crowd that was predominantly Black and gay at a time when both of those things made you a target. The music he and his peers were developing built on the bones of Disco and created somethjing that was more raw, more electronic, more underground. Importantly, they were not trying to cross over to the mainstream and instead, were trying to dig deeper underground.
House music was a reclamation.
It took what the mainstream had tried to destroy in disco and rebuilt it somewhere the mainstream could not easily follow. The Warehouse, the Music Box, and the clubs of Chicago's South Side were not trying to recreate Studio 54. They were existing as something the mainstream had no framework for, and therefore had no easy way to co-opt.
House music was also insistently communal in a way that mattered politically. Instead of being a performer on a stage removed from the crowd, the DJ was in an intimate relationship with the room, reading it, responding to it, building something together with the people dancing. The dancefloor, too, was a place you went to participate in something collective, not a stage you watched. That structure, the idea that the people in the room are co-creators of the experience rather than consumers of it is the political logic of House made physical.
The move underground was not a retreat, but a refusal. It represented a deliberate choice to build something that belonged entirely to the people who needed it, without asking permission, without seeking mainstream approval, without making themselves legible to a culture that had just shown exactly what it did with legibility.
Techno-Future
In Detroit, something different was happening.
Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson, the Belleville Three, were developing Techno: music that went so far underground that it left the planet entirely.
Where House was about reclaiming the present, Techno was about re-imagining a future.
It was Afrofuturist in its bones, built on the idea that Black people were not only survivors of a brutal present but architects of a possible world that did not yet exist. The machines, the synthesisers, the relentless forward momentum of the music were the sound of people refusing to be contained by the world as it was.
Artists and selectors like Theo Parrish carried this forward, understanding that the music was always doing more than entertaining. It was constructing an alternative reality in sound, giving people a sonic experience of freedom that the material world had not yet caught up to.
Techno asked: what if we imagined our way out? What if the dancefloor was not just a refuge from the world but a rehearsal for a different one?
Bring it to the Ballroom
And then Ballroom answered: what if we just built it?
In New York through the 1980s and into the 90s, the Ballroom scene was doing something that went beyond music or dancing or even community: it was constructing an entirely parallel reality.
Houses, founded by legends like Crystal LaBeija, Hector Xtravaganza, and Paris Dupree, were were functional family structures for queer and trans people of colour, the majority of whom had been rejected by their biological families, many of whom were living on the street, all of whom were navigating a world that had no place for them.
The houses had mothers and fathers who looked after their children, who provided housing and mentorship and protection. The balls where houses competed were performances, yes, but they were, more importantly, celebrations of the full range of queer life; of trans women being praised for serving cunt; of trans men being celebrated for bringing masculinity; of butches and femmes and queers getting their 10s walking categories that honoured their beauty and the way they moved in dance.
In a world that pathologised and criminalised and murdered trans and queer people of colour, Ballroom created a context in which those same people were the standard of excellence. Where the outside world saw deviance, Ballroom saw royalty.
This was not the deluded fantasy many might call it. This was a functioning alternative to a society that had failed to provide safety for its most marginalised. Chosen family as a literal replacement for biological family. Community accountability as a replacement for a justice system that offered no justice. The ball as a replacement for a mainstream culture that offered no reflection.
Ballroom did not imagine liberation and it did not just sound like liberation. It organised itself as liberation, building new structures from the ground up because the existing ones were not just inadequate but actively hostile.
All of this was happening during the AIDS crisis, during escalating police violence, during an era of systematic exclusion and erasure.
The dancefloor was never just a party. It was where people kept each other alive.
Cape Town Context
This lineage did not bypass Cape Town.
While Black and queer Americans were rioting at Stonewall and building ballroom houses and dancing at the Warehouse, something parallel and equally uncelebrated was happening here in South Africa.
In District Six, a dense, multi-ethnic neighbourhood just east of the city centre, Kewpie, a trans, gender-fluid hairdresser and performer born in 1942, became one of the most beloved figures in the community.
Her salon in Kensington became a refuge, a performance space, a fashion runway, and a community hub: the kind of space that queer people all across the world have always had to build for themselves because no one else would build it for them. Gay men hosted drag parties in clubs where they came together to celebrate their sexuality, an outlet for the community to express themselves unapologetically. Under apartheid, homosexuality was criminalised. Queer existence was a legal offence. And still, Kewpie and her community showed up, to the balls at the Ambassador Club, to the parties on De Smidt Street, to the beach at Trafalgar Park, in full, elaborate, joyful resistance.
She may have never called herself an activist, but in the apartheid context, in a time of forced removals, gender policing, and racial discrimination, simply existing as herself was a powerful act of resistance.
In 1966, the apartheid government declared District Six a whites-only area under the Group Areas Act. More than 60,000 residents were evicted and their homes demolished. A community that had built its own culture, its own queer infrastructure, its own way of being together was scattered across the Cape Flats. The erasure was deliberate and total. We have no way of knowing what Kewpie's functions sounded like because a lot of her artifacts were destroyed. That is our great loss as a generation. We are grieving this erasure that is the consequence of apartheid.
When democracy came in 1994, South Africa's post-apartheid constitution became the first in the world to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. It was a genuine legal breakthrough, but also an incomplete one. Despite the new liberal constitutional environment, the gay spaces generated in post-apartheid Cape Town were not inclusive of most gay South Africans. The legacy of apartheid race, gender, and class inequality persisted, generating a wealthy, white, male leisure space enclave that reproduced the same exlusionary behaviour of the apartheid regime before it.
De Waterkant, Cape Town's so-called gay village, became a destination for gay tourism, for white middle-class gay men, for the kind of inclusion that has a very specific face and a very specific price tag. Pro-Black and alternative LGBTQ+ spaces developed in direct response to these exclusions, but with little protection or recognition from institutions.
The pattern repeated itself again: when the mainstream failed to hold everyone, the people it excluded built something of their own.
Why This Matters Now
The people who built these spaces, the Stonewall rioters, the house DJs, the ballroom mothers, Kewpie and her girls dancing in the rubble of a demolished District Six, were not doing anything radical. They were doing the only logical thing: building the world they needed, with the people around them, because no one else was going to.
We are not doing anything radical either. We are following in a direct line from our marginalised ancestors. The structures change. The principle does not.
Care is how you survive when institutions fail you. Community is how you build what they won't. The dancefloor is where you practise the world you're trying to create.
Written by: Tony Camme
April 2026