Hey, I'm Linnea Dominic, Curious City Intern. In case you missed it, October 11th was

National Coming Out Day. So we thought we'd return to a story from our archives that looks at

Chicago's house music scene in the early 80s, where a lot of people, particularly young, black,

gay people, experienced a safe space for self-expression.

Reporter Olivia Richardson has that story.

A quick warning that the story you're about to hear contains an anti-gay slur.

Curious City listener Anthony Avery is a fan of rave culture and house music.

He even wrote his PhD dissertation on electronic dance culture.

As a teenager in Buffalo, New York, who went to raves, which are dance parties in huge spaces like old warehouses,

he didn't realize house music originated in Chicago.

He knows that now, but he wants to know what was like to be a part of the house scene in the early 80s in Chicago. House music is soul, disco, funk, pop, and post-punk

tracks remix into long, continuous dance tracks. The two most prominent house clubs in those

early years were the power plant and the warehouse.

That's where lots of people say House gets its name, like Warehouse.

To answer Anthony's question, I talked to a lot of Househeads, or superfans, who went to the warehouse and the power plant in Chicago in the early 80s. You'll hear

them talk about DJ Frankie Knuckles, one of the founders of House, and they'll show

memories of dancing all night long. People would bring backpack sometimes so that they would

have a fresh change of clothes because it wasn't like you get a little bit of sweat, you know,

front of your shirt and the back of your shirt.

I mean, drenched. Take the t-shirt off of somebody. You could wring a cup of perspiration out of it.

People remember how inclusive the scene was. It originated in the gay black community.

They say the clubs felt like a safe space, physically and culturally.

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