Hinterhaus is launching a new series of personal essays from people who live and work in nightlife. These pieces step outside our usual interview format and offer first-person windows into how artists think, feel, and create. For this first instalment, DJ handbag shares her story in her own words. We’ve also made a Spotify playlist of the tracks she mentions, so you can listen along as you read.
Essay by DJ handbag
When I first spun a diva house set at the FitzRoy—a club in Berlin-Mitte—something shifted in the room. I’d just played Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Sensation,” with its iconic vocal sample that was the backbone of so many great house tracks, when I caught a moment in the crowd: a gay man in his forties locked eyes with a twenty-something non-binary kid. They didn’t know each other, but for a few minutes, they were family.
That’s what queer house music does.
Queer house doesn’t just make you dance—it makes you belong.
I’ve worked in Berlin’s nightlife for close to twenty years. I’m a trans-femme DJ, a door worker at various clubs, and I work in harm reduction. (I once told my story in a feature for this magazine.) I’ve seen how queer house music creates the braver spaces Berlin desperately needs.
I’ve watched people come out on the dance floor. I’ve seen first kisses happen during the breakdown of a Frankie Knuckles track.
I’ve witnessed my community grieve when it loses members, playing their favourite songs as tributes.
But queer house isn’t new—it’s been creating these kinds of spaces and liberating experiences for over forty years.
And right now, in 2025, as queer spaces face increasing political pressure (and increasing closure), understanding this genre’s history is more than an academic study of music—it’s a matter of survival.
House music was born from oppression.
“House music was born from oppression,” writes music historian Tim Lawrence in his 2004 book Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Culture.
When I first read that line five years ago in a Neukölln café after a door shift, something clicked in me. I finally understood why certain tracks make me cry on the dance floor.
Frankie Knuckles didn’t just invent a genre at Chicago’s Warehouse club in the early 1980s. He made a sanctuary. I think about this every time I play one of his edits.
The Warehouse was a club where Black and Latinx queer people could exist safely and joyfully. When the world said, “You don’t belong,” Frankie’s music said, “You’re home.”
Musicologist Kai Fikentscher wrote about this in You Better Work! Underground Dance Music in New York City—how that four-on-the-floor kick drum at 120-130 BPM wasn’t just a rhythm but the signifier of a new, more liberated queer culture.
The syncopated hi-hats and that signature “jack” groove created a space for queer, non-normative bodies to connect and express what words could not. I’ve felt this origin of house music in my own sets. When you get that groove right, when the kick hits just so, you watch people’s shoulders drop. The tension leaves. They know they’re safe.
Vocals turned house music into queer house. Gospel-trained divas like Loleatta Holloway and Jocelyn Brown brought church to the club. Their high-register runs—what some call “the gospel impulse”—turned dance floors into sites of spiritual liberation.
Lady Blacktronica taught me this—she is a Black trans woman who has been in the scene forever. We talked about this years ago while partying at Berghain. “Vocals are love,” she told me. I’ve never forgotten that.
When I play these tracks now—when I drop that Jocelyn Brown vocal or Martha Wash breakdown—I’m playing the soundtrack of queer resistance, delivering a love letter handed down through generations of AIDS and oppression, a message heard and celebrated by our greatest activists and so many family members we lost too soon.
(Below is a mix I did for SEVEN, a queer music label in Berlin, which showcases my style—music as a queer love letter to past generations.)
Handbag house was born in the 1990s in the UK.
By the early 1990s, the new sound pioneered by Frankie Knuckles crossed the Atlantic and transformed. UK producers took queer house and made it faster, fiercer, and more dramatic.
What emerged came to be called “handbag house,” named, as Nadine Hubbs notes in her book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, for the handbags gay men would place on the dance floor to “mark their territory”—to define their dancing space on the floor.
I understood handbag house from the beginning. I’ve been around long enough to feel what happened after the AIDS crisis—how we had to fight to exist, find each other, and create space.
One of my first gay contacts in my home town was an older guy who was part of a folk dancing company. I joined the group, not because I was a natural dancer—I wasn’t—but for the community connection. Later, I understood: it was about finding your people, moving together, and claiming a space when the world said you had no right to exist.
Then I moved abroad. Years later, someone told me the older man had died. In that moment, I found more of myself in him than I’d ever realised when he was alive. Grief and joy—they’re so close to each other.
You couldn’t mistake the new UK sound: tempos pushed to 130+ bpm, and vocals pitched up to create urgency, with dramatic piano stabs and string sections designed for peak-time release.
(If you want an example of this new UK sound, listen to “I’m Gonna Get You” by Bizarre Inc., 1992, below.)
Handbag house wasn’t just about the music. Those handbags on the floor weren’t just practical; they were territorial. They said: “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going anywhere.”
That’s why I used this name for my DJ project. “DJ handbag” is a name and a tribute, a declaration of queer love.
When I step into the booth as DJ handbag, I carry that lineage: those old gays who survived the AIDS crisis, the folk dance company where I learned what it meant to find my people, the handbags placed defiantly on UK dance floors in the 90s—it all lives in my name and sets.
I can feel the floor shift when I drop a handbag house track now.
With this music, there’s a sense of recognition among the queer people in the crowd. They feel that spark of shared language, a shared attitude, and they dance with a little more ease and abandon.
The AIDS era saw the birth of ballroom music.
While the UK was making house music faster, New York City’s ballroom scene was making it functional.
As Matthew Collin documents in Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House, ballroom categories demanded very specific BPMs: Vogue Fem at 118-122, Runway at 122-126, Dramatic at 125-130.
That’s ballroom—that level of precision. Producers like Kevin Aviance and Junior Vasquez made sonic tools for physical expression.
Every element of ballroom music, from the bass drops to the vocal chops, was designed to showcase the dancer. The music served the body.
Marlon M. Bailey’s book Butch Queens Up in Pumps explains how ballroom dance styles shaped the music. But for me, the real education came later.
I once met a queer dancer at Berghain—they were cute and talented—and we talked about ballroom in those liminal, conversational lulls on the dance floor where the music’s loud but you can still hear each other. They explained the love—how each movement of ballroom dance told a story.
Then I watched them dance.
The way their body hit every beat—the precision, the confidence. The way they commanded space—not aggressively, but with a presence that said, “I belong here and deserve to be seen.” I watched as the floor responded. Other dancers gave them the necessary room. The energy shifted.
Something changed in me, too.
I was impressed, but more than that, I understood this wasn’t just dancing, it was survival turned into art. This was claiming literal space on the dance floor in a world that tried—and still tries—to police queer bodies and subjects them to widespread violence and erasure.
When I play ballroom tracks, I pay attention to the floor. I adjust the BPM to what I see in the dancers. This music isn’t about me; it’s about the kids serving face, body, and realness. My job is to give them the right tool.
I’ve seen this evolution happen in Berlin’s ballroom-influenced parties. When LSDXOXO plays, you can watch dancers hit every beat with surgical precision.
That’s not by accident—that’s forty years of queer people making music that honours their movement.
Berlin’s queer house scene is having a renaissance.
So here we are—Berlin, 2025.
Recently, I played at 4Q4 ERROR, a queer music festival at Kater Blau, in Berlin’s Friedrichshain neighbourhood. The floor was packed with sweaty bodies and hands in the air—with that specific Berlin crowd that’s equal parts serious and ecstatic.
I dropped “Chantal’s Chant” by Identified Patient and layered in a classic diva vocal. I built tension with a UK garage track, then released it. There was this unspoken understanding between the crowd and me—they were ready to go where I was taking them.
After more than a decade in Berlin’s queer music scene, I can say that something special is happening here. Berlin’s queer house scene is preserving queer history and also innovating it.
Identified Patient—the Dutch-born, Berlin-based producer behind Dekmantel, an events company and record label based in Manchester—is taking the diva house template and adding techno’s industrial edge. Tracks like “Chantal’s Chant” (2019) and “Walk With Me” (2023) honour the past while pushing into darker, more complex territory.
That night at 4Q4 ERROR, during “Chantal’s Chant,” I watched someone I’d known for years finally let go. They’d been carrying so much personal hurt—work stress, family rejection, and the general weight of existing as a queer person in an increasingly hostile world—but for six minutes, they were free.
That’s what this music does, and Identified Patient understands that.
LSDXOXO, whose album DOGMA dropped in September 2024, fuses ballroom’s precision with hardcore’s aggression.
In July, I played their track “BLOODLUST” from DOGMA at a Pride after-party at Tresor, and the energy was feral and beautiful.
When I hear LSDXOXO’s tracks, I hear the future of queer house: uncompromising, experimental, and refusing to be boxed in.
Then there’s Sherø—I met them recently at a Horse Meat Disco party. We bonded, and I think we share the same love of ’90s rave culture.
Their 2024 EP You N’ I brings what their RA profile perfectly describes as “90’s house, rave, jackin’, breakbeat nostalgia with a sensual, energetic, melancholic soulful twist.” I played their track “I wonder how you movin’” at a party called TEASER in Dresden. That track sounds like hope.
That’s Sherø—they take the nostalgia, the sounds that made us feel safe in the ’90s, and make them relevant and necessary for now.
CRYME is another artist pushing Berlin’s sound forward. They co-founded the SEVEN label in 2024 with a specific mission of platforming house music with a queer and FLINTA* leaning roster.
I’ve watched CRYME’s career explode over the past few years, with residencies at Pornceptual and De Reünie, brilliant sets, and an incredible collaboration with artist Christoph Faust called Things We Used to Say (2025).
What I love about CRYME is his house-meets-techno sound, those fast-paced, boundary-pushing sets—it’s the sound of someone who knows who they are and what they’re fighting for. When I hear CRYME play, I hear Berlin’s queer house scene at its most confident.
Electrosexual, the Berlin-based project by Romain Frequency, brings activism directly to the music. What strikes me is how political their music is without being preachy. Tracks like “Automatic People feat. Hanin Elias” make you dance and think.
Their bio states their values: “activism, feminism, queerness, and electronic music.” That, to me, is Berlin’s queer house ethos in a sentence.
Then there’s Aerea Negrot, a Berlin-based queer house pioneer and trans woman who shaped the city’s sound for over a decade before we lost her.
Her 2011 track “It’s Lover, Love” was a moment that changed everything for me. The first time I heard it, I was still figuring out who I was as a queer person and where I wanted to go in life. That track—with its raw, unapologetic vocals and driving house groove—showed me what queer house could be.
Aerea Negrot embodied the Berlin ethos. Her productions were vocal-driven, politically charged, and deeply rooted in the city’s underground queer scene. Her work bridged the gap between classic diva house vocals and Berlin’s harder, more industrial techno sound.
She took the gospel impulse, the emotional rawness of those early Chicago tracks, and pushed it through Berlin’s dark, uncompromising filter.
“It’s Lover, Love” became a touchstone for me.
“It’s Lover, Love” is a track I return to when I need to remember why I do this, why I stand in the booth at 3 am playing to a room full of sweaty queers.
It reminds me that love is political.
The legacy of Aerea Negrot lives on every time we drop that track—every time we honour the trans women and queer artists who came before us, and every time we refuse to let their voices be forgotten.
Nowhere does this reverence for the history of queer house music feel more real than at Lunchbox Candy—a Berlin-based queer rave and artist collective founded in 2021.
Lunchbox Candy is the epicentre of queer house in Berlin.
LBC isn’t just another gig for me. It’s my sanctuary and playground.
It fuses high-energy house, EBM, techno, breakbeat, and trance with live performances, club kid culture, and immersive art.
For the fourth anniversary edition of the party, I played 54 tracks in three hours. Picking the setlist was brutal. It wasn’t just about making people dance. It was about creating liberation—even while I was still wrestling with my own.
I opened my long set with Kate Nash’s Germ. “I feel no threat from felt any trans person that might be in the toilets,” she says at the opening of the track.
She says it plainly, sarcastically, cutting through the bullshit bathroom panic that’s used to legislate trans people like me out of existence.
Before we could get cunty, before we could serve, I needed everyone in that room to know that this space named the violence that was happening against my community.
Then I flipped it and played the Biscits track “Wrong Is Right“, a tech-house track with that rolling bassline and a groove that gets under your skin. The vocals celebrate everything the world tells us is wrong. The track takes shame and flips it. It says, “Actually, this queerness is right.” And right on cue, the magic happened on the dance floor again—bodies loosened, attitudes fell away.
Midway through the set, I played Jordan Nocturne’s “Just a Dance“—a playful, seductive track. The floor ate it up.
Then, I played the Narciss track “Immer (Venice Remix)” toward the end. This set was, I think, the moment I fully understood that I wasn’t just playing tracks—I was the bridge between the music and the dancers, between the pain we carry as queer people and the joy we create together. A queer DJ in a queer party is the bridge between isolation and community. In such a role, the work a queer DJ does is a conversation, a call and response. We were all in this together.
That night, the community showed up. People gave each other space on the dance floor, that queer etiquette where we protect each other’s joy. My friends danced in the booth, their energy feeding mine. After my set, I stayed till the end of the party, because it was that good.
One message I got afterwards: “You have no idea about how I feel when you dance. I feel free, and I feel me.”
That’s the greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten—someone telling me that, for those hours, they got to exist fully without editing themselves for a straight world. That’s Lunchbox Candy.
Queer house matters now more than ever.
Queer house feels like more than just a genre—it’s a survival tool. It has the unique ability to hold space for love, freedom, and mourning. In 2025, as anti-queer legislation spreads across Europe and the U.S. and as our spaces are being shut down and our identities debated, queer house remains the sound of queer defiance.
The technical elements are worth combing over for anyone interested in music theory. Why does the 120-130 bpm, the four-on-the-floor bass, the gospel vocals, and the frequency balance designed for club sound systems foster the kind of scene they do?
That’s a question for a more academic person to answer; what I know is that what matters more than the elements is what happens when they all come together with a room full of queer people.
In September, I played for the first time at GEGEN—a queer, sex-positive party series—where I’d worked the door some years ago.
It was a perfect night. The sound system was dialled in, the crowd was ready, and the energy was right. I played everything from classic Chicago house to the new Berlin sound.
At some point, I saw three generations of queer people dancing together: the elders who’d survived, the millennials who’d built Berlin’s current scene, and the Gen Z kids creating the future. They were all moving to the same four-on-the-floor that Frankie Knuckles pioneered forty years ago, the same gospel vocals that brought church to the club.
So, the next time you’re on a Berlin dance floor and hear those gospel vocals over a four-on-the-floor beat, remember that you’re hearing forty years of queer joy. That’s queer house.
A dedication from DJ handbag: “This piece is for the dancers who trust me to hold space for them. It’s for my chosen family, people who are building bridges and laying the foundation for us to grow. And it’s for every queer kid searching for home.”
Words: Tal Se / DJ handbag
Edits: Alexander Cheves
Berlin-based DJ handbag is a booker, curator, bouncer, and rising force in Berlin’s nightlife, now stepping fully into the spotlight behind the decks. Her sets—a mix of diva house, hardbag, hard house, UK garage, and global grooves—celebrate queer, trans femme joy.
