It's a Spiritual Thing, A Body Thing, A Soul Thing...

Sometimes I get asked to interview wonderful people for Faith, the London zine that has chronicled house culture since 1999. I'm reposting some of those pieces here and as Robert Owens is performing at Handsome this week here's the first focused on peak Chicago.

For this one I spoke with Terry Martin, to talk about the seminal zine Thing and the subsequent House magazine he edited Crossfade.  Honey Dijon, a reader of Thing, kindly added an introduction:

"Zines are a form of creative expression without mainstream restrictions. Zines can also document counterculture and its participants. Zines can inform, educate, and enlighten. Thing Magazine was that and more. Published by DJ Robert T. Ford - alongside Trent Adkins and Lawrence Warren - during the height of the AIDS crisis in November 1989, Thing was a form of Google for the Black queer experience during the explosion of house music culture in Chicago.

It listed playlists of the most respected and revered DJs, interviewed everyone from Willi Ninja to Candy J aka Sweet Pussy Pauline, had conversations with trans sex workers, and the experience having AIDS during Reagan/Bush era. It also broke down gay Black lingo. It was more than a zine, it was a revelation and a revolution. It was Black queer theory and thought that gave a voice to those who change culture and then are left out of it. It is still as important today as it was when when it was first published in 1989 and I have every single copy." - Honey Dijon.

Terry Martin talks fast, jumping midway through a sentence onto something else. His energy, beamed over Zoom from his home in San Francisco to London, is kinetic. We are meeting to discuss Thing, a zine published between 1989 and 1993 that documented Chicago’s Black, queer underground during a time of seminal social, political, and cultural shifts.  

Founded by Robert Ford, Trent Adkins and Lawrence Warren, it is a unique testament of an era of the city’s creative burgeoning as well as the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In Ford’s own words to journalist Owen Keehen ), it existed because, “We knew for ourselves what a rich and important cultural thing gay, Black men have and share. We wanted to make a magazine that would be a way of documenting our existence and contribution to society.”   

Terry Martin and Robert Ford

“That history was almost erased,” says Martin, visibly moved at remembering those who did not survive. “We lost so many people. When I look through the pages of Thing magazine, it reminds me of a whole generation of beautiful, creative folk that were taken, many were my friends.” As he notes, he may be one of the few remaining alive who worked closely on the project as a music reviews writer, photographer, and editorial assistant.

Thing arose against the backdrop of the Reagan/Bush years, when America’s political climate had turned sharply to the right. There was fear, stigma, and discrimination, with the US government doing little in the first few years of an epidemic that disproportionately affected gay men, non-white populations, and intravenous drug users. Martin is rightfully still angry. “Black, queer, trans folks were being marginalised, criminalised, and oppressed. It was an active annihilation of LGBTQ folks through government policy of inaction. They wouldn’t even talk about the epidemic. You could say in some ways it was a genocide - they let people die.” 

As an act of cultural preservation and political protest, the pages of Thing jump out with a joyous ‘fuck you’ and exclaim ‘we’re here’. It is celebratory, punchy, camp, irreverent, funny, specific, spiritual, combative, and a banner-bearer in heels for Chicago’s - and wider America’s - Black queer cultures. Each of the ten issues is bursting with interviews, anecdotes, artwork, photography, and tongue-in-cheek lists of freshly minted categories like ‘Should have been a drag queen: Grace Jones, Ultra Nate, Adeva, Stephanie Mills, Diana Ross, Eartha Kitt, Pattii LaBelle, Annie Lennox…’  

Contemporary queer luminaries such as Marlon Riggs, Vaginal Davis, RuPaul, Dorian Corey, Essex Hemphill, Lady Bunny and Willi Ninja all feature. As an antidote to the marginalisation and othering of the mainstream, Thing gave voice and visibility.  

“The power of Thing was that so many people could be seen for the first time and get validation. You heard Harvey Milk talk about visibility and being seen so that these kids in Iowa can recognise themselves,” says Martin, holding up the second issue with Little Richard on the cover. He reads me a snippet of a remembrance letter to Sylvester from Thing’s debut issue penned by co-editor Lawrence D. Warren: “How can I forget sprawling in front of the TV - and you my dear sister splashing into my family room real as ice-water and twice as cold – screamin’ and hollerin’ and shoutin’ and irreversibly disrupting the tedium of my God-fearing middle class styleless life? Too late, my sainted mother rushed to snap you off- commanding me to go to my room and pray; instead I went to my room and worshipped you.  Amen to that. In an age before the Internet, finding references and community was something many queer people had to leave their homes and seek.”

Years before Thing was a thing, Chicago offered this queer community within the city’s underground scene. Martin was a DJ and club promoter who was deeply involved in the emerging scene, and it was through music in 1981 that he first met Ford while buying 12’ records at the renowned Rose Records State Street store. “Robert started as a clerk and became the buyer there,” says Martin. “He was a musical encyclopaedia. I remember when Madonna’s first record 'Everybody' came out and they had ordered something like 12 copies. Robert knowingly suggested they might need a few more! He had his finger on the pulse. He was a huge jazz fan, he loved Billie Holliday and Miles Davis.” And of course he also loved house.  

Chicago was about to bequeath a musical legacy whose global influence and relevance is still unfolding today. Now part of the cultural canon, it was an adopted son of the city, Frankie Knuckles, whose club The Warehouse birthed the term house music. Record shops were also vitally important to the music’s gestation. “Gramaphone Records and Joe Dale deserve props for fostering the city’s sounds, as does Importes, Etc. which was where people would come in and ask for the records Frankie had played,” he says, recalling the relationship between dancefloor and record shop that supported the emerging community. “The owner of Importes, Paul Weisberg, created a ‘Warehouse’ section for that, later abridged to just ‘House’. It’s also where a young Derrick Carter started as a clerk.”  

The Thing team.

Frankie Knuckles’ left The Warehouse for reasons he explained to Martin during his Crossfade magazine interview (republished in this issue of Faith), founding a new venue Power Plant over which he could have greater control. “I remember going there and thinking I’d died and gone to heaven,” says Martin. “The club was predominantly Black and queer but it was inclusive, you felt welcome there. It was like walking into Valhalla… the mothership.”  

He recalls being there one night in the DJ booth with his friend Janet who was close to the late, great pioneer. “I had been DJing for many years at that point but hearing him play that night was a whole different level. How he emotionally moved the crowd. There was minimal lighting in there, but the feeling was magical. The windows were blacked out, so we opened one to get some air in and suddenly from nowhere there was Jamie Principle under this single pin spot singing ‘Your Love’. No announcement, no stage. I lost my mind. I’m telling you that was like going to church – it was spiritual.”  

Terry Martin was also a regular at another night that holds equally mythic status, Ron Hardy’s Music Box. “That is where you’d hear the harder house tracks played. Ron would beat the box! Music Box was on Lower Wacker Drive, so you’d have to trek downtown. Like Power Plant it was like walking into another world,” he recalls, before laughing as he also remembers some of the production values. “At Frankie’s parties things were spectacularly on-point when it came to audio, whereas with Ronnie… not so much! There was a ‘give me some noisy audio tape’ DIY vibe to it. He’d fucking play two cassette tapes back-to-back, but he was a genius. He was the blueprint for the acid tracks, a much harder edge and noisier but in a good sense of the word. It was down and dirty.” A later party, Boom Boom Room, is also given special mention. “That was the Monday weekly at Red Dog hosted by Hifi Bangalore with Byrd Bardot on the door. It’s where all the queer kids went to listen to House music, get messy and have some fun. It was a wonderful party.” 

It was an invite from Derrick Carter and Mark Farina in 1989 to a small loft party that provided another watershed moment. “There were probably only about 30 people with a single smoke machine. When I walked in Derrick was playing Electribe 101’s ‘Tell Me When the Fever Ended’. I think it was also the first time I took ecstasy, and I was like, ‘wow, this is the future’,” he says. “There was another underground loft party called Life by promoters Patty Ryan and Wade Hampton where Derrick and Mark also DJ’d. That was also an eye-opener and it made me want to put Derrick and Mark on somewhere weekly.”  

This resulted in a Monday residency at Foxy’s, called I Am. “Foxy’s was set up by three former employees from Medusa’s, an alternative queer spot where I had DJ’d an all ages ‘Teen Dance’ in the mid-’80s. Back then the gaybourhood on the North Side was very white and mainstream [for the record, Martin is white]. It was pretty lame and boring where they played commercial dance music. Foxy’s turned that on its head. It had a very queer club aesthetic that attracted all the [as he puts it] mismatched socks. It was House music, but they’d do rock nights too. It was for everyone who didn’t fit into that mainstream gay scene.”  

Terry Martin and Frankie Knuckles during a Crossfade interview.

Shortly after Foxy’s closed in 1992, they moved Martin's weekly to Smart Bar. “I started a night called Pump around ‘94-’95 that ran for about a year with Derrick as resident. We’d rotate artists like Mark Farina, DJ Sneak, Cajmere, Ralph Lawson, Roy Davis, Ron Trent, Jeff Craven from Large Music, Jevon Jackson, Alton Miller, Luke Solomon, Chez Damier,” he recalls, sounding like the Burke’s peerage of house music. Pump’s strapline was, “A dark room, disco ball and a feelin’,” but he says even with that talent on the decks it was sometimes a struggle to pull the crowd in those days. He laughs when he says it is crazy how successful they all became. “I’m so happy to see those people who were so young back then go on and do what they did, it’s amazing.” Pump moved to Shelter when they were booted out by an unsympathetic manager due to a DJ smoking a joint the DJ booth, despite Martin appealing to the owner Joe Shanahan, whom he speaks of fondly.  

Martin was a cultural generalist: spinning vinyl, promoting, photographing (he covered the funeral of Chicago’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington, for another Ford zine, Think Ink, of which Thing was something of a queer reworking), and as a music journalist. All these interests plugged him into the city’s underground scene and made him a perfect fit for Robert Ford at Thing. There was also, of course, their shared love of house music. In two years Thing had grown from a 20 page photocopied 8.5”x 7” zine to a full-colour 10.5”x 8” publication and reached a print run of 3,000 copies distributed across the US. Nevertheless, despite the larger format they could not cover the amount of quality music that was being produced at the time.  

“We just had too much music content, there was so much going on,” says Martin. So he decided to start Crossfade, a music zine with Ford working as art director. The first issue was published in September 1992 with Lil’ Louis on the cover and included interviews with Deee-Lite’s DJ Dimitry, a Maurice Joshua Q&A, charts, a full-page ad from Tommy Boy for RuPaul’s forthcoming debut album, as well as features at the front discussing homophobia in the music industry and HIV/AIDS. “The mainstream music mags were a little stale and we wanted to include a queer in-your-face perspective and aesthetic,” he says. The intention was to publish monthly and by the third issue it had doubled in size from 16 to 32 pages. Ron Hardy was on the cover, as was Frankie Knuckles, who gave Martin an interview where he doesn’t pull his punches. It also included a feature on Chicago House history to accompany a House 100 list.  

The curveball about this list is that none of the tracks we today associate with Chicago House feature. Tunes that came to define the genre and that were put out on labels like D.J. International Records, Trax, and Hot Mix 5, are absent. Included is a heavy selection from West End Records, Prelude and disco staples from Diana Ross and Gino Soccio, alongside Skatt Brothers’ cruising homage ‘Walk the Night’ and Yello’s ‘Bostich’. “The House 100 list had originally been published in Thing a couple of years earlier and was compiled by Robert and Trent. These aren’t what people associate with early House, but they are the fundamental building blocks,” says Martin. “It’s what Frankie would play at the Warehouse and what people would ask for at Importes, Etc. I remember him playing ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but it would sound different, he’d run the ethereal intro for an eternity before dropping in the kick drum. He would take us on a ride with this queer aesthetic that was both melodic and had this unique feeling.” 

Sadly, this third issue of Crossfade was to be the last. The demands of turning around a monthly publication became unsustainable as Ford found himself struggling with complications from HIV, to which he would succumb two years later. Without Ford’s input and creative direction, Martin decided to fold the magazine. “Although I was older than him, he mentored me a lot with Crossfade,” he says, becoming emotional at the memory of his good friend. “He is the person who had the biggest impact on me both professionally and personally. He really was one of the most generous people I knew: incredibly funny, witty, and charming.” 

He says when he looks at Thing today, he can see its importance in countering the amnesia and erasure of certain histories, as well as a document to a culturally unique and creatively fertile era. “The voice of Thing magazine is in that same camp as those who fought for their lives at that time. It was alongside activists like Cleve Jones and Peter Stanley demanding healthcare and life-saving medications. Robert was doing that in his own way by getting that message out there and sharing the struggles of people navigating those life and death challenges,” he says. “Watching him waste away was hard, but he left us with this incredible legacy that is so important to preserve and celebrate.” As American politics has become more polarised and threats to equality from the radical right have increased, he is clear about the need to continue the work of those who went before. “Let’s not forget those fights still exist: LGBTQ people are still  being criminalised, marginalised, and oppressed. What’s going on with the Supreme Court and the current political climate means we still need to be out in the street fighting.” 

While he may not be able to march with us any longer, the work of Robert Ford and his friends stands testament to their lives and voices, as well as providing a golden archive of Chicago’s Black queer underground.  

Originally published in Faith Winter 2022.