Queerness in Afro-British dance music?

Here's something I've been wondering about for a while: How does queerness operate in Afro-British dance music? In Af-Am music there's been a strong tradition dating back to disco of very overtly (or sometimes more coded) gay dance music, with dance music scenes often acting as a safe harbor for queers when mainstream Black American music has been less accepting of them, but Afro-British dance music has always felt very resolutely straight to me in comparison. At times it's felt more masculine or more feminine, but that's always seemed to play out as a tension strictly between the concerns of heterosexual men and heterosexual women. This was actually thrown into relief recently by hearing a Champion set with a couple of ballroom tracks, which shouldn't feel that odd being that funky and ballroom actually have quite similar beats, but felt very surprising and quite a bridge as it did, much moreso than an American DJ chucking in a couple funky tracks in with some ballroom would. So basically, what gives? Where the dancing homos with indecipherable accents at?

Imagination had an overtly gay image and had a huge following in American gay clubs. Singer Leee John went on to release some 2-step garage tracks.

This is a really good question. Post-garage British dance music is in general either overtly macho or at the very least quite blokey. There are probably gay artists working within it but I don't know of anyone out.

The shadow cast by the sort of American dance music you describe is so huge that any black British openly gay artists are more likely to be beholden disco or US house and garage than anything more uniquely British. Or just immersed in house and techno proper, which obviously a lot more faceless.

it is a good and complicated q but one i kinda hesitate to speculate on tbh. i guess the key interwoven points would be strength of community, will to defy/self-define, and the natural evolutionary modes of uk scene progression straight or gay (ie everything is second hand until a tipping point)

strictly musically speaking you could say the london shuffle/tech/deep thing right now is (unknowingly) likely the queerest-coding organically indigenous (well, sort of) urban scene there's ever been in the uk, but again that's more in theory than (ime at least) proper evidence of cultural mutuality. as far as i can ascertain it's still kind of like ballroom made and consumed by lumpen str8s; from afar there would seem to me to be logical potential there though, idk

This is a wild guess that's probably just off the money but maybe this difference is attributable to the inherited macho attitudes associated with the predominantly West Indian music from which UK dance music stems?

I dunno, whereas you had queer cultures active in, say, 1920s Harlem ballrooms, the reggae/dancehall/jungle lineage (as opposed to jazz/funk/disco) undergirding UK dance music has been less less hospitable to these things?

it's a good question and if it has an answer i don't know it; but ime british dance and british rap has always been much less sexual, to the point of national self-parody, than its US counterparts. cf how there's no such thing as a british lil kim or a british trina.

Has there even been a British LL Cool J? But I dunno, garage and funky can be pretty sexy at times, if not raunchy in the way a lot of American stuff is.

I dunno, whereas you had queer cultures active in, say, 1920s Harlem ballrooms, the reggae/dancehall/jungle lineage (as opposed to jazz/funk/disco) undergirding UK dance music has been less less hospitable to these things?

This makes sense, but even more hiphop-derived (and thus more theoretically macho) US dance styles like club and bounce have been more accepting of queerness.

Is there even any real Afro-British queer subculture tho? Even if it's not expressed through any unique form of music.

the london shuffle/tech/deep thing

By this do you mean the stuff in the Duke Dumont thread or something else?

Something else - more a post minimal deep house / tech house that a lot of Londoners are into, both former funky types (e g. Carnao Beats) and non. Probably not what you're looking for, at this stage of its development at any rate.

I don't know the answer to the thread question of course - though I suspect it's correct to ask about the sub-culture first and the music of choice second.

this was the only thing i cld think of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJSqNmHcSE0

Tim, rtc, or others: could you post examples of what you mean then?

Store brand boogie-era EWF? I can kinda fux with that.

Difference is dance music in england mostly came from early hip hop, jazz funk & reggae not disco

Is there even any real Afro-British queer subculture tho? Even if it's not expressed through any unique form of music.

There are proportionally fewer black people in the UK than in the US and therefore an even smaller proportion of openly gay black people. And gay scenes in the UK (or at least the south of England) are fairly racially mixed. I'm not sure the sort of defined subculture you're getting at actually exists.

Or if it does, it's very small.

Agree with RTC that the sort of stuff that coming out of the UK now is creating a (fairly mainstream) culture where it could become easier for gay black dance artists to flourish.

yeah i have no idea whether mnek is gay or not, but if he was, i wouldn't be entirely surprised