complete the circuit

This Joy

by Mickey Weems

"I think he's challenging me."

We were sitting together at Fireball, a Chicago circuit party. Chuck Quarles noticed a Viking about 30 feet away. Big, blond, buffed and bare-chested Steroid Sven was a regular in the scene. He was A-list and a fine dancer.

Chuck wasn't having it. He stood up, all 5feet nothing of him, round brown belly shining in the lights (as did his shaved head), and he confronted his Nordic nemesis. Neither man smiled. Eyes locked and arms whipped as they moved separately/together in heated battle, each daring the other with every step and gesture to bring it.

When the song segued to a less fierce selection, they withdrew from the arena. It was a draw.

The Chosen People

Chuck and I had known each other for years, ever since he and his man, Jay Pappas, moved to Columbus from Dayton in the first years of the new millennium.

We were members of a nomadic glitterati that traveled from city to city whenever an extended weekend presented itself. Since the mid-'90s, Columbus had been a hub for dance parties attracting men from Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, Deoutlookohio.com

troit, Pittsburgh and beyond. Everyone spent too much money and stayed up too late for days on end.

It was for the noblest of causes: communal bonding. We lived to dance. If excess was our fall from grace, dancing together was our salvation.

I have been immersed in DJ culture since 1999, when I began my doctoral research on the Gay male dance scene. I have witnessed performances by the adept and the incompetent, from genuine Chicago talent to pathetic LA fake. No DJ consistently moved me the way that Chuck Q (his nom-de-discaire) did.

"Some people have DJ'ing down to a science," said his friend and fellow DJ evangelist, Jeremy James. "Chuck had it down to an art." A messy art, to be sure: In an age when DJs depended on compact discs, Chuck made a shambles of the DJ booth CDs scattered everywhere.

The result of the chaos was cerulean, a beatific vision transubstantiated into sonic pulse. He issued an altar call through the salvific voices of screaming divas.

Anointing

As he was with Vikings on the dance floor, Chuck was competitive in the booth. DJ Tom McBride recalled tag-teaming with him: "We challenged each other every time we played together in public, and even more times

when we would perform epic marathon sets at his house while the real world slept."

The witching hours between 2:30a and dawn were magical for our tribe. All that exuberance we'd brought to the club was already spent, but we were nowhere near done. There is another source of power, something so ancient it existed before our ancestors had words for it. We needed someone to summon that archaic power within us, to conjure it with the latest technology and the hottest songs.

Chuck had a residency at an after-hours club called Millennium. He was solar-brilliant in this house of worship, a holy man who summoned forth such joy that we could not sit still. Despite petty rivalries, slights, betrayals and body fascism, Chuck anointed us with the fire of the Holy Spirit so that we joined together in rapture, even when we could not stand each other.

In other words, Chuck brought church.

DJ'ing is the art of seduction, as well as salvation. Chuck received the highest compliment possible from his fellow Gay men: Bitch, you worked my pussy! Nightclub icon Anisa Love (née Corey Williams) concurred with the vox populi: "Chuck wasn't afraid of a vocally driven anthem with a sick beat. He often put me and my sisters in a trance that could only be described as pussy-whipped."

RIP Chuck.

It Is Finished

Right about 2005, the scene careened out of control. One of the girlfriends ran amok, fracturing the unity of our tribe. Night whispers of unbridled excess, including clubbers hot-railing in public places, became daylight conversations loud enough to attract the feds. The end of an era was at hand. Millennium closed, and the tribe disbanded.

Hard times were upon us, and the Great Recession made things worse. Chuck and Jay weathered the turbulence together, proof that "for richer and for poorer" is not just a convenient sentimentality that vanishes in the cold, hard light of a Terrible Tuesday. When last I heard, they were doing well.

But our Chuck was living on borrowed time. His chronic diabetes caught up with him, as he no doubt knew it would.

Down in My Soul

Jesus may have died for my sins, but Chuck lived for my joy. I feel joy when I think about what he's done for me. Until I can move no more, I live for him. I commune with him every time I'm torn away from my computer by a hot track and I dance around my house like the crack whore I am.

Mickey Weems is a writer, educator and creator of the Qualia Encyclopedia of Gay Folklife. You can follow him at mickeyweems.com or qualiafolk.com, or email him at mickeyweems@yahoo.com. Complete the Circuit runs every other month in Outlook.

august 2014

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