It Shouldn’t Have Taken Ten Walls’ Outburst For Us to Notice How Straight Dance Music Has Become

If you could take any positives at all from Ten Walls' homophobic meltdown - which consisted of a hateful post on Facebook that compared homosexuals to paedophiles - it was that it provoked a rare moment of absolute togetherness in dance music.

In the wake of his rant, he was dropped from the line-ups of Creamfields, PITCH, and Sonar festivals, as well as having Fort Romeau withdrawing from his scheduled support slots for the DJ. The final nail in the coffin came from Ten Walls' booking managers Coda Music Agency, who stated they condemn "all forms of discrimination based on race, religion or sexual orientation", and announced they would be dropping the DJ, real name Marijus Adomaitis, from their roster.

The incident managed to inspire a genuinely unified reaction across all corners of the dance music world. Fans and DJs were posting pictures of themselves smashing his records and deleting his music from their iTunes. The outrage at his actions fast became a unanimous sentiment throughout the house and techno community, who took matters into their own hands, condemning and rejecting Adomaitis across all platforms and as a result removing any shred of credibility he had within the genre. It was a swift, bold, collective, "we will not stand for this".

The systematic ostracising also came from a slew of other DJs and producers. Figures from across the electronic sphere, from Eats Everything to The Black Madonna, came out against him — challenging and condemning his actions, as well as wholly supporting the decision to have him removed from festival bills. It is difficult, if not completely impossible, to see any way for Adomaitis to return from this backlash. If it had happened to a bigger star, you could imagine some idiot loyalists backing him through it, but in the case of Ten Walls, it seems the words were too vile, and his appeal too niche, to rescue him from complete obliteration. He has become more of a celebrity in the last twenty-four hours than in his six-year long career, and for all the wrong reasons.

It's fantastic how unanimously the electronic community responded, but should it have taken a homophobic diatribe to notice how detached things had become? Dance music has been systematically erasing its roots in queer culture throughout the past couple of decades, replacing it with sterile macho bullshit. Tracks uploaded to Youtube come with FHM-scale bikini-clad models. Diplo still headlines festivals despite tweeting at an illustrator, whose artwork he stole: "I credited her what u want me to do? Eat her out and massage her boobs at the same time as well?" Betoko, who last year lost his Ibiza residency following a case of domestic violence, has since returned to touring with relative ease. Put simply, EDM has a straight white male problem.

Yet the internet always lends a tendency, throughout the fight for progressive social politics, to latch on to individual incidents in favour of tackling the malaise. We'll attack one advert for being sexist and continue to ignore a constant stream of misogyny throughout the media. We'll go after a politician's racist gaffe and disregard systematically prejudiced politics. We'll put one high profile gender transition on the cover of a magazine, but continue to under-represent and neglect the community as a whole. It's not to say we don't care, but for the clicktivist generation it has become incredibly easy to feel like an issue only goes tweet-deep.

Just because Ten Walls is history, that doesn't mean the problem has been solved. As appropriate response as this is, you only need to read these extensive pieces from THUMP and Resident Advisor to realise just how far dance music has distanced itself from the LGBT communities that birthed it. All too often gay nightlife is now sloppily understood as a fun night out listening to Lady Gaga, and while that's one valid facet, it ignores the role gay culture has played in creating the foundations of pretty much everything we understand as dance music now. The influence and continuing presence of LGBT electronic artists stretches far back into the past as Frankie Knuckles, and as far forward as the ground-breaking wonky-industrial stylings of Arca. Disco and garage came from the queer communities of 70s New York, the story of Chicago house begins in a gay bathhouse in Manhattan, and these are just a few of many origin tales. No consumer or creator of electronic music should forget these things.

So the challenge, particularly to heterosexual members of the dance music community, is to not only shut down Adomaitis, but to sustain support for the gay community within electronic music going forward, not just when a one-hit selector goes on a deluded homophobic rant. There will be a lazy temptation to view the Ten Walls incident as proof that dance music doesn't have a homophobia problem. This week has seen the world of electronic music triumphantly united in outrage, but the real victory will be in sustaining positive support.

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