“Sometimes I feel like I’m up against certain barriers, because when I look at who is given space to express themselves, it is people who don’t look like me. I feel like I come up against challenges that other people don’t, and that’s just the life of a black person. Queer on top of it.” —Shaun J. Wright
Shaun J. Wright has spent the last decade-plus amassing a smorgasbord of a music career. It would be reductive to call him a DJ, though he regularly commands dance floors worldwide, most often in his hometown, Chicago, where he plays alongside legends of the city that birthed house music. He’s also an accomplished producer and vocalist, frequently singing live during sets and bringing his voice and vision to heavy-hitting tracks. (You may recognize his vocal work from Hercules and Love Affair, a project where he met artists he still collaborates with today.) Alongside frequent collaborator Alinka, he runs a Chicago-based party and record label, Twirl, whose releases have graced dance music’s most influential floors and attracted collaborations with both rising and renowned industry talent. Then there’s his foundations studying fashion (and his fierce personal style), his occasional performance work as a dancer, his role in Chicago’s vogue and ballroom communities, and the various ways he works to strengthen the city that raised him. “Multi-hyphenate” would be a disservice.
All this is inextricable from his identity as a queer, Black, gender-nonconforming person. Wright uses the various facets of his career to create room for people like himself and elevate marginalized voices within dance music, a mission captured beautifully in a short film premiering today on them., “A Child of House: Shaun J. Wright.” Directed, shot, and edited by filmmaker Serge Garcia, it follows Wright on a summer day in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood as the artist speaks to intersections between his work and his identities, how marginalization pervades dance music, the significance of chosen family, his early experiences in Chicago’s house music scene, and broader goals he holds for his career.
The film was produced for Garcia’s Subterraneans series, whose first outing featured artist and DJ Jackie House (a.k.a. Jacob Sperber) as he prepares to play the Berlin fetish party SNAX, while using his performance to toy with cultural notions surrounding AIDS, techno industry gatekeeping, and more. Garcia’s series profiles leading dance music talent while sifting through the ways identity factors into the scene, and his films aim to capture how the community is combating sexism, racism, misogyny, and other forms of marginalization, with the hope to “inspire ravers to preserve the queer and non-conformist spirit of dance music and club culture,” as Garcia has it. Check out his film on Wright above, and be sure to follow Shaun and Serge on Instagram to keep up with their work.
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