“Let me tell you something about house music,” the voice says. If you’ve ever partied in a queer club, or a Black club, you’ve probably heard this voice. Hell, if you’ve ever danced to house music anywhere, for almost any length of time, anywhere in the world, you’ve heard its flamboyant, authoritative glory. It’s a building block of dance music, of Black and gay culture, of modern culture. “It’s not just a groove. House is a feeling,” it goes on. “And when you feel it, you will understand that house music is freedom.” Simply, then, a commandment drips from his lips like honey: “Feel it, children.”

The voice belongs to Aaron-Carl, who made unambiguously queer music in a time when such forthrightness wasn’t exactly an asset. Born Aaron-Carl Ragland in 1973 and nicknamed “Boogie” by his family, Aaron-Carl grew up in the white working-class suburbs of Taylor, Michigan. As a kid, he was obsessed with Prince—not only for the way Prince embodied his defiant racial and sexual politics in his sonics, but for the power embedded in the “Produced, arranged, composed, and performed by Prince” banner on many of the records. “I used to watch it spin around the turntable,” Aaron-Carl told the Submerge podcast. “That was such motivation. I was like, ‘If he can do it, I know I can do it. I have to do it.’ So, yeah, I got my little stacks of books and my little ink pens.”

By the time he was a teenager, he was making tracks with a keyboard, a sampler, and a cassette recorder. He was also sneaking into clubs, first checking out the Top 40 crowds at the Gas Station and then ducking upstairs into Heaven, where DJ Ken Collier was up to something much queerer. “Drag queens kicking all over the place… and nothing you had ever heard on the radio,” he told Submerge. One night in 1989, Collier played Jaydee’s epochal “Plastic Dreams.” “It was like two years before it hit mainstream. So when the song came on, the lights went red, and everybody just looked like one big wave of people dancing.” He ran up to Collier, begging for a track ID.

That song’s emphatic minimalism informed Aaron-Carl’s first songs. So did the bold, world-building techno of Underground Resistance, whose co-founder Mike Banks took Aaron-Carl under his wing. UR was militantly funky, but a little po-faced. Butch, even, unlike ghettotech, the high-speed and low-brow amalgamation of Miami bass and Detroit techno originally fashioned by DJs including Jeff Mills and the Wizard which, by the early to mid-’90s, had become a calling card for locals like DJ Godfather and DJ Assault. With his keyboard and sampler and four-track, Aaron-Carl found himself straddling these worlds.

In 1996, he self-released a CD, Storm, encouraged by Mike Banks. He then released two 12″s on labels associated with the Detroit legend. “Wash It/Down” was a filthy pair of ghettotech burners: On the A-side, he reminded listeners to keep their asses clean, while the B-side promised what he’d do to them if they did. These tracks were gay as fuck.

In Aaron-Carl’s very first show outside of Detroit, he performed “Wash It” in South Carolina to a rapt audience. “I had on this little leather jacket, and I had on white pants with the ass cut out like Prince did,” he told Submerge. As he pranced and sang about keeping your coochie clean, the audience chanted back every word. Then, it exploded. “When I turned around and lifted up my little jacket and they saw my ass hanging out, it was like, Oh my God,” he laughed.

In that ass, they heard the revolution. As did Banks. “‘Down’ was one of those accidents, the last song on a cassette tape,” he said. “When [Mike] heard it he just flipped…I really didn’t think that straight people would even take to the record. …I always thought, house music, gay music. And I felt good about it.” Yet these tracks were punk as fuck, too. “Mike Banks even told me—I mean that was one of his reasons for signing me in the first place, was because I took nothing and made hit records,” he said.

His second 12″ of 1996 showed there was more to Aaron-Carl than the dancefloor at Heaven. The hellish “Crucified” nails a moment of personal turmoil onto a frame of teeming Detroit techno. His record deal with Banks meant that he wasn’t making much money and didn’t own his masters. He and his boyfriend had broken up. “Crucified,” he told Little White Earbuds in 2010, “was actually a suicide note.” House is a feeling, after all—but so is despair.

Despair didn’t really fit him, though, and as a Detroit DJ and producer in the ’90s, little else did. There was the raunchy camp of ghettotech, but Aaron-Carl wasn’t pulling punches; the ass he wanted to eat belonged to men. Detroit techno and house were often politically motivated and spiritually inclined, but he relied on his specific faith in the dignity of homosexuality. So he refashioned his world in his own image. In 1998, he released “My House,” which set his teachings like fist-sized diamonds into a crown of sumptuous kicks and claps; on the flip, the same words echo imperiously across a landscape of sci-fi wooshes for a cappella version called, with biblical fervor, “The Word.” These are the words—“House music is a feeling”—that launched a thousand other people’s DJ sets and tracklists, the declaration that gay sensibility is integral to house and its revolutions.

He started a record label, Wallshaker, named after his final single for Banks; he licensed “My House” to Josh Wink and King Britt’s Ovum label, who made it an international smash. By the early 2000s, he had chops, a little bit of cash, and a reputation that allowed him to tour. He also had a new partner, Mel Winders, and two young adoptive sons. With this foundation, he could have doubled down on Detroit, making an instrumental fascinator like Aztec Mystic’s “Knights of the Jaguar.” Or he could have gone rootsy, placing himself in a legacy like Masters at Work did by remixing Nina Simone’s “See-Line Woman.” But maybe he wondered, what would Prince do? His answer was, well, everything.

His debut album, unmistakably titled Uncloseted, is the sound of a Black gay man taking up all the space he wants. It starts with a radio dial flipping through his previous hits, but it doesn’t linger on them. Instead, it creates new classics. “I’m Not Free” is a protest song you could imagine either Crystal Waters or Le Tigre performing, a bandwagon of crispy breaks, tooting horns, and woozy little sound effects. On “Switch,” he invokes the spirit of fellow travelers in Black weirdo visionary culture like Green Velvet and Kevin Aviance, for a tribal-house kiki to rival anything Danny or Junior spun in the ’90s. He goes home again for “Tribute 2 My City,” but on his own terms. Contrast its placemaking with the Underground Resistance remix of Kraftwerk’s “Expo 2000,” released just a couple years previous: UR fuses together cultural powers with its chant of “Detroit, we so electric/Germany, they so electric.” Aaron-Carl, though, queers his geography into a feeling. “Detroit, the attitude,” he murmurs. There’s no place like home.

It’s also where the heart breaks. “Sky” pays tribute to Aaron-Carl’s father, who was killed in 1987, with a sky-blue house-blues lullaby. Plush drums blanket the ears as his voice does runs, raining below the synth pads, praying for the certainty of an afterlife. In a bravura risk of schmaltz, one of Aaron-Carol’s own sons cries out, “Daddy, I love you.” Imagine hearing that in the club. The first time I heard it—in a bathhouse, of all places—my heart stopped and I gay-gasped. Out of sorrow, of camp incredulity, I don’t know. But I felt it.

And then there’s “Homoerotic.” If Prince made drums sound like fucking, Aaron-Carl made drum machines sound like gay fucking. “Gentlemen, the orgasm starts now,” he announces at the start, and damned if it doesn’t. “Homoerotic” recasts “Down,” the track that made him famous but which he didn’t own, into a mid-tempo phantasmagoria of sweaty tambourines and Astroglide-slick synths. Its lyrics boast of the prowess of his ass, of how a moment with him is “so much better than masturbation.” You believe it. The song is Aaron-Carl’s “Sexy M.F.,” his “Justify My Love,” and in a just world, it would have made him as big as Prince or Madonna. But we know this isn’t one. The song made some waves across the pond as part of a new queer techno movement in Berlin, but never made much of a dent in America’s neon-white electroclash scene.

But wait, he had more. In a serve, the multitude of Uncloseted swells to include defiantly gay rap and R&B. “Coming Out Story (b.i.t.c.h.)” re-introduces his childhood self, swishing through a swaggering take on Teddy Riley-style swing. “It’s tough being a gay boy,” he sings. “Whatcha gonna do when the whole world rejects you?” The only answer is to become “a B.I.T.C.H./Boogie’s in total control of himself.” On “Bring It On,” over a fabulous sample from Gioachino Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville, he stomps on the necks of homophobes. “You say that my kind of love mocks society,” he sneers, licking his lips in a register between Moi Renee and Missy Elliott. “Don’t you know we gon’ fight you back?”

The living-well-is-the-best-revenge ethos of, say, Destiny’s Child, fuels “Ex-Boyfriend (Revenge Is Sweet),” and while there’s maybe a bit too much slut-shaming in his takedown, it’s just bracing to hear gay men talk about breakups this way, with such fearlessness, even 20 years later. He could have sold a classy heartbreak ballad like “Everything” to Brandy and had a smash; it’s so moving to hear him sing it for himself. And it’s a downright revolution to hear the a cappella “Diva’s Chat Interlude,” which could have been a Sweet Pussy Pauline bitch track, performed instead by his young son Stefan, a kid stealing the show once more. “Do you understand me? … Bye-bye, honey,” the boy declares, his proud dad howling with laughter in the background. Feel it, children, indeed.

As for the title track, it’s a manifesto. The wisdom and wooshes reappear this time, bouncing off the walls of a big-room banger. Industrial percussion rattles like chains breaking apart. His voice is deep and booming as he intones: uncensored… unashamed… uncloseted. You can’t miss his distinctive, very queer cadence. You can’t miss the argument that children like him—and maybe like you and me—built this house. For us. The track is a welcome sign for a place where the only thing missing is the closet door.

Again, there’s little justice in this world. Uncloseted, produced and put out entirely by himself, made a few ripples, but failed to ignite like slicker (and straighter) mixes of sass-and-sleaze like Felix da Housecat and Bassment Jaxx did. He toured internationally, parented his kids, and made two more albums ripe with panache. If much of his content was ahead of its time, he was also eager to be of the moment, embracing platforms like MySpace, Blogspot, and Twitter to shit-talk his exes, share news of releases, and generally carry. He headlined Detroit’s Fuse-In (now Movement) Festival in 2005, and a few years later, started the DJ mutual-aid community W.A.R.M.T.H. International. By 2010, he had a major body of work, the respect of his peers, and a big European tour on the calendar. Preparing to leave, he noticed some pain in his stomach. He went to the hospital. A few weeks later Aaron-Carl died of stage 4 lymphoma.

From disco to hyperpop, the history of dance music is plagued by the loss of queer geniuses. Those we do manage to rescue from the closet of history to reexamine in all their splendor—Patrick Cowley, Arthur Russell—tend to be white. Meanwhile, Aaron-Carl’s discography is out of print, much of it unstreamable. For someone who lived his life so vibrantly, his profile in the culture is, at this moment, unforgivably dim.

Aaron-Carl was a singular producer who spent his 37 years conceiving and then queering the major musical movements of the 20th century. He pioneered a riotous variant of ghettotech so flagrant that even straight people couldn’t deny it. He made deathless hi-tech soul 12″s taking morality dead seriously. He made jittery electro-rap that, with its sassy insistence that gay men could get their freak on in bed and behind the mixing board, rivalled both the futurism of the Virginia Beach scene and the retro-futurism of electroclash, hyperpop, the Drag Race hip-house musical diaspora, whatever it is that Hercules and Love Affair and LSDXOXO and Kim Petras are up to. Prince might not have claimed him as a descendant, but Aaron-Carl should have made him proud. “House music can make you do thangs,” he testified in “The Word.” “When you feel it, you will understand.” When you hear Aaron-Carl, you will.