On a Saturday night in early April, the worn wooden floors of Babes Bar in Bethel were packed with patrons who had turned up for the venue’s popular “Queer Dance Party.”

When DJ GenderEnder played Lady Gaga’s new dance track “Abracadabra,” the crowd leapt into the air in an ecstatic frenzy.

“All the queers are out of the woodwork,” said Bea, a trans woman who’d made the 40-minute trek from Plainfield to attend the event. “People show up from all over.”

They come for the music, and for the DJs who play it.

In the Upper Valley, DJing is rarely a full-time gig. The people who do it work day jobs, and a couple are even students at Vermont Law and Graduate School in South Royalton. They make a little money doing shows, but being a DJ fulfills a different type of need.

“I am providing a service to the people, and I love that. I love that that is something I can give back to my community in that way,” said Jordyn Fitch aka DJ GenderEnder.

Fitch’s fondness for queer hyper-pop has roots in a longstanding affinity for the trans dance music artist SOPHIE.

“That sort of world that she opened up through computer music has just always really inspired me and no one was playing it,” said Fitch, 26, who came out as trans in 2020, the same year they graduated from Dartmouth College.

The next year, Fitch decided to try their hand at DJing after observing a workshop by Sean Hay at JAM, a media arts nonprofit in White River Junction where Fitch works as a production manager and producer. “I was like wait, I could do this,” they said.

Hay runs the entertainment business LiveMixKings and over the years has taught DJing classes to youth at the Upper Valley Music Center in Lebanon. 

Fitch uses a mixing board and laptop, as do many of the other DJs in the Upper Valley. Some however, such as Chico Eastridge, aka DJ Suave Sweatstain, take an old school approach, mixing solely from vinyl records. Eric Johnson, or DJ Skar, combines the two, using a program from Serato, a music software company.

Since their first gig at JAM’s New Years Eve party in 2022, Fitch has played sets at venues such as White River Junction’s Main Street Museum, Sawtooth Kitchen Bar and Restaurant in Hanover and Babes. But no matter what room they’re in, their target audience is always queer people.

“If straight people are there and they like it, awesome, I love that. But in my heart of hearts, I’m playing for my community, I’m playing the music I know gets them going,” Fitch said.

Like Fitch, hosting Latin nights at Sawtooth and at the Black Lives Matter House in South Royalton as DJ Chele has helped Ethan Avendaño deepen his connection with his Salvadoran heritage and the Latino community in the Upper Valley.

Raised in Hartford, Avendaño, 34, never really felt like he belonged. He grew up without his dad, who was deported when Avendaño was a baby, and for a long time, that part of his identity felt out of reach.

“All I knew about El Salvador was that there was pain and there was trauma,” he said.

Growing up, he used Latin music as a “teaching tool” to learn Spanish, so that when he met his family, he would be ready.

In 2019, Avendaño reunited with his dad and encountered a different El Salvador, one full of family gatherings centered around music and dance.

Not long after his trip, Latin artists Bad Bunny and J Balvin released their albums “El Último Tour Del Mundo” and “Colores,” which imagined a solidarity among Latino people beyond geographical and cultural boundaries.

“There’s this sense, coming out of the pandemic, that there’s this common cause, this common unity, this family,” Avendaño said.

Galvanized by this groundswell of Latin pride, in late 2020, Avendaño started DJing Latin nights in South Royalton with the help of Nando Jaramillo, who runs the agricultural nonprofit Moon & Stars.

“I started to see more Latinos in one place than I’ve ever seen in the Upper Valley ever,” Avendaño said.

These days, “Latin Dance Parties” filled with reggaeton, salsa and cumbia rhythms have found permanent spots on the calendar at Sawtooth. “Now it’s (grown) into something where it’s therapeutic,” Avendaño said.

DJing has also made it easier for Avendaño to be a part of the party. “I don’t do well in crowds, so if I can be behind a table and people aren’t around me and everyone’s over there,” that’s better.

Many of the DJs I talked to said they found a similar freedom behind the booth.

“I get social anxiety really, really bad, so sometimes it can be too much for me, so it’s nice that I get to experience it with a little barrier,” Fitch said.

Eastridge works with Fitch at JAM, and they compare notes about the DJ’s craft. “I don’t think many people would consider me shy, but I feel shy,” Eastridge, 38, said.

But behind his turntables, as DJ Suave Sweatstain, wearing shiny, ultra-short jumpsuits and kitschy sunglasses, Eastridge is a live wire. “I try to set the bar at like ‘you can be at least this crazy, and it will be OK,’ ” he said.

Upper Valley DJs might be shy off stage, but they’re confident in their taste and often reluctant to make concessions for their audience by accepting song requests. “I am not DJ Jukebox,” Johnson said. 

Ish Abdullah, a student at Vermont Law and Graduate School, decided to try DJing after going to a club in Hawaii and realizing he could probably do a better job than the DJ mixing. Abdullah is part of SoRo House Mafia, a DJ collective that was formed last year by a handful of law students and a resident from South Royalton.

This kind of obstinance begs the question: is the DJ in service to the audience, or is it the other way around? “I’m doing it for me,” Eastridge said. “And everyone else is doing it for me.”

If that’s true, it doesn’t seem to matter to audiences who pack venues like Sawtooth, Babes and the Black Lives Matter House on weekends. After all, in a rural area like the Upper Valley, there are only so many nightlife options, or DJs, to choose from.

Audiences don’t always mind if a set gets a little messy, either. At a show for students of Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, Hay played a song that immediately fell flat. Acknowledging the flop, he ran a sound effect of chirping crickets, then launched into a Pitbull track. The crowd gave a big laugh, their energy renewed.

“Up here in the Upper Valley, they allow you to do that stuff, you don’t have to be so professional and tight,” he said. “That’s my favorite part of it.”

Limited options also means that the barrier to becoming a DJ is pretty low.

While living in Boston in the early 2000s, Eastridge found it hard to get events off the ground because “you needed a certain amount of social clout to get anyone out to anything.”

“When I moved back up here, I found it really easy to just kind of do whatever I want. Like you can throw a dance party and know that you’re throwing the best dance party in like a hundred miles,” he said.

That might be a good thing for newcomers who want to try DJing, but it also means audiences often are less discerning.

“In the Upper Valley, I do notice that it is less your quality and expertise; they want to hear something they know,” said Johnson, who lives in Hartford. 

Raised in Chicago, Johnson has been spinning since he was 8 years old. Now 52, he’s more than put in his 10,000 hours mixing reggae, soul, funk and hip hop on vinyl and digital.

“I cut other DJs and leave them scarred,” he said, hence the name.

While he recently got a job at the Jiffy Mart in Quechee to bring in some extra funds during the slow season, for the most part, he’s been able to make a living doing what he loves, even in a rural place like the Upper Valley.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t limitations to what he can play.

“Here, people like hip hop, but they like it in private,” said Johnson, who is Black. “When they bob their heads, they feel guilty about enjoying the music.”

During the pandemic, he started a weekly Zoom show called DJ Skar Live and Direct that he still hosts today. Unlike at the in-person shows, when he’s streaming, Johnson can play what he likes.

In our interview, Fitch brought up Revolution-owner Kim Souza’s motto that “In White River Junction, we make our own fun.”

Upper Valley DJs aren’t so different. “We recognize that it can get kind of dull here sometimes if you’re not making your own fun, so that’s kind of the piece that we play,” Fitch said.

Marion Umpleby can be reached at mumpleby@vnews.com or 603-727-3306.