HOME SWEET HOMO That’s My Jam has local flavor.

Photograph: Rachel Chang

When Tikka Masala, a 27-year-old lesbian DJ, first floated the idea of a queer dance night, Vic Black, owner of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, club Sputnik, told her he had tried to throw a pride party two months before and failed. “I think I just don’t know how to promote to gays,” he said then.

Masala did. The September evening That’s My Jam (TMJ) debuted, 400 people poured into Sputnik. It was the biggest crowd the club ever had without a famous headlining DJ. “Gays were the headliner,” Masala laughs. And it’s been snowballing ever since. Masala, who is Indian-American, and copromoter Trent Brooks, 22, who is Caucasian and transgender, are hosting their third event on Saturday 15. Encouraged by the sense that the party got Bed-Stuy queers out of the woodwork, they now want to fill what they see as an absence in the neighborhood through tie-ins with local businesses, artists and a blog.

But it hasn’t been all smooth sailing and rainbows. Ruffled by the newcomers, the proud but underground Bed-Stuy queer establishment wants to set the record straight. To them, TMJ isn’t doing anything for gay ’Stuy but gentrifying a scene that has grown moribund in recent times. Gay party promoters Khane Morris, 36, and Ignacio Riviera, 37, have discontinued all their events in the neighborhood, including performance night Limbo, dance night Sweat and a sexual liberation party called Desire. Before it ended in June, Sweat was pulling in only about 35 people. And Sputnik’s last attempt at a regular gay event, lesbian night Boudoir, ended its run two years ago. Even attendance at Bed-Stuy mainstay the Lab, whose Sexy Sunday nights have drawn 800 attendees in the past, has dwindled to a crowd of about 300, says owner Sean Porter, 44.

Part of the problem is worsening economic times. But a larger issue is the changing of the neighborhood—and the queer demographic along with it. The biggest gay night at the Lab has always been for homothugs, Porter explains—a scene that the skinny-jeaned and kaffiyeh-scarved crowd at TMJ would not blend into. “My party is 90 percent black, 10 percent Hispanic,” he says. “White gay folks and black gay folks operate in different worlds.”

While Porter says that TMJ is the first “white” gay party in the neighborhood, Masala and Brooks prefer to advertise the fact that it’s the first “mixed-queer, all-inclusive” event to get local gays who are not necessarily of color to join in the action. In fact, they are determined to not become a “gentrification problem.” “We want to find ways of bringing local businesses who want to be represented to the community,” she says. At the next TMJ night, there will be a performance and dance lessons from local wellness studio Embora.

Businesses are happy to cash in on the pink dollar, activists have already discovered. Over the last two years, the Audre Lorde Project, an advocacy outfit for people of color, has been putting together a list of places where gays can feel free from threat in the neighborhood. The promoters of TMJ are attempting something similar for their hipster patrons, to the chagrin of Bed-Stuy’s old guard. “There’s more to be done, but they [TMJ] have to recognize that they’re not the first to do it. The way has already been paved,” Morris says.

Despite the criticism, Masala and Brooks are delighted by the flame they have seemed to light. The event has introduced many local queers to one another, them included, they say. Sarah Jenny, 25, a new media artist who moved to the area only a year ago says that TMJ is the first queer dance party she’s been to in Bed-Stuy. “It is really nice to have something in the neighborhood. It is quite the schlep to Metropolitan in Williamsburg,” she says. For some, TMJ has been a step toward making Bed-Stuy home. “I used to go out of the neighborhood to be gay,” says Brooks. For Bed-Stuy queers, that soon may not have to be the case.

That’s My Jam is at Sputnik on Sat 15.