Today, there are tons of queer nightlife prospects in Pittsburgh. One five-minute scroll through Instagram will give you the dates, times, and dress codes of a plethora of queer parties at local clubs, bars, and breweries, most of them not explicitly queer venues. But it wasn’t always this way.

At this point, telling a non-Pittsburgher that Pittsburgh is the unlikely home of a surprising number of queer nightlife events and electronic acts might be a cliché…