Basement to Mainstage: How Queer DJ Ariel Zetina Is Rewriting the Club Ritual

On a cold December night in Chicago, the line outside smartbar curls around the block hours before doors open. Inside, the booth is stacked with USBs, a laptop, and a single handwritten note taped to the mixer: “For the girls, the dolls, the theys, the bbs.” The person behind the decks is Ariel Zetina, the Chicago-based DJ, producer, and playwright whose genre-bending sets have made her a fixture from underground basements to global festival stages.

This month, Zetina’s schedule has been especially visible, with a string of North American dates and European club bookings positioning her as one of the most talked-about queer DJs closing out the year. At each stop, she treats the dance floor not just as entertainment, but as a collective ritual for queer and trans people to hear themselves—sonically and spiritually—at full volume.

Zetina’s work is inseparable from Chicago’s legacy as the birthplace of house music and as a hub of Black and Brown queer innovation. smartbar, where she holds down a long-running residency, has served for decades as a home for LGBTQ+ club-goers and queer DJs, including icons like Derrick Carter and Honey Dijon. By bringing her own trans, Belizean, and playwright lens into that lineage, Zetina is extending a tradition of experimentation that centers marginalized bodies in sound.

In interviews over the past year, she has consistently described her aim as building “a world within a set” where queer and trans people—especially those of color—can see and feel themselves as protagonists rather than guests. That world is informed by the queer house history of clubs like the Warehouse and the Music Box, where Black gay men and trans women helped shape a sound that would travel the globe.

Across the last 30 days, Zetina’s calendar has showcased the range of her influence. In early December, smartbar announced a special “Queer Futures” night with Zetina headlining and curating a bill of trans and nonbinary DJs and performers, emphasizing a lineup that mirrored the crowd on the floor. Social posts from the venue and from Zetina’s Instagram account highlighted the event’s focus on trans and gender-expansive communities and invited attendees to “come in whatever gender, outfit, or mood feels most euphoric.”

Within the same month, European club listings and festival teasers have positioned Zetina on bills alongside other queer and trans artists, signaling how her sound travels across scenes. A recent event listing on Resident Advisor promoted a Berlin date featuring Zetina with local queer collectives, describing her as “a leading voice in the contemporary fusion of techno, house, and Latin club rooted in trans and queer experience.”

While detailed reviews from these December sets are still emerging, attendee recaps and short clips posted on social media capture recurring elements of her ritual: chopped and layered vocal samples repeating affirmations, sudden drops into bass-heavy polyrhythms, and transitions that move from ballroom to punta to hardcore techno without apology.

Zetina’s music draws directly from her Belizean heritage, a point she has emphasized in interviews and bios for recent releases. By threading punta and other Central American rhythms into Chicago house, techno, and ballroom, she doesn’t just reference a culture—she activates it on the floor, inviting diasporic queer and trans listeners to dance in ways that feel both familiar and newly possible.

For many attendees, this turns the club into something closer to a collective ritual than a standard night out. A short documentary segment produced this fall by Boiler Room ahead of a recent live stream framed Zetina’s sets as “portals,” underscoring how she creates shared emotional peaks designed specifically for queer and trans audiences. In interviews for that segment, Zetina spoke about watching people cry and hug at the end of her sets and how that emotional release is central to her practice.

The visual language surrounding Zetina’s shows is as considered as the music. Recent event photography and social media posts show her in looks that mix club-kid silhouettes with everyday trans femme streetwear: mesh tops over sports bras, heavy eyeliner, chunky jewelry, and nails long enough to tap against the mixer.

This approach is not about spectacle alone. In a Q&A earlier this year, Zetina described dressing for the booth as “a way of signaling who the set is for” and of aligning herself visually with the femmes, girls, and theys in the crowd. Rather than conforming to the minimalist, anonymous look often associated with big-room techno DJs, she leans into an openly queer and trans aesthetic that reads instantly to many in the audience as “one of us.”

That shared visual code extends to the crowd. Photos from her December smartbar and European shows show dance floors filled with mesh, glitter, harnesses, baggy jeans, and thrifted faux-fur, alongside mobility aids, binders, and gender-affirming accessories. For many attendees, these nights become opportunities to test-drive new genders, new pronouns, and new styles in a space where experimentation is expected rather than policed.

Zetina’s use of language in and around her work connects her deeply to queer and trans subcultures. Track titles, event descriptions, and set notes often feature phrases like “the dolls,” “the gworls,” and “the girlies,” terms that have long histories within Black and Brown trans and queer communities.

On flyers and in Instagram captions, these words act as signals, telling potential attendees who the event is centering without needing a lengthy explanation. That specificity matters at a time when mainstream venues may promote “queer-friendly” nights without necessarily building safer spaces for transgender people, nonbinary people, and queer people of color.

When she does get on the mic during a set, short clips show her using that moment to affirm the room—shouting out “all my trans girls,” “all my baddies,” or “everyone who made it out tonight.” These callouts do more than hype the crowd; they recognize survival in a context where queer and trans communities continue to face legislative attacks and increased violence across multiple countries.

In recent months, discussions about safety in nightlife have intensified, especially for transgender women and nonbinary people of color navigating clubs, transportation, and late-night streets. Zetina’s events, like many queer-led parties, address these realities both formally and informally.

Recent flyers for her December shows have included explicit codes of conduct, accessibility notes, and reminders that racist, transphobic, or ableist behavior will not be tolerated. Event descriptions on Resident Advisor for her European dates mention safer-space policies and encourage attendees to look out for one another and contact staff if they feel unsafe.

In previous interviews, Zetina has linked these practices to the lineage of queer community organizing, drawing parallels between the mutual care in club spaces and mutual aid networks that emerged during the HIV/AIDS crisis and continue today. While the contexts differ, the underlying principle is similar: queer and trans people building systems of protection and joy for themselves in the absence of institutional safety.

Zetina’s work as a playwright adds another dimension to how she thinks about queer life. Her plays and performance projects, highlighted in recent arts coverage, incorporate club culture, trans characters, and diasporic narratives, blurring the line between nightlife and theater.

That storytelling background surfaces in how she structures a night. Instead of a purely functional build from warm-up to peak to close, her sets often feel like multi-act narratives: opening with slower, more spacious tracks, rising into dense, percussive climaxes, and closing with emotional or nostalgic selections that leave the crowd singing or swaying together. Audience comments on recent clips describe experiencing “a whole story” or “a full journey” across a single set, language often reserved for theater or film.

By bringing dramaturgical thinking into the booth, Zetina underscores the idea that queer and trans lives are not just aesthetic influences but complete narrative arcs worthy of attention, nuance, and time.

While Zetina’s rising profile has made her visible on a global stage, she remains anchored in local queer ecosystems. Chicago media have noted her presence at community fundraisers, smaller DIY events, and collaborations that channel resources back into trans and queer-led projects. In this way, her current wave of international attention does not signal a departure from community spaces but a redistribution of visibility and opportunity.

Her bookings this month on multi-genre, multi-artist bills also highlight how queer and trans DJs are no longer relegated to token “Pride” nights or late add-ons; instead, they are increasingly positioned as headliners and curators in their own right. This shift reflects the broader influence of queer and trans aesthetics, slang, and sonic experimentation on global music and fashion—an influence that has often gone uncredited even as it shapes mainstream trends.

By insisting on centering trans and queer people of color in her work, Zetina pushes against that erasure. Her current visibility demonstrates how a DJ can carry local subcultural languages—musical, visual, and verbal—across borders without flattening them into generic “club music.”

This month’s flurry of sets and announcements confirms Ariel Zetina as one of the queer artists redefining what club culture can mean in 2025: a space where trans femmes from the Midwest, diasporic kids from the Caribbean and Central America, ballroom legends, baby dykes, nonbinary ravers, and curious allies share a floor built on mutual care rather than spectacle alone.

For many in these rooms, the ritual goes beyond a good night out. It is a chance to hear a bassline that feels like home, to shout along to a chopped-up affirmation that matches the words they use with their friends, to see a DJ whose gender, pronouns, or migration story mirrors their own. On nights like the ones Zetina is leading this month, the dance floor becomes not just a party, but a living, moving snapshot of queer life—loud, specific, and unapologetically centered.