Electro boy: DJ Larry Tee on RuPaul, Lady Bunny, getting clean, the death of house music, and his new CD, The Electroclash Mix. (music).

"We used to have stars," says an excited DJ Larry Tee. "We had Grace Jones; we had Divine. You were excited to see them. Now? It's these housewives singing 'I Am What I Am' over and over." He laughs as he disses the current state of house music, but he's serious. "People are "becoming immune to house," he continues. "You walk into [New York City club] Splash, and they're playing Livin' Joy's [1994 club hit] "Dreamer" because there are no new hits. I don't think they even really hear it anymore."

Tee's remedy? Electroclash, the latest hybrid of 1980s electro music (think New Order's "Confusion" or Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock") with modern techno and old-school new wave rock attitude. The chief purveyors of the sound are artists like Peaches, Fischerspooner, and Adult, and Tee's mission is to make them household names--or at least as popular as Grace Jones--by spinning theft records everywhere he goes. And he's gone a lot of places.

Starting in his hometown of Atlanta, Tee's DJ style was always progressive, even back in the early 1980s when "you'd play Depeche Mode for these queens and they thought it was wild," he says. "But Atlanta was fabulous. We had a great time there. In our crew we had RuPaul and the Lady Bunny, who at the time were both just learning theft tricks. I really feel Atlanta was the birthplace of contemporary drag culture. We had some mean, nasty drag shows there."

In 1989, Tee relocated to New York with RuPaul. ("Our only plan was to get out of Atlanta," he recalls. "We flipped our van on the interstate. We were fine, but lots of wigs and heels were injured.") Along with Bunny, Tee and RuPaul quickly became staples of that city's club life. After creating the celebrity-magnet Love Machine party and the infamous Disco 2000 party with the even more infamous Michael Alig, and writing RuPaul's breakthrough hit, "Supermodel," Tee responded to success in a routine manner: He became a drug addict.

"Now I'm proud to say I'm 5 1/2 years clean, thanks to Narcotics Anonymous,' beams Tee. But getting clean also meant that the music stopped sounding exciting. "Then a friend took me to see Fischerspooner, and that was all she wrote," he says. "I was in heaven. They're like Cirque du Soleil. Then the other bands got all up in my face at the same time." Tee's nightclub, Berliniamsburg, became the home of a new generation of club kids looking for the next thing. Mix CDs of new electro artists (including the recently released The Electroclash Mix by Tee), a New York festival in October 2001, and an Electroclash tour followed, not to mention pages and pages of coverage in hip style magazines. "This music is now just barely in stores, and those magazines are saying it's already dead," Tee says, laughing. And in that whirlwind of activity, Tee also found time to build a relationship with fashion photographer Conrad Ventur; they've been together 2 1/2 years.

Meanwhile, the musical subculture Tee helped build is lighting a fire under more traditional DJs looking to add some new sounds to their sets. "Even [circuit party DJ] John Blair plays some electro now. That's something," he says with evangelical zeal. "And the audience is changing too. We have a whole new generation of girls in the scene who are just genius. They're smart and funny, and they mix with the boys. I never thought it was healthy for gay men and lesbians to be so segregated."