14. Gay Line Dancing, Gay Partner Dancing
Forbidden dance is back.
I’ve taken dance classes. Group dancing is especially fun, where many people know the same steps that they share through demonstration and basic lessons at the top of the event. It is usually a very dorky group of people gathered in a gymnasium with the lights fully on, many of them quite elderly. This has been my experience of contra dancing, for example, which looks like a rowdier version of what you might see in a film adaptation of a Jane Austen novel. I’ve also enjoyed circle dancing, mostly at the Golden Festival, which I first attended fifteen years ago (???), and where they don’t really teach you anything, but you’re inevitably sucked into the spiral of people holding hands around the musicians, getting tighter and tighter and more delirious as the night gets later and later. Social dancing is a wonderful act, and I hope it keeps making the comeback it seems to be making, in queer communities anyway. With more masking.
This summer, it seemed like I suddenly heard about all these social dancing events being run by queer community members. A lot of the other group dancing events I described above seemed inherently queer, but it was not explicitly stated. Explicit queer dancing is back.
Partner dancing is another beast. I’ve attended partner classes with a male partner and solo, and the hostility one is greeted with as a solo woman in that scenario is pretty shocking. It’s possible they saw me showing up alone as a desperate foray into man-stealing, but I’d have to be really far gone to expect a lot of available straight men at a waltz class. I remember how surprised some couples seemed to be that we would switch partners and experience dancing with others as a way to improve dancing with the person we brought. Once, a couple stepped out of the group to dance alone together in a corner, refusing to participate in partner swapping. This is a metaphor for something, but I’m not sure what. A refusal to learn and grow outside your relationship? A lack of trust? Or maybe some people watched their furtive corner shuffle and saw profound devotion. Dancing, like all art, is open to interpretation and the viewer brings the meaning with them.
At the queer partner dancing class I went to this fall, there was also an issue with switching partners, but it read more as people being too shy to meet a new person. And it was extremely crowded, making it impossible to form a neat line to go down trading places. This was my POV, anyway, and probably as biased as my judgment of all those straight couples I’d seen in the past. The event was at Ginger’s Bar; the back room where we gathered got cramped. I went with my friend Kelsey and we did stick together, no swapping. To be real, I don’t think I got better at dancing at this event. Each pair had to choose who would be the lead and who would follow. When dancing with a man, women are obligate follows. In life, I tend to be a lead in a lot of scenarios so I was one that night as well. That was too bad for Kelsey, because she had to follow someone who didn’t know what they were doing. Despite the chaos and lack of tangible skill learning, the vibe was good.
The vibe was also good at Stud Country, a line dancing event I went to several times in this year of new experiences while I was in Los Angeles. Line dancing sneaks into all of our lives from time-to-time, even if it’s just at weddings doing the Electric Slide. I did not grow up in a world where it was common practice, though, so it is still novel to me that there are regular dance steps to specific songs that large groups of people know and spend their Saturday nights doing together. The venue for this event was huge, with a stage and plenty of floor space and seating for people on line dance breaks. I went with different friends the three times I attended and retained nothing after I left. But during the night, there were moments when my feet would do what I wanted them do and I moved in synch with the crowd, swaying, turning, bending snapping, dipping, and spinning all at the same time. A bunch of micro-organisms swirling together into a larger formation. To no purpose! Which is why it’s fun.
Stud Country has songs intended for partner dancing as well, but there weren’t any demos the nights I attended. Most of the crowd stood and watched just a few couples two-step, looking romantic and outside of time. Dancing, whether it’s extremely formal or loosey-goosey, contains so much history in every movement, from the impulse to sway in tandem that first overtook us in the primordial ooze to the strict structures imposed by culture, timing, ceremony.
I don’t like to write about being queer much because it’s kind of a private thing or a matter-of-fact thing, for me personally. There are also a lot of people who do it better. To break that streak, I’ll write that watching queer people dance together is very healing, because it’s like getting to see them exist in this world where they’re not always witnessed or named, even in crafts they created or innovated in their own communities to begin with. I don’t see myself as having a claim on that creativity either—I am not a dancer and certainly not a person with a marginalized identity, not even in my sexuality. Bisexuals are very yawn.
I have thought, though, that if I didn’t know gay people existed when I was growing up, I would have considered it at some point anyway. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. And in the past, when I’ve danced as the obligate follow in a heterosexual relationship, it was alienating in a way I wouldn’t understand if there wasn’t another visible option.
So, if there’s some part of you that is itching to be expressed, go and do a dance about it. The right person might see and join and before you know it, it’s a party.
Wow! Sorry for the long delay, I’m sure you missed these random ass posts. I was sick and then it was the Lost Week (Dec. 25-Jan. 1). I only have about seven weeks until I turn 40, and I have about 25 more posts to do, so please expect a LOT of posts to come. And I’m always looking for events, ideas, and friends who want to drag me to a new thing :) I will finish this project by god. Or not, we shall see.
Big Apple Ranch is a queer line dancing night in NYC, if anyone on the east coast is intrigued. It really has that middle school gym dance vibe to it.
And with some investigation, the event at Ginger’s Bar has led me to a whole slew of mixers and dance events for queer people on Eventbrite. Make some friends and enemies ASAP.
The idea of refusing to dance with someone else gives me hives, but it's mostly because I'm shocked that someone would refuse instructions from an instructor/authority person.