Tale of a gay female dancer

If I get told to think about a man while I dance one more time I’m gonna snap. I’ve been doing this for 19 years, and in that time, I’ve had dances about flirting with men, breaking up with men, chasing after men, shaping up because I needed a man, being in love with men, men, men, men, so many dances about men. 19 years and you know how many men have been on my dance teams? One. Just the one. It’s amazing how much men can be involved when they aren’t in the room half the time.

I just never quite understood what it meant to look flirty. I mean I could smile and bat my eyes and move my hips, sure, but I couldn’t show you flirty if you pulled up the wikihow article and gave me a picture to follow, which I definitely never tried that or anything.

I remember one time, just about everyone in my class was obsessed with Damon from The Vampire Diaries, teacher included, so my teacher pulled up a picture of him on her iPad and put it in front of us while we danced. She’d yell “dance for Damon!” at us every time we ran the dance. It worked like a charm for the rest of the team, but staring at those scary-piercing blue eyes while trying to spot a pirouette just set off my fight or flight instinct. It was like an inside joke that I was a part of from the start but missed the punchline so I had to keep fake laughing whenever it came up.

18 years. That’s how long it took for me to think maybe there’s a reason I don’t get flirty and I don’t get the inside jokes and my heart always got really fluttery when you stood next to this one older girl for warm-ups when you were younger and here’s a hint, baby me, you weren’t just intimidated by her. A whole 18 years for me to even consider that I like girls.

Sometimes I think I’d have figured it out faster if it weren’t for dance. Don’t get me wrong, the dance world was never outwardly homophobic to me, and I’m very lucky in that respect, but there’s just no space for gay women in dance. Our presence is hardly even considered. Yes, I’m very lucky in my experience, but erasure, deliberate or not, does its own kind of damage.

Here’s what I mean. When most people see a man and a woman dancing together, they assume the relationship between them is romantic. A lot of times when it’s two men, people assume the same thing, whether that’s because gay men are associated with dance or because society thinks any relationship between men that involves physical affection is romantic, I can’t say. But when it’s two women, people think they’re friends, sisters, or worse… gal pals. Short of kissing on stage, people just don’t think about gay women in dance. Not as an audience, and in my experience at least, not as choreographers.

I didn’t even have people like me to look up to off stage. Until I got to college, I didn’t meet an out gay female dancer. There were plenty of out gay male dancers to look up to, men who were so confident of how dance helped them to accept their identities, but I’ve never seen any story like that from a woman. When there were no gay women around on stage or off, how was I supposed to consider that I could be one?

There were definitely some things I should’ve noticed. Like how the year I had a dance that required a few of us to dress in more masculine-presenting clothes, no one else on the team wanted to, but I did. Or how I would always get annoyed with how giggly the other girls got when being lifted by a guy because come on y’all, this is just professional, but I was always a little nervous about doing the lifting, but only because I was afraid of dropping my partner! Or how I never understood the way other girls on the team could be so casually touchy with each other, always leaning on shoulders, laying in laps, taking pictures kissing each other on the cheek. I didn’t think I was less close to them, so why did it feel like there was this barrier that neither me nor the other girls could cross? I remember thinking, no you can’t lean on her, she might think you’re trying to flirt or something. But yes, baby me, you’re definitely 100% straight because that’s exactly how straight girls think. That’s what I mean when I say that erasure has its own damage, because I spent those years with half a superiority complex for being not like other girls and half terrified that something was wrong with me, that I was a doomed to always be a bad friend because I was not like other girls. When you never see yourself on stage and never meet someone like you offstage, it makes it hard to figure out exactly who you are.

When I got to college, I realized two things very quickly: one, well. The obvious. Two, there’s no one putting bounds on what I could create. There were stories on the tips of my toes, and all I needed was the people to tell them. So I found a new home as a choreographer, and I met people like me, people who understood my story, who were excited about what I wanted to create. Turns out, the sapphic dancers were there the whole time, and we were all desperate for a space to call our own. I can make that space. Finally, I’m the one who can say people like me deserve the spotlight. I can take a musical like Cabaret and say, I am going to put non-hetero partnerships in my dances because I want to thread those relationships into the fabric of the show. I mean, sure half the time people are going to think we just ran out of men, but I can laugh now because maybe it’s true but the couples are still gay because I say so. Death of the author my ass.

It’s not just putting gay couples on stage though, it’s deeper than that. Making space for people like me means making space to feel and be in ways we haven’t been able to. It means telling women you don’t have to be an object of effortless beauty. You’re allowed to show your strength, your independence, your beauty, your pain, your rage, your sorrow, your unbridled joy. It means learning that the space you occupy is important, and what you feel is real and valid. It means taking the parts of ourselves that dance told us to hide for so long and turning them into our strengths.

I didn’t have someone creating dances or spaces for people like me when I was younger. I didn’t have an older dancer who was loud and proud and out to look to. So that’s why I keep creating. That’s why I’m constantly finding new rainbows to wear or slipping in gay jokes wherever I can. I have to believe that one day, I’ll reach someone, some other young dancer girl maybe, and she’ll see that there’s a space for her. So what if most of the audience misses the point? It was never for them anyway.