| Having a ball >> The homo set discover the joys of dancing cheek-to-cheek
by ELEANOR BROWN
“It’s about my search for a love relationship,” says Siddiqi, who brought along a camera crew to tape the ball for his film. He didn’t find what he was looking
for, but Siddiqi did plug into something. His immensely successful queer
ballroom night in Montreal was just the latest sign of the resurgence
of old-time dancing in the homo world. Others appear to agree. In Ottawa, couples jived during the city’s Pride weekend. Ballroom crazes are growing in Vancouver and New York City. And more than 1,000 of ballroom’s kissing cousins met in Toronto this summer for the annual convention of the International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs.
This fall’s Sydney Gay Games will feature dancing for only the second time, and 200 couples are expected to caper through Modern Ballroom, Latin American and New Vogue (an Australian specialty that involves bobbing about in a counter-clockwise circle). There’s even a wheelchair section. Siddiqi had been listening to a lot of waltzes last winter, recalling that his father had never taught him the basic steps, though he’d asked as a child. “I wanted to bring something fun and passionate back into my life. What’s special about ballroom is the idea of doing it with a partner, it’s like a relationship—having to listen to someone, guide someone, navigate amongst other couples and other people.” And of course, there are no rules about who must lead and who must follow when the couples are of the same sex. Siddiqi is learning to switch. “Anybody can do whatever they want, we have the freedom to invent our own roles. Just like within our community.” Others, like Miriam Ginestier, have their roles fully planned out. “If you follow a good leader, it’s the only way you get swept off your feet, there’s a real Cinderella feeling,” she says. “It does feel kind of naughty. “It’s a pleasure, a structure
where if you want to you can go real girly or real butch—it’s
got that fantasy realm thing going. It’s innocent and wholesome
but naughty, at the same time.”
But that didn’t stop anyone from looking good. Although there was no dress code advertised, everyone was one was done up to the nines. It was a very mixed event—the 100 who showed up included a handful of heterosexuals. Many had attended a series of workshops beforehand—the very simple fox-trot takes five minutes to memorize. Ginestier, herself a huge fan who failed at creating a lesbian tango league a few years ago, is excited about the new interest and is now planning a ball every season. And the next one will be more flirtatious, she promises, with dance cards and pencils distributed to encourage the ritual of asking for a dance. It wasn’t so hard for women to ask each other to dance back in the day when the city’s bars played cha-cha-chas and Big Band. So many straight men hated the two-step that it was perfectly normal for girls to dance together, says sociologist Line Chamberland, who has made a study of local lesbian history. “It was much more innocent.” Everything changed if they were obviously lesbian and slow-dancing together. At the old Pont de Paris, a popular lezzie hangout that opened in the 1950s, the women were warned if police were in the room (and they could be arrested on charges of “indecency”). “And there was another bar, La Cave, where a light in the corridor would blink if there were police,” says Chamberland. In this mixed gay and lesbian establishment of the 1960s, everyone would quickly switch to opposite gender partners. Setting off a macho riot Things were very different for men. According
to queer historian Ross Higgins, most early bars were mixed straight
and gay, and the idea was to be discrete. Dancing together would have
caused a macho riot. Finally, Monroe demanded that the men be allowed to dance together. Management was not happy. But in the summer of 1957, Montreal’s very first public gay male ballroom dancing took place. The men loved it; the police didn’t. One gay man told Higgins that he was arrested as late as 1965 at a Peel Street bar for same-sex dancing. No matter the repression, we couldn’t stop dancing. Today, we call ourselves a dancing people. The rhythm of the music and the dance are an integral part of the culture. As Higgins notes, “If a person walking into a gay bar was making a symbolic step in the construction of his gay self-identity, his first steps on the dance floor marked the beginning of his connection to gay culture.” |
Atif
Siddiqi has sheepishly discovered that he’s not so good at giving
up control. A friend gently told a resisting Siddiqi the news while
trying to lead an old-fashioned ballroom dance step. Still, it was probably
a good thing. The local filmmaker wanted men to meet the real him—and
dozens showed up to the party Siddiqi held to find himself a boyfriend.