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But All Dancing Gets Canned in the Castro! To Dance or Not to Dance?—That is the Question |
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By Jack Nichols
I well remember a time when dancing was forbidden. In mid-1950s Washington, D.C.— Saturday night after-the-bars parties then provided the one venue where "cutting the rug" was permissible. Only two infamous dance bars on America's East Coast existed–both considered illegal by Percy Policemen. In 1956 I visited one of those bars, the C'est Soir, located on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
There, in a seedy back room, a few beer-tight romantics--coupled and shuffling, clung together like frightened monkeys in the semi-darkness— stealing a few moments of fractured joy that heterosexual couples took lazily for granted.
A singular light bulb, hanging in pure ugliness on a wire in the room's center , lit up whenever unknown personages entered the bar's outer premises. The lit bulb signaled that the dancers must break stride and sit on surrounding chairs like chastened wallflowers until the bartender felt assured he wasn't serving Percy Policeman.
Much later, in San Francisco, I befriended a handsome student who worked as a bartender in the Castro district. He's since moved on, but the popular bar where he worked, The Midnight Sun, remains. It came as a shock on the first day of 1999 to read in the San Francisco Weekly that not only has dancing been banned at The Midnight Sun, but that its now been forbidden throughout the Castro. Hey, is this 1955 or something? Can we still kiss? In contrast to this dreary Castro news, The New York Times reported on the same first day of the year that on campus "Tripping the Light Fantastic" is all the rage. At the University of Pennsylvania, for example, fifteen hundred undergraduates "were languishing on dance class waiting lists; on Friday nights, the ballroom dance club was overwhelmed trying to teach hundreds how to cha cha and fox trot." Yup, the fox trot, a dance I learned to do when I was eight, has returned. And what else has returned? Benny Goodman, Red Nichols, Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey, commonplace names of a half century ago, are in. Latino rhythms, ever enticing, are back. Slow dancing felt sexy and romantic because it gave us all a chance to get close, to feel intimate before deciding to get intimate. As I moved into my twenties, prior to any success gay and lesbian liberation would later know, I made a pact with myself at the late-night parties. Because I wanted to make sure that the guys I was attracted to weren't self-hating closet cases, I'd first ask them—after brief conversations-- to dance. Macho mental midgets—gay as gooses—would usually reply scornfully: "I don't dance with men." Enough said. Next? It came as something of a shock the first time I saw people dancing apart-- doing The Twist. In fact I remember exactly where I was—in Pittsburgh at an all-black club where, on an upraised dance floor, it was impossible to tell who was dancing with whom. That, according to an alarmist article I read shortly thereafter, was the problem. This article, appearing in 1961 in the Sunday magazine of a Washington newspaper, warned that people dancing by themselves offered a sure sign that social disorientation was right around the corner. Dance, said the writer, reflects social values. Dancing by oneself, he thought, would bring about a sure end to human unity. I disagreed. As dancing without touching took over, human postures improved. Men, for the first time, learned that they could do what Elvis Presley had been forbidden to do-- to shake his hips on the Ed Sullivan Show. And believe it, this was progress. In any case, it seemed somehow sad that the new dancing—dancing done alone—was taking over so completely. Why couldn't the two forms—dancing either alone or touching together—remain for those who liked them, side by side?
And now that Swing is back and ballroom dancing is once again in style, I beg only one thing of all fellow dancers: please, please never give up altogether on the joys of wiggling in wild, singular solitary abandon. Could it happen? Who would ever have once thought that the fox trot and the cha cha could disappear for forty years?
Better yet, why not create new forms? Disco-Swing, anyone? |
© 1997-98 BEI