Queer Dance: Waacking, Jacking, Flagging, Shenanigans, and Voguing

Mickey Weems and Christopher Davis

This essay addresses the following question: Is there such a thing as queer dance? The quick
answer is “Yes.” The context of queer dance in America, however, is deeply entwined with
African American folklife, theatre dance folklife, the evolution of social media and recording
technologies, and the emergence of queer communities after Stonewall. These five guidelines
inform this paper:

1. Queer dance is not synonymous with queers dancing, but rather consists of dances that
originated in queer safe spaces: enclaves in which they were the majority and set the rules.

2. Queer dance folklife intersected with not only the embodied folklife of the African American
community, but also the folklife of theatre dance as an institution. As one of many folk dance
communities with a passion for superb technique, theatre dance has had an interdependent
relationship with African American folk kinaesthetics and innovation since the 1940s (and queer
folk kinaesthetics in the new millenium) to maintain its continued relevance as the authority of
American dance sophistication performed onstage.

3. The appearance of distinctly queer genres has been dependent upon emergent mass media
and queer liberation movements since 1969. This paper only reports what has been discovered
thus far and should not be considered the final word.

5. Most queer dance genres in this paper evolved with disco and house music, which has roots
in African American popular music going back to ragtime and the primacy of the 4/4 time
signature.

5. In addition, queer dance is invariably scandalous and always political, regardless of its
context, because queerness is inevitably framed as a politically volatile topic. In addition, the
politicization of queer dancing is overwhelmingly linked to rejection of toxic masculinity by queer
men and trans women, thus does not reflect other expressions of queer identity with the same
vigor.

This essay begins with African American popular dance, innovation, and queer visibility in terms
of its relationship with music, recording, and mass media since the late 1800s. It then moves to
queer dance genres in the USA after Stonewall, and their relationship to disco, DJ culture, and
house music. Finally, there is a brief outline of challenges the dance community faces with the
pandemic.

With the rapidly changing folkscape in an increasingly destabilized America, queer folklore
scholarship in the Age of COVID 19 and catastrophic climate change provides future
generations with information that may help our species meet the challenges in a world that can
no longer afford heteronormalized toxic masculinity and the threat it poses to human survival.
The Liberation of African American Dance and Music

When observing that a song in blues or Gospel is not sung the same way twice by the same
artist, African American folklorist Gerald Davis stated, "Imitation is a form of play. But imitation in
Black culture is like child's play when invention is the expectation and character of play in
African American performance."1 Expectation for playful, spontaneous innovation applies to
dance as well as music.

The African-Americanization of popular American music and dance started with ragtime, a
genre born in African American saloons and sex-for-hire establishments around 1897-1920.
Ragtime is marked by the introduction of rhythmic variations originating in peoples stolen from
West and Central Africa and preserved in spirit-filled church services. Ragtime swept across
America because of its hipness. The earliest references to "hip" as "in the know" originate in the
Age of Ragtime.2 "Hip" and “gay” in the early 1900s could refer to almost anything, including
dress, speech, music, art, and dance that changed with the times, as well as unregulated sex
and illegal drugs. “Hip" and "gay" evoked the back alleys and shady establishments where one
could procure forbidden things.

The rapid spread of ragtime was made possible by the production of commercially available
recordings. Ragtime circumvented social barriers that separated African Americans from the
more numerous (and in more than a few places, murderous) European Americans. These same
audio-visual technologies brought forth phonograph records and movies featuring the first
openly queer African American stars in ragtime, jazz, and blues, including Tony Jackson, Ma
Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley. There were also drag balls, elaborate debutante
events for socially-perceived men to come out publicly as glamorous women (along with same-
sex couples dancing), and the pansy craze, cabarets that featured entertainment by openly
queer staff. There is evidence of queers dancing in the late nineteenth century, but not queer
dances, not yet.

Movies spread ragtime dances across the nation in the time it took the films to reach cinema
houses that were popping up everywhere as the twentieth century progressed. Along with
ragtime came hip "modern dances," including the one-step (a dance done to the 4-count pulse,
which in turn inspired a stampede of animal dances3) that also originated in African American
communities.

Modern dances should not be confused with modern dance, a genre of theatre dance (along
with ballet and later, contemporary dance) that arose in the same decades, but without the
African American-derived elements of popular dance. Until swing and the influence of African
American scholar-dancer Katherine Dunham as well as anthropologist-folklorist Zora Neale
Hurston, theatre dance in early twentieth century America segregated its two genres (ballet and

1 Davis, The Performed Word, 1982.

2 There is a reference to "hip" in G.V.Hovart's’ novel, Jim Hickey, A Story of the One-Night Stands. New
York: G. W. Dillingham Company, 1904 (15).
3 Kélina Gotman, Choreomania: Dance and Disorder, Oxford, NYC (2018) 285. Turkey trot, grizzly bear,
and bunny hug were popular animal dances done with the one-step.
modern) from the rich folklife of the African American community in its pursuit of kinaesthetic
European purity. Isadora Duncan, one of the brightest lights in modern dance, created a
sanitized pseudo-classical Greek fantasy to legitimize her modifications as natural, eternal in
spirit, liberating for women, and free of the strictures of ballet.4 Nevertheless, Duncan’s
obsession with feminine form and movement in her choreography (“the mission of the woman’s
body and the holiness of all its parts,” as she said in her essay, “The Dancer of the Future” 5) can
arguably be read as distinctly queer kinaesthetic expression, rooted in Duncan’s homoerotic
desire and her relationships with, and performances for, American lesbians of note in their Paris
salons from 1900 to 1910.6

Ragtime morphed into jazz, and with jazz came swing, the name for both the music (typically
with a 4-count pulse) and dance that was popular from the ‘30s through the ‘50s. Swing initially
carried the same stigma as ragtime: it was too sensuous, too undisciplined, and too Black for
respectable folk of any race.7 But over time, the sophisticated rhythms and nuances of swing
made their way into movies, Broadway musicals, and the fine arts represented by theatre
dance.

The 1950s also were a time when gay men could only dance together legally by doing line
dances (with at least one woman in the line) such as the Madison, which anthropologist Esther
Newton says was possibly created in a queer safe space in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, so that
men could dance together.8

The Dance Revolution Will Be Televised

In 1957, American Bandstand debuted nationally on American television.9 Performance was

rendered as ordinary as possible. There were no costumes, no preset choreography, no
proscenium, just young, heteronormal, European American kids dancing the latest steps on an
open dance floor. Not just anyone could be on the show, however; the dancers had to look good
and be good at what they did, and some of them became stars in their own right. As swing gave
way to rock and roll as well as rhythm and blues (and a few African Americans made it on the
show), many dances no longer required the couple to touch each other at all, such as the mash
potato, the Watusi, the jerk, and the twist. Couples still danced with each other when they did
the monkey or the tighten up, but they did not necessarily touch or even match each other's
moves.

4 Ann Daly, Done Into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America, Middleton, CN: Wesleyan, 1995 (93-110).
5 Isadora Duncan, The Art of the Dance, New York: Theatre Arts, 1969 (63)
6 In “Dancing Greek Antiquity in Private and Public: Isadora Duncan's Early Patronage in Paris” (Dance
Research Journal Vol. 44, No. 1 (Summer 2012) 5-27), Samuel N. Dorf describes Duncan’s work in Paris at a time
when homoerotic dance performances by women set in classical Greek settings and themes were popular.
7 There were moments when ragtime, jazz, and blues artists referred to queer behavior in songs such as
"Prove It on Me Blues" and "Sissy Man Blues."
8 Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town. Durham, NC:
Duke, 1993.
9 Jake Austen, TV-a-Go-Go: Rock on TV From American Bandstand to American Idol, Chicago Review
(2005) 29-30.
By the mid-1960s, couple's dances became less prevalent than the new individualized dances
coming from the African American community. Individualism further found an icon in the go-go
dancer, a single person on a platform who danced alone with no preset choreography. Music
was no longer live, and DJ culture went international in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s with the
ubiquitous 4/4 pulse.

Queer Roots: DJ Culture, 1969, and Disco

DJ culture had roots in World War II France when people danced in discotheques, discreet
spaces that played African American jazz records as a form of resistance to the Third Reich.10
Régine Zylberberg, a Jewish woman who spent her early years hiding from the Nazis in
Southern France, claimed to be the first discaire (disc jockey/DJ or music selector) as she
played dance records at the Whisky Agogo in 1953 Paris, transforming the venue into a popular
post-war discotheque11 and starting a French trend that gained popularity in 1960s Britain and
the USA. Two Manhattan discotheques with go-go boys, Arthur’s and the Sanctuary, were hip,
sexy, and safe spaces for gender nonconformists and homoerotic-romantic desire.

Everything changed during the summer of 1969. On June 28 of that year, a decrepit nightclub
for queers in Manhattan was the site of a wholesale shift in humanity's understanding of its most
basic embodied identity: the man/woman dichotomy. In America, queer men were seen as a
threat to the state because they were deemed a threat to the military, and cross-dressing in
public was illegal for socially perceived women and men. But physical resistance by gender
nonconformists after a police raid of the Stonewall Inn made international headlines with two
days of nonlethal insurrection, then simmered down the next day, possibly due to rain and the
performance of humor by queens in drag who danced in a can-can line in front the riot police (à
la the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, chanting, "We are the Stonewall Girls/We wear our hair
in curls/We wear no underwear/We show our pubic hair"), then ran away. The general public
was already conditioned to find queers amusing; crossdressing in movies, children's cartoons,
and live television was a sure way to get a laugh. The Stonewall Uprising was not the first queer
uprising in the USA. Resistance was reported a few years before Stonewall in cities such as Los
Angeles and San Francisco.12 Stonewall was different because it was an international media
sensation that allowed humanity to confront the mindless bullying committed in defense of
men's supremacy, and to embrace unrestricted gender expression and erotic-romantic options,
unfettered by obsession with procreation and heteromasculine dominance over women.

Stonewall did not occur in isolation that summer. The first worldwide live televised broadcast
occurred when the unarmed Apollo 11 spacecraft safely landed on the moon, uniting humanity
in a common bond as our species peacefully achieved its first off-planet landing. Woodstock
(August 15-18) was likewise nonviolent: A half a million unarmed and unpoliced bodies, soaked
in rain and caked in mud, congregated in a way that precluded violence as they danced, did

10 Albert Harry Goldman, Disco, Hawthorn, New York 23, 1978.

11 Hugh Schofield, “No Holding Back French Disco Diva” BBC News, 24 October 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4372150.stm
12 Weems 82-95.
drugs, made friends, and made love as anxious authorities prepared to send in armed enforcers
(miraculously, they did not). Woodstock and Stonewall (and in terms of perceived
demilitarization, the moonshot) undermined the toxic masculinity that almost led to humanity’s
extinction in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis.

Once Stonewall gave the world gay liberation, spaces for queers flourished as never before
since pre-fascist Berlin. In Manhattan, activism went hand in hand with celebration and the
enthusiastic hunt for casual sex. It was also manifested in dance fundraisers for gay liberation
organizations and the tradition of men taking their shirts off indoors (which happened as early as
1970 in the Firehouse, a former firehouse-turned-gay-activist center).

As gay men danced together in large numbers, they generated their own folklife. Manhattan
venues opened and closed as the fickle gay male crowd sought the latest hip establishment
(lesbians had their own dance club: Sahara13), DJs in gay men’s clubs mastered the basics of
DJ culture, such as slip-cueing: playing one song after another without a break in the beat. This
was done by timing the spin of vinyl records on two turntables, switching from one record to the
other on the 32-count of a song. It also led to the 12-inch single, a vinyl record with one song on
each side that featured an extended introduction and conclusion, rendering it easier to mix into
the next song.14

Refinement of technique ran parallel to the production of dance music with a steady 4-on-the-
floor pulse and hi-hat after each beat, liberal use of strings and horns, typically female singers,
and sexy lyrics. This was the Age of Disco, a genre that captured the international imagination
as being, hip, fun, hedonistic, and suspiciously gay. In 1974, an upscale and exclusively gay
male nightclub called the Flamingo opened in Manhattan. In addition to a dance floor, it featured
a back room for sex. There was a theatre architectural connection to disco - the exclusively gay
male Saint and the all-inclusive yet elitist Studio 54 were formerly theatres.

Dancing shirtless in a sea of men while higher than God became a thing in gay men’s dance
spaces since the wildly popular fundraiser dances at the Firehouse. Most likely, the Flamingo
featured an unnamed genre (henceforth labeled “shenanigans”) situated in a basic two-step
done in place between two men facing each other so that they could then stick their hands down
each other’s pants to a pumping disco beat. Another option was “bruising”: men slam their
crotches against each other to the beat. Shenanigans can currently be found wherever gay men
of any ethnicity in America gather in large numbers to dance, take their shirts off, and get
intoxicated.

The Age of Disco occurred soon after the debut of Soul Train, a televised show that billed itself
as “The Hippest Trip in America.” Soul Train featured African American dancers and was
dedicated to an African American audience. Like American Bandstand, Soul Train featured
13 Mickey Weems: “I learned about Sahara in 2010 from Leslie Cohen and Beth Suskin, models for the
Gay Liberation monument in Christopher Park across from the Stonewall Inn, Manhattan.”
14 Many of the top DJs were Italian American men, such as Nicky Siano, Dave Mancuso, Francis
Grasso, Michael Cappella, and Steve D’Acquisto. Grasso is said to have perfected the slip-cue, and was
also a go-go boy before finding fame as a DJ, as was his mentor, Terry Noël.
attractive young people who danced in an open space with no proscenium. Dancers were
recruited locally (Los Angeles), songs were the latest soul hits nationwide, and guest artists
were typically African American hitmakers. Originating in Chicago with host and producer Don
Cornelius (a Marine, police officer, and radio DJ who was born in Chicago’s South Side), Soul
Train moved with Cornelius to the West Coast and was nationally syndicated in 1971.15

As unique as Soul Train was as an American institution and a hip trailblazer of popular dance, it
was not divorced from theatre dance. According to house music singer and former Soul Train
Dancer Eric Redd, Cornelius provided a dance studio as well as lessons in theatre dance, free
of charge. Redd emphasized the importance of theatre dance in the evolution of Soul Train:

I do think it would help to show Don's relationship with a well known choreographer of
the day named Lester Wilson.16 Many of the Soul Train episodes had theatre dancers
from Lester's dance company, and many were heralded the best in the business.
Several Soul Train Dancers went on to choreograph and star in videos and tours during
the disco area that subsequently birthed the Video Age. Because of television notariety,
these Black dancers single-handedly changed dance. The respect shown to Alvin Ailey
should also be shown to Don Cornelius.17

By the Age of Disco (roughly 1974-1979), Soul Train featured "TSOP" by MFSB, a 1974 disco
song in the style called the Philadelphia sound, in the show's introduction. As early as 1976,
disco balls were incorporated on the Soul Train set and one was featured prominently in the
show's introduction that year. Some of the Soul Train Dancers (which included a significant
number of queers) were waacking, the earliest queer dance on record, to disco music. Inspired
by drag queens and predominantly female Hollywood luminaries, waacking utilized large arm
movements, expressive hands, strikes (quick outward extension of limbs to accentuate the
beat), Hollywood-inspired glamour poses, and the occasional kick. Arising from queer spaces in
Los Angeles, waacking was too queer for many straight dancers, so another dance, locking,
was developed as an alternative.18 This did not keep waacking and other dances from being
exported nationwide by Soul Train Dancers Tyrone Proctor, Jeffrey Daniel, Jody Watley, Sharon
Hill, Kirt Washington, and Cleveland Moses Jr., who collectively called themselves “The
Outrageous Waack Dancers” who were featured in the 1978 issue of Ebony that never
mentioned waacking's queer roots.19

Disco Sucks and Rebirth of Disco in House Music

15 Christopher P. Lehman, A Critical History of Soul Train on Television 5, 11, 54-55.

16 Wilson was a gay, classically trained, African American dancer/choreographer. He is remembered for
choreography in the hit disco movie, Saturday Night Fever.
17 Interview with Eric Redd, trained in theatre dance and regular on Soul Train who also appeared on
American Bandstand (personal communication, January 2020).
18 Some of the greatest silver screen vamps influenced (and were influenced by) queer culture - Mae
West was lauded as the “greatest female impersonator of all time” by George Davis in Vanity Fair.
Marlena Dietrich’s performances in men’s clothing made her a butch icon for lesbians, and her many
affairs with women added to her queer allure. The same may be said of Greta Garbo.
19 “The Outrageous Waack Dancers,” Ebony August 1978, 64-68. The article also mentions Watley's use
of a hand fan, a tradition kept alive in the queer club scene.
By 1979, disco had so saturated the airwaves that straight men’s revolt was inevitable. Mel
Cheren described the backlash:

Rock had defined two generations of baby-boomers, particularly guys… now it was in
danger of being relegated to a niche market itself by a new style dominated by black
musicians and Gay promoters, producers, and tastemakers. As the disco sweep turned
into a tidal wave, a near panic set in… there was this deeper complaint: disco was black
and Hispanic. Disco was mindless and gay. Disco sucked. (245)

Ten years and two weeks after Stonewall, radio DJ Steve Dahl held a “Disco Demolition” in
Chicago during halftime for a baseball game between the White Sox and the Detroit Tigers in
Comiskey Park. Dahl dressed in military gear and blew up a mound of disco records brought in
by attendees in exchange for reduced admission. The explosion inspired thousands of young
White men to storm the field, chant “Disco sucks!” and destroy property. In that same year,
Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper’s Delight,” the first major hip-hop hit. “Rapper’s Delight”
(based upon samples from two disco songs, both released in 1969) was a macho fantasy that
included a homophobic reference. Unlike gangsta rap that was to follow, “Rapper’s Delight” did
not glorify violence and misogyny. But the stage was set for gangsta lyrics with violent,
queerphobic, sexist machismo at a time when the toxic masculinity of racist law enforcement
generated a toxic masculine response, including rejection of faggotry.20

Disco did not die; it went underground in gay men’s clubs and the nascent house music
movement with songs like “Hold on to My Love” by Jimmy Ruffin (1980), “Do You Wanna Funk”
by Sylvester (1982), and “Teardrops” by Womack & Womack (1988) as well as new wave music
in songs such as “Blue Monday” (1983) and Bizarre Love Triangle” (1986) by New Order.

Ballroom, Circuit, House, and AIDS

The 1970s saw the rise of ballroom among queer people of color, events in which competitors
walk, pose, and vogue (ballroom battle dance) that have roots in urban drag balls of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. Ballroom (not to be confused with traditional ballroom
dancing) is a safe space for all races and queers, especially feminine gay men and trans people
of color (some of its most revered icons are trans women, such as Pepper LaBeija and Paris
Dupree). Ballroom competitors are typically members of houses: nonsanguineal families with
mothers and fathers that often take the names of fashion houses, such as the House of
Balenciaga. Contestants compete in various categories of realness (initially referring to the
ability to pass any number of gender performance categories21) Voguing and runway include
elements of waacking, such as the strike and hand gestures.

20 Weems, The Fierce Tribe 111.

21 Competition also includes “bizarre,” a non-gendered category that encompasses sci-fi and exotic
outfits.
Meanwhile, in the mega-club scene that marked gay men’s nightlife in 1970s-80s Manhattan,
DJ culture was being perfected at venues such as the Loft (a mixture of every ethnicity and
sexuality). DJ culture and venues featuring state of the art sound and light systems made their
way to San Francisco, then to cities between coasts in the 1980s. Two private Manhattan
members-only mega-clubs, the Paradise Garage and aforementioned Saint, set the pace. The
Saint could hold a few thousand (mostly White and often international) men under the dome
above the dance floor, which had a planetarium that could shine the stars over the dancers.
Upstairs was a balcony for sex (as did Studio 54). The Paradise Garage was patronized by
Black and Latin men who wanted to dance more than preen and score. The circuit, initially
referring to seasonal migration of mostly White men from the Manhattan club scene to gay-
friendly resorts on Fire Island in the summer, expanded to include parties thrown in places such
as Atlanta (Hotlanta) and Columbus, Ohio (Red Party).

In the early 1980s, a mysterious disease was killing gay men and trans women. By the middle of
the ‘80s, the sickness was dubbed “the Saint’s disease” and had contributed to the Saint’s (and
the Garage’s) demise as members became ill and died. African American activist Kevin Omni
Burrus, who was Mother and Father of the House of Omni in New York and who first
participated in balls in 1975, said that ballroom was all-inclusive before AIDS, but many
straights (who initially had competitive categories reserved for them) left the ballroom
because of negative association with the disease.22 Circuit and ballroom scenes came to a
standstill as fear gripped participants and mourners buried the dead. But the communities rallied
in the 1990s. As West Virginian artist Corbett Reynolds, founder of the Red Party, said, "You
still have to dance." Circuit party fundraisers for HIV/AIDS arose, including Blue Ball
Philadelphia, Black and Blue Montreal, Dallas Purple Party, and White Party Miami.23

Severely hit by AIDS, ballroom gained positive media attention with the release of "Deep in
Vogue" in 1989 by Malcolm McLaren, a song that featured ballroom legend Willi Ninja of the
House of Ninja. It sampled the disco hit-turned-ballroom anthem, "Love Is the Message" (1974),
a song by MFSB from the same album as the Soul Train theme, "TSOP." A second, even bigger
boost occurred in 1990 when Willi Ninja was prominently featured in a popular musical video,
“Vogue.”24 Over the years, ballroom events have gone international, welcoming the
dispossessed in urban centers around the world. A television series called Pose ( 2018)
featured a cast with several trans women of color as stars, including Dominique Jackson, MJ
Rodriguez, and Indya Moore. Jackson praised the queer safe space in which she participated:
"The ballroom scene is what saved my life, the ballroom scene is where I was raised, the
ballroom scene taught me a lot of my values."25

Voguing as a dance genre has standard techniques for competition, including clicks (arm
contortion over the head and behind the back) and the five elements of vogue fem: catwalk,

22 Personal communication, December 2009.

23 Weems, The Fierce Tribe 121-124.
24 "”Vogue" by Madonna.
25 Abbie Bernstein, "POSE: Dominique Jackson on Playing Elektra - Exclusive Interview." Assignment X,
July 9, 2019,/www.assignmentx.com/2019
hand gestures, spins and dips, duckwalk, and floor performance.26 In the competitive dance,
opponents confront each other on the runway, improvising moves to counter each other as they
vie for attention from the judges and vocal support from the audience. Ballroom also has its own
distinctive house music genre with origins in disco and deep house. “The Ha Dance” (1991), a
song by Louie Vega and Kenny Dope of Masters at Work, became a signature song for vogue
dance battles and has been remixed by ballroom DJs such as Vjuan Allure. The song features a
loop of a sample from the movie Trading Places with the chant, “Bubuly bubuly bubuly, ha!” The
“ha!” hits on the fourth beat of the four count and is enhanced by a loud crash. The pulse on the
fourth count was preferred by vogue competitors so that they could twirl and strike or dip
(dramatically descend to the floor on their backs) on the "ha!"

The Fully-Fledged Circuit

The circuit reached its peak between 1997-2002, reaching as far as Capetown and Sydney.
These events often feature hotspots, quick stage performances with backup dancers that mix
smoothly into the DJ’s set, then mix out without a break in the beat. Major parties typically
featured hotspots with African American women who sang circuit hits that were sold on CDs.
DJs, typically White and Latin gay men (and about a half a dozen lesbians), became superstars.
Circuit music had its own favored genre: tribal house featuring strong percussion and synth
stabs (percussive blasts of synthesizer notes that invite dancers to strike on that beat). The
side-to-side two-step, heir to ragtime’s one-step and universally found in house events, was a
platform for strikes, the ubiquitous move in most queer dance genres with roots in waacking.
The ubiquitous two-step for gay men in a festival context is often considered a form of
communal wayfaring, walking in place to an unknown destination with the DJ as shaman-guide
through a mystical sonic landscape.

The circuit also had flagging, a genre that began in gay men’s clubs in San Francisco or
Manhattan in the 1970s, then spread nationwide. Flagging involves waving large squares of
colorful cloth with tiny weights attached to one edge, spinning them and moving them in a figure
8 motion. Originally done with large, spined fans made with cloth, flagging evolved as fans lost
the spines and gained the weighted edge, allowing the cloth to fully unfurl. Flaggers often
consider themselves members of a particular flagging tribe, yet flagging usually removes the
flagger from sensuous dance floor interplay. Participants often describe the experience of
flagging as a source for spiritual transcendence.27

Another queer dance genre, performance artistry, arose as gay male dancers from ballroom and
the androgenous club kid set (young people who would get in free to various EDM, rave, and
house events due to outrageous costuming) began dancing at circuit parties in the 1990s.
According to Power Infiniti, a Trinidadian American who is one of five influential performance
artists who gained fame at circuit events,28 performance artistry is a blend of ballroom and drag
26 Madison Moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric 181.
27 Weems 51.
28 the other four performance artists are African Bahamian Kitty Meow (Miami), African American Kevin
Aviance (NYC), Mexican American Flava (LA), and Canadian Lena Love (Toronto, the only one who is
female, straight, and White).
that includes elements of his African American and Afro-Caribbean heritage. He describes his
art in spiritual terms: “I feel like I’m taking you to church, so to speak… much like preachers who
catch the spirit when they speak and the rest of the church catches it with them. It’s no
different.”29 Though Infiniti sees performance art as a form of drag with lip-syncing, it is not
traditional drag, which often includes multiple songs, banter, and may or may not have dancing.
Performance artistry was a physically demanding workout that typically lasts no longer than an
extended dance remix. The artist typically has a shaved head, is in semi-drag, and wears
dramatic drag makeup. Performance artistry often featured backup dancers trained in theatre
dance, although a background in the ballroom community appears to be the only criterion for the
star performer, who commanded the stage with bold moves and strikes to the beat reminiscent
of waacking, along with the strut and aggressive poses that transferred from waacking to
runway and voguing.

House

Before house music emerged as a distinct musical genre, the house scene and its ethos of
inclusivity were already alive in the Paradise Garage (1977-1987) and Chicago’s Warehouse,
the DJ residence for Frankie Knuckles. A close friend of Paradise Garage’s DJ Larry Levan,
Knuckles moved to Chicago from Manhattan in the late 1970s. House music takes its name
from the Warehouse, and considers these two gay Black men as founders.

Both Levan of the Garage and Knuckles of the Warehouse were musically eclectic, shamelessly
juxtaposing songs from rock, soul, disco, and new wave in what participants described as a
spiritual experience resulting from communitas: All status between participants fell away, and an
indescribable bond brought forth the joys of Bakhtin's carnivalesque: a temporary space where
participants make the rules rather than the authorities. The Garage was predominantly gay
male, but women could buy memberships.30 Like the Garage, the Warehouse also started with
predominantly gay males of color, but then diversified as White fraternities were attracted to its
hipness. Barriers between straight and queer fell. As one participant stated, “The music made
everybody bisexual.” All were welcome, and there was a palpable sense of intimacy and
camaraderie between regulars31 that house music inspires to this day. Knuckles described the
dynamic in terms of a Spirit-filled gospel service: “Because when you’ve got three thousand
people in front of you, that’s three thousand different personalities. And when those three
thousand people become one personality, it’s the most amazing thing. It’s like that in church,”
he added, “the preacher gets everything going, or the choir gets everything going, at one
particular point, when things start peaking, the whole room becomes one.”32 He also described
the Warehouse as “church for those who had fallen out of grace.”33 For his part, Levan's twelve-
hour Saturday night sets were known as "Saturday Mass."34

29” Weems 56 (modified with permission January 2020).

30 DJ Patti Kane from New Jersey was a Garage member, and contributed to my understanding of the
sacredness and egalitarian nature of the Garage (interview, December 2019).
31 Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day 405.
32 Brewster 292.
33 Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy 30.
34 Jesse Jarnow, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. Boston: Da Capo, 2016, 167.
Other DJs have been credited with being important at this genesis, including the Hot Mix 5, a DJ
collective on radio station WMBX in Chicago35 that featured Ralphi Rosario, a gay house music
legend of Puerto Rican descent. He is also part of the duo Rosabel with Cuban American DJ
Abel Aguilera (they jokingly refer to themselves as "sisters"). The music of Rosario, Abel, and
other Latin DJs has distinctly West African roots from the rhythms dedicated to deities. Along
with Black Gospel-infused house favored by Knuckles and other house musicians, Afro-Latin
beats add to the experience of altered states that so many house-heads and circuiteers
describe. The secular sacred context of house music and dance is heir to a spiritual cosmos in
which dance connects people with something beyond themselves, something holy. The ecstasy
of surrendering to rhythm is kinaesthetically displayed through moves and postures no longer
generated solely by the dancer, but from the urgency a rhythmic pattern imposes on the
dancer’s body-mind. The dancer resonates, intimately and in a state of intense pleasure, with
the music and other dancers. This state is ecstasy, which Gerald Davis describes in its African
context as celebration and an expression of "sound psychic health" and "reminding folks of an
elegant humanism" that "was already old when impudent Europe thought it was the first to
discover the power of the celebrating spirit."36

The circuit is not devoid of the secular sacred, but its predominantly gay White male participants
may suffer from body fascism, the privileging of the beautiful body and face to the point of being
obnoxious. Still, house and circuit scenes are more similar than different in terms of kinaesthetic
transcendence en masse. House and circuit dance genres are, at their heart, techniques of
ecstasy, allowing participants to step outside of themselves. Except for performance artistry in
the circuit, dance genres are choreographed, not unlike dance at a Santería-Lucumí, Vodoun,
Candomblé, or Spirit-filled Christian rituals beyond those basic steps each community assigns
to an embodied deity or an enraptured soul. No matter how far apart the branches of house
music and its dance genres, the roots ever return to Africa.

Although house folklife began in the late 1970s, house music became an international genre in
the late 1980s with a strong four-on-the-floor featuring electronically-driven beats and soulful
vocals as well as a distinctive queer dance called “jacking”: moving the torso back and forth in a
way that resembles convulsions, as if the music has taken over the dancer and caused the
dancer to lose control. Those convulsions were regularized through repetition, then augmented
by more complex footwork allowing the dancer to move about, freed from the spatial boundaries
of the two-step. To constrain jacking to pre-set technique, however, is a bit disingenuous since it
is at its roots a manifestation of the loss of control rather than display of preplanned technique.

The earliest house music tracks blending house with techno were “Strings of Life” by Derrick
May and “Big Fun”/“Good Life” by Inner City. These songs are illustrative of house music’s
evolution once it moved beyond Chicago. All three have the repetitive four-to-the-floor and
computer-driven, industrial sound of techno music, the result of African American DJ-producers

35 In Detroit, the Electrifying Mojo (Charles Johnson, born in Little Rock, Arkansas) was the radio DJ that
gave Atkins, May, and Saunders their break, thus helping techno music make its mark.
36 Davis, 1982. I have heard dancers describe the experience as a return to the dawn of humanity.
in Detroit falling in love with futurism, science fiction, house music venues’ ethos of diversity,
and Western Europe’s Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder along with Japan’s Yellow Magic
Orchestra. In addition to techno, “Big Fun” and “Good Life” feature soulful vocals by the
aforementioned Paris Grey, a Black Gospel and Chicago house singer who recorded "Big Fun"
and "Good Life" with Kevin Saunders (who, along with Juan Atkins and Derrick May, is
considered one of the three African American founders of techno37) in his hometown of Detroit.
Saunderson was influenced by Chicago house; he would drive to Chicago to listen to the Hot
Mix Five on WBMX.38

House culture inspired its own underground scene in Britain that spread to Ibiza and all over
Europe, fueled by MDMA or ecstasy as the dancers’ drug of choice. Legend has it ecstasy
made its 1984 American debut in Starck, a gay nightclub with straight clientele in Dallas, Texas.
Starck and other bars sold the substance as an alternative to alcohol prior to its ban.
Coincidentally, that ban reached its most severe enforcement during the presidential
administration of former Texas governor George Bush, Jr., the same time authorities were
cracking down on raves and adding further oppression of gay men and trans people in the
military due to their perceived harmful presence in the Armed Forces.39 MDMA, raves, EDM
(electronic dance music and its mega-events with over 100,000 participants, such as Electric
Daisy Carnival and Tomorrowland), and queer culture tend to nullify the violence inherent in
toxic masculinity, an essential feature of heteropatriarchal dominance.

Chosen Few and the Onslaught of COVID 19

Every summer, Chicago’s South Side has featured a huge house music festival called Chosen
Few. The neighborhood has a reputation for violence, but not during Chosen Few, which is
marked by not only nonviolence, but also inclusion of all, as 40,000 people gather to barbecue
and dance. As with “Peace, Love, and Music” of Woodstock in 1969 and PLUR in raves and
EDM festivals today, Chosen Few is the continuum of what the Warehouse had achieved in
Chicago in the late 1970s (Knuckles was a regular headliner before he died, and Rosario
performed at the festival in 2018). “Sexism and homophobia are discouraged,” said DJ Patti
Kane, who attended Chosen Few in 2019. “It is all about dancing, however you choose, with
whomever you choose.” A similar energy takes place with Body & Soul in New York City. Its a
safe place for queer dancers with a mix of young old, straight and multi-ethnic participants.
Founded in 1996, it is helmed by DJ’s Danny Krivit, Joaquin “Joe” Clausell, and Francois K. This
party is a direct link to the aforementioned Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage.

Since the onslaught of the COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease-2019) pandemic, the major
concern for queer safe spaces is no longer guaranteeing all are welcome and a reduction of
toxic masculinity - a safe space must be one that prevents the transmission of virulent and
easily transferable diseases. Some clubs will only survive if the pandemic ends before they run
out of money. But the impetus for queer dance and queer spaces - house music - is still being

37 May's song, "Strings of Life" (1987) was christened with that name by Frankie Knuckles.
38 Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash 14.
39 Mireille Silcott. Rave America: New School Dancescapes 29 (1999).
produced, and DJs are provide live sets every weekend for a worldwide online audience.
Concerns for recurrence have damaged events resembling Woodstock in size (Woodstock
occurred at the tail end of the more benign H3N2 avian influenza virus pandemic40). Smaller
venues have an advantage over mega-clubs with massive overhead, as will events such as the
Chosen Few that have low production costs, unlike massive EDM events such as Electric Daisy
Carnival and Tomorrowland with their elaborate light shows, stages, and massive numbers of
attendees.

Theatre dance faces similar challenges during the pandemic. Revenue has plummeted. Packed
venues and lavish productions anywhere are less feasible. Broadway faces massive
downsizing. But the show will go on. The proscenium has been moved to the computer screen,
and the lifeblood of theatre dance, training new dancers, continues with online classes, which
might even include waacking, jacking, and voguing in their repertoire.

Conclusion

Distinctive dances performed by queers (especially gay men and trans women) in queer safe
spaces constitute a challenge to the heteropatriarchy and toxic masculinity whenever they
involve expression that is considered feminine, and toxic masculinity continues to be real threat
to queer communities in the USA and worldwide. But American men’s flirtation with toxic
masculinities make it all the more important for scholars to keep their eyes open for genres
originating among any of the multiple emergent identities in the queer community that dance
their identities. The new normal of the COVID 19 pandemic restricts the ability to celebrate the
sensual and physical world of dance, and negotiating the safe interaction of bodies in the face of
toxic masculinity, queerphobia, and infectious disease is still a work in progress.

Ultimately, dance has been a form of resistance for oppressed communities, and it has certainly
played this role for the queer community. Queer kinaesthetic folklife is worth investigating further
than the scope of this article.

40 Doctors were onsite at Woodstock, in case of a cold or pneumonia epidemic (Museum at Bethel
Woods, Mike Evans, Paul Kingsbury. Woodstock: Three Days that Rocked the World, New York: Sterling,
2009, 155).