Articles on Gay Square Dancing
So I posted about a square dancing friend’s blog. And he added a comment pointing to another blog with an article about gay square dancing on the West Coast. And this article pointed to an article in the Mercury Post on gay square dancing with the El Camino Reelers.
It’s a good article; the dance featured Andy Shore calling, and the reporter talked to Rich Reel, Patricia Sawin (was she there dancing, or did the journalist call her up in North Carolina for some quotes?), Judy Young of the National Association for Sport & Physical Education (another phone call?), and Denis Gomez. I especially liked what Sawin said about clothes:
Sawin said the dress code speaks to the “hyper-heterosexual” culture of traditional square dancing.
“The clothing was really about emphasizing standard heterosexual gender differences,” she said. “American square dancing was sort of a conservative distortion or appropriation of the English and French country dances it came from.”
Meanwhile, the Let Me Get This Straight blogger says, “We don’t think hoedown dancing will fly here on the east coast, unless participants look like Matt Cavanaugh of Broadway’s Urban Cowboy.” Fortunately, Thom added a comment, listing some of the East Coast IAGSDC clubs.
I just discovered your blog entry about the Mercury Post article. Very glad to hear that my comments rang true for you. To answer your question, the reporter just called me up in NC, having discovered that I teach classes on gender issues and have an interest in dance. My impressions of gay square dancing come, I’m sorry to say, just from what I have read and heard. At first I was reluctant to comment on the lives of people I hadn’t talked to directly, but hoped that those insights might do a little good. Furthermore, the comments I shared come from the work of a friend, Professor James Lavita of the University of Denver, out of his master’s thesis at Berkeley. I urged the reporter to call him, but she was in a hurry. So this is also my way of giving credit where credit is due.