I first had the idea about dancing in the guy’s role probably late in 2012. I was in my usual class, there weren't enough guys to dance with, another girl and I had been practising our ochos dutifully for ages against a wall. I was thoroughly bored. The teacher talked a lot and demonstrated a lot and there was hardly any time to dance anyway, never mind that there weren't enough men. So I said to the other girl: let's just try dancing together. She was worried, I remember. She didn't like stepping out of line. That fear was justified - the teacher didn’t like that at all. It was scary, so had been the pep talk about 'loyalty' to one's teachers, so I changed class. If anything it was that talk that made try lots of other teachers.
Once or twice I tried leading in a class in another city. I remember on one occasion there was a huge imbalance of men and women in a workshop with visiting teachers for which we had paid a lot. I could tell it was going to be swap roles or risk sitting out for most of the time. It was a milonga class and the teacher was frustrated at how the men were not getting the rhythm. He got everyone to just walk around the room in a rhythm which was not difficult; so later I teamed up with another woman but she was evidently disgusted. I know now she has that kind of personality, but I didn't then. Still, it was enough to put me off ‘leading’, as it was called for a couple of years. The harm we can do to one another with a look or a remark... Still, it taught me to be careful about who I chose to invite, and to pick kind-looking, compatible women. In that, it was a valuable lesson.
My new teachers were light-hearted, fun and experienced in what they did. One was a born entertainer. They complemented one another. I attended the classes in the woman's role. The classes felt more relaxed; the teacher seemed to play more variety of tracks, especially in the practica and early on I began to love the music. There were more men now and I found that I could dance just by ‘following’ what the guy did. That wasn't what we were supposed to do but meshing what his step was supposed to be with my female version of the same step was always complicated and fraught.
If I ignored that and just 'followed', in class, I was happy enough for perhaps over a year. There were two problems though. If I just followed the guy and he hadn't got his step right he could blame me which was never fun especially as I couldn't use the defence "I'm following you!" because in class terms, since I was "just" intuiting my move from his, I was skiving off my duty to work at my dance and do my role properly. So most of the time I accepted the criticism dumbly and felt confused and sad. We also had to rotate partners. There were at least a couple of regular guys whose arms, after a while, I just couldn’t bear to have around me. But the teacher would insist "Embrace him", properly! so I would dash off regularly to the loo when the rotation came round to those guys. It wasn't subtle.
There were other problems: the partner often didn’t think he was ‘getting’ what he was supposed to do or the teacher said he wasn’t getting it. To help with this and to get out of being blamed for not following, I started to try figuring out the guy’s role, mentally, and literally back to front (as I was still on the ‘girl’s side’ of the room). This was taxing. I did it to help the guys when they got stuck so that we could both get dancing.
Soon I realised how insane it was that I was paying to help guys figure out what to do in class to avoid being blamed for 'not following'. I was paying to be a prop to guys I couldn't bear to have near me. I realised too, in the milonga that if I relaxed with nice guys and just went with it I had a good time. But for quite a long time that was hard with all the class instructions replaying in my head of all the things that I supposedly did wrong and should work on. The two things seemed imcompatible - how could you relax in the milonga when you were so inadequate in class there was a list as long as your arm of how every inch of your body was supposed, according to the teacher, to be in some fractionally different position.
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