Queer tango - chat

Tuinhuis milonga, Utrecht, Dec. 2016

June, 2024:

A: I always wonder how the people from the queer tango feel And I can't really work out, at first I was like, are you trans? I find it awkward because you can never ask anybody because it's inappropriate to ask .

B: And it's not really relevant.

A: But in a way, there is a relevance, even though it's not meant to be relevant. There is a relevance in engaging with somebody. B: What, their sexuality?

A: Uh-huh. Well, for obvious reasons.

B: How do you mean?

A: Well, if you're interested in somebody then...

B: What, for dance? Or just more than that?

A: Let's go for more than that.

B: Well, should you necessarily be using dance for...I mean I know people do...

A: No, no, no, but that's not the point. The point is that there's interactions between people and if you don't know...

B: Oh I see..

A: ...where they are then...

B: But do you only dance with people that you might be interested with?

A: No!

B: Exactly.

A: No...

B: So does it matter?

A: It does matter.

B: For me it doesn't really matter.

A: But you're more accepting.

B: Of what?

A: Of ...things.

[laughter] A: I was just curious...

B What matters to me is if someone is going to be rough with me.

A: So if I'm dancing with guys, it's different to dancing with a woman.

B: Of course it is.

A: So...

[laughter]

B: "How is it relevant?"

A: You just said it was irrelevant, but it's different.

B; No, it is. But for me the main thing is not whether it's a bloke or a woman. It is how open they are, how compatible with me they are, how [not] rough they are. But it is difficult to dance... It is much harder to dance with a guy "following", because most of them...

A: ...don't do it very well. B: Don't do it very well and are heavy.

When I spoke with some of the European queer tango people they told me some horrendous...I was saying, why don't you make these [queer tango] events open to everybody? Or why do you have to do these private events? Why don't you dance in regular milongas....? And they do, but often and my sense last time I spoke to them was, increasingly, they don't like to... ....because regular dancers have so much to learn from you. You dance so much better. And they said, "No, we don't feel like that. We had really bad experiences, we were abused, we were harassed, we experienced violence...."

A: Yeah, yeah...

B: "People looked down on us." A: Yeah, I can see how that's potentially the case.

B: And I don't think they really need to dance in regular milongas in places where there are enough queer tango dancers. They get great dancing among themselves and no shit to deal with... I find them very often gentler, politer people at least in Paris. And I wonder if they're gentler, because maybe some of the stuff that's happened to them makes them understand how awful it is to be on the receiving end, although the people who said this stuff were by no means just from Paris.

A: Yes, of course. I think there's always a potential for there to be inappropriate... Feeling threatened. You go into a space where there's cis-normal people, and you don't know what you're going to receive.

Postscript: Check out the Jeanne Mammen images of women out and dancing together from a hundred years ago.  Thanks to R for the tip.