The Gospel of Gay Square Dancing

My husband, Brian, and I are Unitarian Universalists. Roughly summarized, ours is a religion built on an open, free,and responsible search for truth and meaning.

UUs find their own beliefs, their own understanding of God (or lack of God), and their own codes of behavior within the bounds of a few core principles: respect for the freedom and welfare of others, respect for nature, democracy, inclusiveness, and the wisdom to be found in all religious traditions.

In the summers, our church, Eliot Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, allows members of the congregation to lead services, and Brian and I were lucky enough to lead a service in August of last year.

Independently of our life at Eliot, we fell in with a gay square dancing club, the Gateway Squares, through a random convergence of friends who were also members.

You wouldn't think that joining square dancing club would be a life-altering event, would you? But it was.

Here's how.

A Ghetto within a Ghetto

For many people who are openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender, the experience of feeling different at every stage of our lives, of being denigrated by parents, preachers, and presidents, deeply shapes our adult lives. As soon as we're able, many of us make our way to the cities where we live in gay-friendly neighborhoods, join gay clubs, go to gay bars and gay restaurants. If we're careful enough, we can spend as little time out in the straight world as we absolutely have to.

And even within the all-gay worlds we cobble together, we tend to segregate ourselves again. Men go to men's bars. Women go to women's bars. Younger people hang out with other younger people. So what happens when something comes along that is so corny, so absurd, and yet so irresistibly appealing that it cuts across all those boundaries and more?

Like, say, square dancing?

I went to my first square dancing lesson mostly to get my husband, Brian, off my case. And it started out truly awful. I couldn't keep my "left" and my right straight, couldn't make the neuromuscular leap between what I was seeing and what I was doing.

But then, during a break, I took in the other people in the room, students and established dancers alike. There were as many women as men, as many younger people as older people. There were doctors and carpenters, teachers and electricians, social workers and corporate lawyers. In short, a lot of people had jumped over a lot of walls to be there that evening, and they were all talking to each other. Community outreach workers toil for months just to convene groups half as diverse.

Letting Go

Besides being gay, the only common thing we started out with was a commitment to learn something that might turn out to be fun. And after the first lesson, we added to that a set of humbling experiences. Holding hands with strangers. Going right when the caller said "left". Taking one wrong step that gummed up the graceful moves of seven other people. If our class had been a native American tribe, my tribal name would have been "Deer Frozen in Headlights. " I elicited very genuine concern from people who saw me not getting the moves and looking panicky. But over the next few weeks, I started getting the moves in spite of myself. It took me a while to figure out why, and when I did, I realized that of course, it was so simple.

All I had to do was let go.

This was staggering! Imagine living most of your life as a self-styled thinker and then suddenly, accidentally stumbling across something that works better the less you think about it.

Radical Change

Change happens when people let go of fear. Change happens when people come together who would otherwise never find their way to each other. Change happens when people see their shared truths as greater than their differences and turn their minds to what is in front of them, not behind them.

The Gateway Squares bring about radical change every time we dance. We're just having too much fun most of the time to realize it. You see, square dancing is organized around local clubs that are supposed to meet up regularly and dance with each other. Dances are governed by a few simple rules. You never turn anyone away from a square, no matter how much you might want to, and you never leave a square until the dance is over and you have traded handshakes and thank-you's with everyone in it.

The St. Louis area is home to a few dozen square dancing clubs -- of the non-gay variety, to be clear -- mostly in the suburbs and outer suburbs. Many have been in existence since the 1940's or 50's, and as the average age of their members has increased year after year, clubs have started folding. The people who remain are by and large over sixty and by and large not accustomed to radical change.

When the Gateway Squares started dancing in 2003, they were the first new square dancing club in over three decades. The question was, would they join this community or keep safely to themselves? If they tried to join the community, would they be accepted or thrown out on their ears? The founding members of the club decided to give it a try, which in the context of that season of divisive elections was an act of great courage. Even the most ultra-out among them, as comfortable in their own skins as anyone could be, arrived at their first dance with butterflies in their stomachs and not the slightest idea of what would happen.

What happened is that everyone put the dancing first and left the politics for later. They put their shared values first and momentarily overlooked their differences. The gay people put their courage just inches ahead of their fear of being rejected, and the straight people put their faith in community just inches ahead their own visible discomfort. Two worlds collided ... and then the dancing started.

A Community in Unexpected Places

For over a year now, the Gateway Squares have squared up with people who have been dancing in the same clubs for two, three, sometimes four or five decades. We have danced with clubs whose by-laws state that women must wear frilly dresses of a certain length, whose members are pillars of their communities and have lived up to every expectation heaped upon them by a culture obsessed with keeping a tight lid gender and sexuality.

And then we show up. We trample across the gender divide, laughing every step of the way, but just to be helpful about it, we put on nametags that read "I dance the girl's part" or "I dance the man's part." And still, from a certain point of view, our very existence is an affront to the culture of conformity in which the people we dance with are, by and large, deeply embedded.

At the beginning of each evening, the two groups, gay and straight, usually stand at opposite ends of the room, eyeing each other warily and trying to act casual at the same time. Then the dancing starts, and there's just not enough time for people to judge each other.

At a dance out in North County, one of our number found herself standing alone as a dance was about to get started. A leader of the hosting club, her back hunched with sheer age, walked up to her, squinted at her name tag, and said, "Oh, you're one of the gay ones! Here, go dance with my husband. " Another member, a big, burly, bearded man who happened to be dancing "girl" one night found himself alone in a square filled with straight people. The big, burly, bearded man who wound up standing to his left looked him up and down and said, "I sure hope you like getting twirled!"

Recently, the Gateway Squares organized a large dance that brought in clubs from outside the area. Local clubs were also invited, but a prominent local caller refused to advertise the event at a class he was teaching. He wouldn't be part of "promoting the homosexual agenda, " he said. The people in the hosting club responded by firing him.

These stories have left many of us flummoxed. Our fear of rejection at the hands of the straight world has been dealt a serious blow. People we half-thought would throw us out of their dances have shaken our hands and thanked us for coming. Some have even been stronger advocates for us that we might have been for ourselves.

We've been left to wonder, how many of the walls that separate us from the straight world are of our own making? If our identities are built around early memories of rejection and differentness, who would we be if those things fell away?

What to Do with Common Ground

Now, I don't want to leave you thinking that all is sweetness and light. On both sides, our community dances see as much squirming and shuffling, as many false starts and looks of blank incomprehension as we have moments of light and understanding.

On both sides, there are some who, for the time being at least, will not cross the gay-straight line. Recently, a number of Gateway Squares decided that no matter how well we get along with the straights, we just don't feel at ease enough to let our hair down the way a lot of us need to. We like to put a lot of flair and athleticism into our moves, which does not always sit well with the sensibilities and arthritic joints of the clubs we dance with.

So in addition to the community dances, we'll soon be starting a monthly members-only dance. Maybe this is a retreat from the idea of community-building. Maybe this is owning up to the fact that not all of us are ready to build communities. Maybe it's an acknowledgment that from time to time, even community builders need to be with people who understand them without having to try. Maybe the common ground we came upon is too narrow to stand on for long. Maybe.

But here's what is certain. Here's what we know. For those of us who crossed the line we thought could not be crossed, nothing looks the same. Even if we go back inside our walls for a time, we know the world outside them better than we did before. And it knows us better.

And it all started with small acts of letting go.