Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making

INTRODUCTION Impossible Dance

INTRODUCTION Impossible Dance ^ ASA TEEN, the most explosive fights I ever had with my mother were about footwear. She wanted me to have sensible—but feminine—shoes. I wanted boots. But not just any boots: ankle boots with strong laces and chunky rubber soles that sprung my energy back through me when my feet hit the floor. The kind of boots ideal for dancing; comfortably heavy to ground me, with a grip that made me secure that whatever I did with my body, I would not find myself sprawling facedown on the dance floor. So I worked hard, saved my pennies, and bought the boots. Now I had to find somewhere to dance. This book is about that search and about finding such a space. It's about finding movement, and sometimes crossing critical boundaries in order to do so. It is about community and individualism , politics and pleasure, past, present, and future, mourning and celebration, mimesis and difference. It's about why improvised social dancing was inspiring, tangible, beautiful, playful, and affective. How it held potential to transform and transcend. How it could link the everyday to the utopie. How it was a way in which participants both remembered the past and imagined possibilities for the future. How they composed and why the act of composition and its results articulated where they came from, where they were, and where they hoped to go. I can't remember how I found out I could dance. I do have an early recollection of rummaging through my parents' record collection when I was about five, and discovering "Love Train" by the O'Jays and dancing around the room feeling its irresistible vibe: "People all over the world/ Join in/Start a love train." Even from that early time, music and dance were integral parts of my life. They formed my play space, helped socialize me, and gave me an avenue of free expression. They also opened up 1 2 x 34) This then is the queer world-making I define, by resisting the impulse to straitjacket the experiences of informants into an ill-fitting theoretical garment that hides all their bulges. The experiences and observations of participants and informants suggested this framework and I use it to get me a little further down the road towards understanding the power, potential , and frustrations of social improvised dancing in a queer club. Queer lifeworlds embodied utopie imagination and power whereby queerness occupied the center, in which the heterosexual couple was no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture. They existed within and drew some energy from not always oppositional relationships to the field of hegemonic power that attempted repeatedly and contingently to normalize heteroorthodoxy. But only an impoverished , thin reading of these practices would deal lightly with the agency, meanings, and values participants drew from the pleasure of fitting in, as well as from resistance. Even in a dance club, at the end of the night when the music stopped and the lights came on, participants had to step back from the center stage of a queer lifeworld into a world that marginalized them. This project contextualizes the deconstructive turn within a larger project of queer social construction. It asks, How do people make pleasure to- Introduction <« 7 gether? "Third spaces" of recreation (after home and workspaces) fuse both quotidian (for instance, dressing and traveling to a destination) and play practices (for instance, working with others in activities in which the imaginary is as concrete as the real). In clubs, dressing and looking, for instance, were vital play activities and expressive performance tools for self-fashioning. Through going to queer clubs, I learned the rules of a lifeworld: how to dress, how to interact, and the invokes, argot, values, and issues. Through word of mouth, I also discovered other places such as bars and coffee shops, community centers, workshops , newspapers and magazines, and other people's homes that made up constellations of sites within a lifeworld. I also learned to incorporate and embody a way of being that allowed me to interpret any environment through a worldview informed by queerness. A queer lifeworld is not only a stage outside of the body, but a state of consciousness and a way of deportment. Movement is central to understanding this. What was it that people actually did? How did they make pleasure? What was the relationship between the everyday and dancing in a club? Was it always the same relationship and how did that affect pleasure-making? Dancers made pleasure together without a score. Improvised social dancing has no existence or agency outside of its participants. In this it is different from formal scores of social dance such as tango or even lindy hop. "Improvised social dancing" is a verb, rather than a noun, an activity rather than an object of knowledge. Dancing is a multivocal and flexible sphere of social activity. The same movements can generate a variety of meanings depending on the contingent historical, social, and psychological contexts in which they take place. Dance is not only a feature within the context of its creation, but also can key us in to understanding that context itself. As a playful practice that depends upon the agency of its performers, improvised social dancing produces queer club culture, not as a homogenous, transhistorical object, but as a process of counterpoint , contestation, and polyvocality. This more fluid model shifts agency away from culture and its structural forms, including dance, to participants who improvised movement in response to everyday experiences , which, in turn, influenced the experiences and understanding of everyday life. These dance-floor compositions interpenetrated and were interpenetrated by mass-mediated culture, and were influenced by the dance people saw in music videos on MTV (Music Television) and BET (Black Entertainment Television). Going to a club already affected how participants might be represented and how they might see themselves, and it's these representations that spawn both danger and pleasure as 8 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE this book will often explore. One of the dangers and pleasures of social improvised dancing is its trivialization within "rational" postindustrial societies: those dance floor darlings are almost always suspect in some contexts. Dancing could be a queer business, as was already the case in New York City, at least. I wrote this book during an emergency for some queer lifeworlds: namely, the rezoning of adult businesses in New York City. Improvised social dancing at a queer club was not simply an escape from these contexts . It existed within and dynamically responded to them. As a practice, improvised social dancing can not only be analyzed through its functions of release of tension, but also as an expression of both the tension and the release as well as an intervention. In 1994, the administration of New York City under Republican Mayor Rudolph Guiliani proposed zoning regulations for "adult establishments" that would radically affect the locations, forms, and content of queer lifeworlds. Gay spaces such as bars, bookstores, and clubs defined as adult establishments according to the definitions of the City of New York City Planning Council would be forced to relocate to areas less accessible for potential customers.4 In order to remain open in their current locations, such establishments would have to purge themselves of "adult" material and performances, the presence of which would render them subject to the zoning laws. This proposal used the politics of space to curtail the existence and articulation of queer lifeworlds. In February 1997, New York's highest state court affirmed a lower court ruling that the law was constitutional. Contemporaneously there was a noticeable crackdown on bars and dance clubs, including those catering to queer clienteles. This crackdown was propped up by licensing laws that restricted public dancing, which, while on the statute books for a number of years, were subject to unprecedented enforcement. These laws stated that go-go dancers could not perform at an establishment without a cabaret license and that three or more customers "moving rhythmically" in any establishment unlicensed for dancing constituted a violation. Although technically any businesses were subject to these licensing laws, in the perspective of informants as well as queer activists they were disproportionately enforced on queer establishments in New York City.5 As well as using the politics of space, the authorities used the politics of the body and of movement to legislate and dictate how and where certain pleasures could be enjoyed. In the mainstream media, dance clubs were represented as dangerous, undisciplined spaces, the indices of the excesses of drugs, sex, and HIV infection. Because of these representations, queer dance floors were al- Introduction <« 9 ways contested and marginalized sites under scrutiny and constantly threatened by dominant social agencies, including some mainstream gay sources. For instance, commentators in the gay press objected to the Fire Island Morning Party. These representations relied upon the sensationalization and generalization of incidents of drug overdoses, violence , and what orthodox heteronormative morality views as deviant sexual behavior. This book is another representation to add to the coverage of clubs. The effects of generalization that representation trigger carry particular weight in a discussion of queer social worlds and their practices. Historically , many gay rights activists have used notions of gay and lesbian culture to legitimate marginal groups as different, but "normal." In this project , it is difficult to speak of "queer culture" because it is anything but a monolithic unity. Anthropologists such as Lila Abu-Lughod (1993) have thrown doubts on constructing "culture" as a model of analysis because to do so inscribes an illusion of professional objectivity and a claim to legitimacy as an empirically based social science. A representation of a singular monolithic culture flattens out the differences between people and their experiences in order to discover its laws, while simultaneously fixing boundaries between self and other. The theater of this ethnography takes its cue from the dance floor. In this space of participation, the boundary between audience and actor is already blurred. My performance studies lens enables me to zoom in on what an actor does, and zoom out to explore its effects. Tensions are not smoothed out, but embodied in movement: tensions not only between constituents of lifeworlds , but between the real, imaginary, past, present, and future bodies of each participant. I have tried to keep these tensions in this book by letting people speak and move, and by saying, "This is what I saw happen in this space, in this moment," rather than stating that this is what happens in queer clubs everywhere, every time. That I went to clubs in downtown Manhattan was not only determined by my access, but also because both historically and today, New York City is a crucible of queer lifeworlds, in which queerness, history, feminism, race, ethnicity, HIV/AIDS awareness, and capitalism are mixed. The dance floors of gay clubs in the city were also such crucibles. I was attracted to these spaces by the extraordinary energy and style of dancing I witnessed and experienced. The images of the improvising, dancing figure, enjoying the experience of power and creativity of his or her own body were affective, and the sensation of participation as pleasurable as it had always been for me. I stress not for the first or last time, that the 10 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE only way to begin to get to grips with any physical practice is to do it. So I laced up my boots again and hit the dance floor. I immersed myself in a full and rich experience that engaged all my senses. I heard the sonic ebbs and flows created by the mixing, layering, and programming of music and sound samples over beats and felt the pull of the soundscape. I experienced the sight of other dancers and myself, often in a fragmentary and disorienting way as lights flashed and bodies moved in front of, behind, and around others within a mass of movement that made it difficult to isolate individuals. I felt the touch of my own body to the floor, to my own body, and to others'. I felt the impact of physical movement on my body, through my breathing and the sensations of heat, sweat, and exhaustion. The body was the prime reference point in these spaces: not only the bodies of others, but my own. My body provided constant feedback tojudge spatial parameters, distance, and size. I perceived the position of body parts, and processed and stored information about laterality , gravity, verticality, balance, tensions, and dynamics, as well as integrating and coordinating rhythm, tempo, and sequences of movements. These sensations produced the body, rather than just the visual apparatus , as the location of experience and knowledge and the primary way knowledge was experienced and shared by participants and myself in the dance clubs. An ethnography that presents these experiences more faithfully reflects the realities of the field. I write what it felt like to be on a crowded dance floor and what it was like to "lose" myself in the flow of music and dance. I don't provide any conclusive analyses. But what I hope I do is offer a few snapshots of experience, as well as make the meaningfulness of these sensations vivid. It would be naïve and disingenuous of me to suggest that my presence and actions did not affect the behavior of others in that space. I'm not invisible after all. Marking myself as an observer (an ethnographer rather than just another person watching the dance floor along with other participants) would have affected others' behavior. How would you dance if someone stood scrutinizing you and taking notes? I can only speculate how the effect of my presence might have been different in a male gay space in comparison with a lesbian space. However, in a few instances I was read in certain ways that affected people's behavior. As I stood on the bleachers at Twilo, a large gay club, to get a sense of the space and energy of the crowd, I was approached by a couple of people who asked if I was selling drugs. They intended—I suppose—to buy some from me. Another time, a clubber thought I was an undercover cop. Again in Twilo several men on different occasions either tried to Introduction <« 11 cruise me or explain to me that they were not gay and had in fact not known this was a gay space. As a woman I suppose they felt I could bear convincing witness to their straightness. At the Body Positive T-Dance, a man wanted to dance with me. He explained that he was bisexual, that his wife and family had left him when he came out as bisexual and HIVpositive . He really wanted to dance with a woman again, not as a pick-up, but because, he explained gently, women knew how to follow in pairs dancing. I did not sit at the side of the dance floor and take notes. I wanted to be immersed in the movement, rather than looking at a notepad, trying to think of the appropriate term. Field notes were written on my return home from the club or the next day. Therefore, in common with most ethnographers, my writing of the event is at a spatial and temporal distance from it. Throughout, I usually move fluidly from one site to another . This movement is part of a strategy of making connections between spaces that shifts the focus away from one practice and one space to clusters of practices and spaces. My approach emphasizes the use of these spaces, rather than their planning. People chose to go to one club rather than another and left one club at a certain time to go to another, knowing that each space was just one within a constellation of queer spaces. In a club itself, more than one thing happened. Human action and interaction shaped clubs, and participants shaped themselves by going to them. It was outrageous even to think about writing this book without asking people what they thought they were doing in clubs. The meanings they made from these practices are more crucial than whatever meanings I impose with the theoretical tools in my standard issue doctoral utility belt. I carried out interviews in order to elicit the vocabulary that some clubgoers used to explain the significance of a club and their dance practices and experiences. I did not walk around the club looking for people to interview for several ethical reasons. A queer club is a "safe" space. How safe might someone consider it to be if approached by a stranger with a notepad or tape recorder? What's more, people go to clubs for pleasure. How much fun can you have when this fully equipped stranger keeps interrupting with a plethora of questions? And finally, the issue of consent gets murky. Participants may have taken alcohol or drugs, or may be in a particular affective state. I wanted all participants to give consent knowingly and with time to consider what they were being asked to do. After initially approaching people—usually through introduction outside of a club space by a person who played the role of point-of-entry—I 12 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE gave potential informants a cooling off period and answered any questions they had about what I was doing and why.6 Within the club, I did not want to mark myself as an outsider, which I felt walking around with recording equipment would have done. Of course, it also would have made it difficult to dance, separating me again into an observer rather than a participant. Each interview lasted anywhere from forty-five minutes to three hours depending on how much the informant wanted to say. I interviewed some informants more than once for the same reason, based on their availability and willingness. I half-expected that my overtures to potential informants would be met with suspicion and demands for justification. Instead, many warmly welcomed my interest. While I cannot claim to have exorcised the ghosts of the ethnographic practice in which I have invested, I have attempted to draw attention to this project as a cultural representation. I do not pull myself out of the picture. You already know that improvised dancing in queer clubs was a way I made meaning and value in my own life. You'll soon encounter the informants, some of whom have become friends. We went to clubs together and spoke about our experiences with each other. These bonds are implicit in my very style of writing. I wanted to let them speak. In interviewing, I rarely walked in with a set of questions I wanted answered . I usually started by asking participants to tell me a story and then let them speak with little interruption. Then I would pursue some issues and expressions that they raised, trying not to impose a pre-set agenda. These experiences and the ways they were retold are the building blocks of this book. Perhaps, on reading, you will see omissions, assumptions, or strange elisions. Perhaps this disjunctive account comes closer to the reality of these complex spaces and practices. The narrative logic of the chapters takes readers on a journey from the streets of New York City, into the dance clubs themselves, and the practices within, before it pops out in the two final chapters to explore particular themes and sites. In Chapter One, I develop the definition and use of queer lifeworlds and discuss their constitution as ways of contextualizing the relationship of the quotidian to improvised social dancing in queer clubs. I explore how the embodiment and performance of memory through storytelling contributed to the creation of queer lifeworlds . The juxtaposition of informants' stories and cognitive maps against official histories of gays in New York City offers a compelling framework of interpretation on the relations between the body, the city, and memory that constantly create and recreate queer lifeworlds. In Chapter Two I explore the currencies of fabulousness and fierceness Introduction <« 13 valued in clubs. The narrative moves from preparation for a night out to getting there to getting in and moving through the space. How was the space claimed and used? In Chapter Three, I enter the soundscape on the dance floor. How did dancers and DJs collaborate and with what effects ? In Chapter Four, I explore the complex, sometimes contradictory texture of desire and reality-making that emerged from the stories of informants and their relationships—imagined and realized—with others in the club. What were the relationships between individual selffashioning and notions of community and political agency through the relationships between bodies as they danced? How does meaning in and of a queer lifeworld get constructed not only by the individual dancing, but also by bodies dancing together? In what complex ways might participants be choreographing politics? In Chapter Five, I focus more specifically on bodies negotiating desire through exploring the role and influences of go-go dancers and strippers, common in many queer dance clubs I visited. As well as exploring dancers' interactions with each other, I also investigate the relationship of each participant's own body and the body she or he sought to achieve or fashion utopically through its transcendence . Next, in Chapter Six, I dig deeper into why, when clubs bring in so much capital—financial and cultural—to New York City, they were being cracked down on. I do this by looking at how these practices fitted into the "quality of life" agenda of the New York City mayor's office, which criminalized some activities and groups. How did the new defiantly queer and nonmainstream spaces respond to this and how might they also have been responding to the history of clubs in New York City and to dominant gay culture? Was it possible for new alliances to be formed, or were class and race distinctions, for instance, simply reproduced in seemingly Utopian spaces? Were these spaces cultural laboratories and what might participants have been rehearsing? Finally, in Chapter Seven, I focus on the Body Positive T-Dance, a now defunct event that was unique in its time for being the only dance event for HIV-positive gay men and their friends. What were the problems of imagining an "HIV community"? How were memories of times and people passed on sedimented in the bodies of participants and performed in improvised social dancing? I explore the needs of people to dance in this space as part of a process of accepting themselves, releasing stress, healing, reclaiming their bodies from medical practice and knowledge, expressing sexual desire, sharing experience, and keeping the future open. Could participants transcend and transform their consciousnesses through the experience of dance? 14 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE In a way, this project is a dance floor. People enter and, drawing on their experiences, memories, hopes, and desires, move across these pages in unique ways. Their moves interact with the moves of others. There are similarities and differences, juxtapositions, counterpoints, polyrhythms. There is self-fashioning, queer world-making. This does not only apply to content, but to form. A space was opened, "Tell me a story . . . ," and they started with their cognitive maps of the city, and so does this project. They told me how they got ready to go clubbing, how they met friends and traveled there, how they felt when they saw the line, how they got in, and so does this project. They told me how they met people, what they did, what they thought, and why any of this mattered to any of them. They told me what pissed them off. They told me how they made pleasure. They told me how politics shaped the spaces and practices within clubs and how these in turn shaped their politics. They told me about people who were no longer around, but who were remembered on the dance floor through movement. They performed their knowledge and their memories. And this project is a dancer. Even now it's checking out the floor, getting a sense of the environment into which it has entered , looking for a rhythm to ride. It's looking for pleasure; it has fashioned itself; it has learned the rules, and wants to use them to find a space in which to offer an intervention on the crowded dance floor. It incorporates the moves of its peers and adapts them, spinning out a few moves of its own. It wants to go home having done its damndest to be fabulous. Finally, why study improvised social dancing? I want you to recognize its importance, but this does not mean that I see it as a Utopian achievement . Although participants criticized these spaces and practices, I do not think that they render them any less important. I'm not sure how I first learned to dance, but I explore what I learned by doing it. The impossibility of fixing improvised social dancing is its power as queer world-making in its production of multiple, fluid possibilities. / like being a part of the early Sunday morninggang walking home after a night dancing . I pay more attention to people on the street than I would if I hadjust got up. Who are these goodfolk coming out of stores with a pack of smokes and the paper, waiting for the walk light? Where are they comingfrom and where are they going to? A friend once told me that most people in New York arefrom somewhere else; some coming to find theirfeet; some, like him, queersfrom Middle Amenca who came to live where they could be themselves and with others, and who we leave like dancers at the end ofthe night with a kiss goodbye and a promise to call. Introduction «{ 15 I get home and rummage around in piles of accumulatedjunk to grab a clean towel. How much crap can oneperson accumulate in five years in New York City? There are a lot of boots; some with worn holes where once deep textured rubber had been; some with dark slits where the leather has separatedfrom the sole. I keep promising myself to have a good clean out one day. But not today. Today I need to sleep. I kick off my boots,flingthem on top of the pile and fall into bed, with the shadows ofpeople going to work outside my window flickering across the insides ofmy eyelids. ...