Editorial Comment: Theater Journals: Dance Liberation

The first time I stepped into a gay bar, a line of people waited in anticipation on a flight of stairs going up to the disco, which was on the second floor of a club called Going My Way?. It was the late 1970s in Madison, Wisconsin and I was a freshman in college. From where I was standing, I could not see the space of the dance floor, which threw me for a loop—how many homosexuals were around that corner, I wondered, and would any of them recognize me from French class? Before I knew it, people had already positioned themselves behind me on the stairs, and now there was no turning back. This hadn't been my idea. One of the girls from my dorm floor had decided it would be fun to go out dancing at a gay bar, and I, who had no previous interest in disco or dancing, joined her for the adventure. She was a nice Jewish girl from Skokie who wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and I went along for the joke. Years later she would tell me she was bisexual, but that night we were two straight kids out on a dare that had more truth than either one of us could acknowledge at the time.

As we reached the top of the stairs, I saw the predominantly male clientele dancing together in what looked to be an activity that had been going on for some time. It both excited and frightened me. I was too scared to have a drink, let alone dance, and insisted we leave right away, which we did. I spouted ugly homophobic comments all the way back to the dorms to deflect my own sense of recognition. I returned to the bar, by myself, shortly after and under considerable duress. In fact, I was a nervous wreck. The practical concerns were more anxiety producing than the possibility that I might in fact be a homosexual. What if someone saw me on my way to the bar? And once there, would I be recognized? But I had decided that the risks were necessary. I smoked a joint beforehand and prepared for the worst. This time it was a weeknight, and there was no line to get into the club. There was never a cover charge during the week. You simply walked right in. That night I stood on the sidelines and watched as gay men in front of me danced in what seemed to me to be nothing short of a state of joy. Where did they get the nerve?

I can still recall the horror I felt the first time a man asked me to dance. It happened that night. The presumption that I was gay infuriated me nearly as much as the idea that I would want to dance with him of all people. I told him I wasn't interested in dancing, that I wasn't gay, and that I was simply waiting for a friend, a woman, who would be arriving any minute; in fact, I should probably go look for her. He said I shouldn't be so afraid of gay people, somehow knowing that what I had just said was a lie. I left danceless and with the bitter sense that gay life, if that's where I was heading, would be full of older lecherous creeps like him. Of course, he was a totally nice man in his late twenties studying for a PhD, but I didn't know that then. Years later, sometime in the mid-1980s, I helped him cope with his best friend's AIDS diagnosis, a gay man with whom it turned out I had sex with a couple of times sometime in between that night at the disco and that day in his hospital room, that is to say between 1978 and 1986, and who turned out to be among the first wave of gay men in Madison to die of AIDS. His friend, someone...