Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making

4 THE ORDER OF PLAY Choreographing Queer Politics

<«4 THE ORDER OF PLAY Choreographing Queer Politics / know a lot ofgay people across communities—clique is a better word. I don't like the term gay community or lesbian community in New York because I don't believe there isjust one. That assumes that all gay people share the same values and the same politics and that clearly isn't the case. I really didn't like Crowbar. It attracted a lot ofyoung people I didn't see at the Bar or the Tunnel Bar and that shook me up a little bit. Partly it was competition .. . what are theseyoung guys doing in my neighborhood. In the two years I had been going to these bars I had embraced their history because I had met so many people who would tell me they 'd been going to the barfor twenty years. Ifelt a part of that history through these vanous cliques. Between these bars there was not a singular community and I was happy I could bridge those communities as a lot ofpeople did. But I knew a lot ofpeople who would say, U I never go to Tunnel Bar, I never go to the Bar. " The Crowbar was taking business awayfrom the bars I wanted to support. So I stopped going. (Barrel) Withfreedom you can do what you want to do, but maybe do somethingyou don't want to do. In clubsyou put on a kind ofpersona. We want to be different, but then we don't. When you grow up gay, you 're an outsider and you want so bad to belong to something. We'll take drugs we wouldn't normally do, we'll have sex we wouldn't do. We'll take more nsks, because we want to bepart ofa scene. (Iain) 3£ OUR LIVES ARE DEFINED by the limits of our imagination. When I reflect upon the stories of informants and their relationships—imagined and realized—with others in the club, a complex, sometimes contradictory texture of desire and reality-making emerges. Some participants wanted to see the club as a space of escape from the outside world; others wanted to see these spaces as prepolitical configurations of community 86 The Order of Ploy «< 87 that could blossom into political agency outside. Some saw their activity as an individual self-fashioning; others expressed that their decision to go to a club was born out of desire to be with others like themselves, and still others found any realization of these desires compromised or unfulfilled in clubs. While none of these expressions negated each other, they did present images of the imagined and real club space and of improvised social dancing as complex textures. None of these expressions necessarily had the same resonances for everyone. What were the relationships between individual self-fashioning and notions of community and political agency through the relationships between bodies as they danced? How did meaning in and of a queer lifeworld get constructed not only by the individual dancing, but also by bodies dancing together? I contend that from the physical and verbal articulations of at least some participants, improvised social dancing in queer clubs did not exist outside of everyday life. It drew from it and informed it. What people could imagine kinesthetically and/ or politically, on the dance floor and on the street constructed lifeworlds. I want to explore some of these political aspects by unpacking the view that dance itself is mindless and those who indulge in it are not only guilty of mindlessness, but of a dangerous surrendering of political agency, and how individuals, as active agents of queer world-making, learned how to be with others on the dance floor and in a queer lifeworld through incorporation and realized the shape of both through embodied practices of energy transmittal and movement mimesis. That complicated term "community" is not one I feel comfortable applying to what I observed and experienced in clubs without giving it a very nuanced definition for two reasons: the limitations of community building as political praxis for gays and lesbians, and the complex configurations of expressed desire, Utopian longing, disappointment, and the sheer variety of practices in the club space. In his essay, "Identity and Politics in a 'Postmodern' Gay Culture," Steven Seidman traces the development of queer politics from the gay liberation movement of the early-ig7os, and notes the reason for the failure of its dominant agenda of community building based on an ethnic model of identity politics: The challenge to the dominance of an ethnic model, with its notion of a unitary gay identity and its emphasis on cultural difference, surfaced from individuals whose lives were not reflected in the dominant representations , social conventions, and political strategies. (Seidman 1993, 117-18) 88 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE The margins revolted against the center, only this time the center was not mainstream heterosexual culture, but gay culture, dominated as it was by white, middle-class gay men. Even lesbian politics, orienting away from gay culture toward separatism, was dominated by white, collegeeducated women who set the agenda. Ever since this failure—and it continues today rather than being set in the amber of 1970s liberation politics —gay politics has grappled with the problem of inclusionary representation, while maintaining the autonomy of individuals' needs and priorities. Through interviews, experiences, and observations, a complex, sometimes contradictory texture emerged in clubs when participants verbally or physically expressed a desire for or experience of community, sometimes through a sense of disappointment or an acknowledgment of dystopia. I find Richard Dyer's (1992) self-admittedly overschematic categorization of the Utopian sensibility and its relation to specific inadequacies in society useful for understanding the Utopian promises of dancing in clubs, and how they can fall short of the experience. Dyer neatly identifies social tensions, inadequacies, and absences and what the entertainment economy offers as their Utopian solutions. Instead of exhaustion, it promises energy; it replaces dreariness and monotony with an intensity, excitement, and affectivity of living; substitutes the manipulations of advertising , bourgeois democracy, and sex roles with transparency: that is, open, spontaneous, honest communications and relationships; and replaces the experience of fragmentation, which Habermas (1989) identified as one of the causes of the failure of the Utopian promise of the public sphere, with the experience of community. Perhaps then this was one of the reasons that many informants evoked a desire for community in its complex expressions. It may be the one promise that informants felt could not be fulfilled in any other space or by other practices involving queers together. The advantage of this analysis is that it offers some explanation of why entertainment works. The weakness of this analysis, according to Dyer, is the absence of class, race, or patriarchy from the left-hand column . But not all informants with whom I spoke emptied all of these needs from their evaluation of social tensions, inadequacies, or absences that a club could or did address. Several informants included one or more of these factors in their evaluation of the Utopian promise of queer clubs, recognizing that its failure rested in the failure of the clubs and their patrons to negotiate race, ethnicity, class, and/ or patriarchy as an inclusive model of queer world-making. Going to a lesbian club, for The Order of Play «< 89 instance, did not mean you could get in or, once in, that you would not experience racism or sexism. To the list of factors not always addressed in clubs, I would add heteronormativity, experienced by some informants as a conscious tension within society to their perceived deviance to which queer clubs promised a Utopian solution celebrating queerness . However, in relation to queer clubs, homonormativity—that is, the conservative and assimilationist dominant gay culture that seeks to alienate queerness—produced social tensions between itself and queers that were not resolved in some spaces. Disposable income, whiteness, and ideal notions of physical attractiveness produced a sense of belonging and a sense of alienation in different individuals. This gets complicated in queer clubs, many of which have their own normativity: buff Chelsea boys may feel alienated at the East Village queer club Pyramid; white or black men with the "wrong" bodies may feel alienated at Octagon; bears may feel alienated at Twilo, and so on. It is important to note that, perhaps with the exception of community, the ideals of entertainment imply wants that capitalism itself promises to meet. That the Utopian solutions of entertainment and of a club may also be the promises of capitalism hints at what may be an unpalatable truth for some. At its core, entertainment, including clubs, may be reactionary and normative unless otherwise consciously kicked against. Informants who critiqued notions of community that were based on economies of capital, including standards of beauty and conspicuous consumption, were also more likely to critique capitalism. In fact, their critiques of certain clubs articulated their critique of capitalism. Informants who enjoyed going to larger, more expensive clubs with their designer bodies and dress, were not apolitical, but seemed to articulate their politics through describing clubs as spaces of self-actualization and realization: be all that you can be, rather than destabilize normativity or make allegiances with other queers, people of color, and women. Yet if the promises of capitalism do not include community, how might a dance club suggest resolutions to this failure? On top of the complex image presented by the verbal expressions of participants, the movement on the dance floor itself was a constant negotiation of individual creative autonomy and communality. This was due to more than the truism that the literal and metaphorical common ground of these subjectivities was the dance floor, partly because across New York City there was the choice of many dance floors and all informants rejected one or another because a place was "not about them." For instance, Colin was not interested in going to Twilo with its majority 90 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE white clientele, Tito because the vast majority were a good thirty years younger than he was, Thomas because he felt he could not be open about his HIV status, and Catherine because it was male dominated. When I looked over any dance floor, it initially seemed as if everybody was moving the same way. Yet, as I observed for a time, I began to notice individuals and clusters. I noticed dancers on podiums, go-go dancers, and how those around them oriented themselves in relation to them. My gestalt impression was of a mass of individual movements threaded with contingent interrelations. What made it seem initially as if everybody was doing the same thing was that somehow order was maintained. There were ordered ways of being together that worked on the dance floor to produce individual as well as mass experience. How was this achieved? What rules were in operation and how were they learned, observed, interpreted, and used as the basis for improvisation? By understanding the choreography of the dance floor, can I understand a model for queer community and queer politics? Choreography is the deliberate patterning of a body or group of bodies using the plastic elements of space, time, and effort. These are traditionally formalized into a score put onto the bodies of dancers by a choreographer . Improvisation differs from this model of formal choreography in at least one important respect: while the creative process for a choreographer may take months and precedes its performance, the creative process in improvisation is happening in the very moment of performance. Lynne Anne Blom and L. Tarin Chaplin explain in their work on dance improvisation that "the kinesthetic self is free to partner the imagination impulsively, without preparation or preconception" (Blom and Chaplin, 1988, x). This is broadly true. However, "freedom" does not mean the same thing to all and the execution of this slippery and contingent concept on the dance floor produced different tensions within and between dancing bodies. Blom and Chaplin continue, "Improv implies a lack of constraints, a diversity of possibilities to follow in any direction for as long as the mover pleases" (1988, x). This is the implication, not only of improvisation , but also of freedom. However, on the dance floor, as in any physical arena, there were limitations and constraints on space at least. Participants had to be aware of and observe certain rules; otherwise chaos reigned. Chaos on the dance floor might look something like a brawl between people who have not observed the rules of respecting each others' space or kinesphere. It certainly would not be an attractive space to enter, and quite possibly would be physically dangerous. A bloody nose in a mosh pit may be a badge of accomplishment, but on a dance floor it The Order of Play «< 91 definitely signals a bad night. Blom and Chaplin round off their initial description of improvisation by stating that: It exists outside everyday life, creating its own time-space boundaries, seeking only its own inherent profit and goal. In ordinary life we learn to distinguish the real from the unreal; in play and improv we acknowledge all realities. Make-believe becomes as real as gravity and equally, or more, potent, (xi) Blom and Chaplin denote this idea from the field of dance they regard as the model for dance improvisation: the work of Steve Paxton, \vonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Anna Halprin in the 1960s.1 As I am looking at improvised social dancing in queer clubs, I would like to add an important nuance to this. While improvised social dancing had its own profit and goal, it was affected by and affected everyday life. In queer world-making, as in improvisation, make-believe—or what queers can imagine kinesthetically and/ or politically, on the dance floor and on the street—could be as real and as potent as gravity. When I went to a queer dance club, I made a choice to place myself in a particular space and engage myself in particular practices. I chose to shape myself and my relationships through experiencing the movement of my body and the movements of others around me on the dance floor. But am I also choosing to forget and escape? To get into the body is sometimes read as collusive with getting out of the mind. Furthermore, in the case of going to queer dance clubs, a homophobic-inflected capitalist reading asserts that music, drugs, and alcohol are uncritically consumed and an apolitical clone intent on irresponsible hedonism is produced . Alex succinctly describes a certain attitude he experienced, "turn up the music, spoon some more coke up your nose, and take off your condom." What are the cultural prejudices that located improvised social dancing and the pleasure it produced as apolitical and as a surrendering of individual and group agency to the imperative of the party? Catherine glowed when she told me how excited she was to be going to dance clubs in New York City. Back in Middle America, in the strict religious community in which she was raised, dancing was forbidden. She recalled hiding an outlawed Walkman under her mattress and listening to music after curfew. During these precious stolen times, she coped with the repressions of her home life by imagining herself dancing. She came to New York to find her feet—literally and metaphorically. Her story reminded me that the moral suspicion of dancing is not a historic 92 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE phenomenon and still exerts a great and pervasive influence over Western thought. The pioneer of kinesics, Ray L. Birdwhistell, suggested that the origins of the mind/ body split, which is rooted so firmly in Western society, is a result of a predisposition to diametrically opposed and valued splits (Birdwhistell 1976, 66). Historically, emotion was anatomically located somewhere below the rib cage, opposing rationality, which operated from the head. By association, "bad" became fixed on the body and on the emotions, both being the site of violence, illness, and waste. To be "good" it was necessary to keep any of the evil leaking out of the baser body. The body was monitored for productive, rational output directed by the mind. When the mind lost control of the body, the individual would cease to be productive and controllable, and dangerous chaos would result that threatened to disrupt the social order. These prejudices are reproduced by a legislative economy that insists with the force of morality that the heteronormative family is the sanctioned economic unit upon which capitalist society is based. The individual animated body is scrutinized by the society that equates its non-task oriented actions with evil excess: the individual who uses their physical capabilities for anything other than production and reproduction is evil. Thus, under the same rubric, a Puritan-capitalist ethic casts both the dancing body and the queer body into the pit of damnation.2 This imperative has resulted in a deep division between work and leisure. Furthermore , it bifurcates cultural use-value between those practices producing an end, and autotelic practices, whose ends society perceives to be indulgent, hedonistic, and marginal. These "useless," "trivial," or "low" evaluations are then associated with their participants. Therefore, clubbers are stigmatized as "mindless," "primitive," and "immature" because of their pursuit of pleasure dancing in clubs. Clubs themselves are seen as having little cultural or social value. Indeed, the media frequently portrays them as sites of self- and social-destruction.3 In the field of lesbian, gay, and queer politics, commentators have expressed alarm that making cultural meaning in a market-mediated environment robs a presumed unitary queer culture of its political power. In short, they surmise that attendance at clubs produces nothing useful politically . Even worse, it is a dangerous distraction by which people immerse themselves in hedonism rather than politics. Recently, gay culture observer Daniel Harris bemoaned the effect of a pervasive late-capitalism ideology of individualism that supersedes social responsibility and opposition to hegemony: "All too often personal empowerment becomes a substitute of social empowerment, self-acceptance for social acceptance, The Order of Play «< 93 coming out for fighting back" (Harris 1997, 258). Undoubtedly, the ideologies of these times combined with an absence of alternative ideological underpinnings of national political debate and the assimilationist mood of mainstream gay politicking, have rendered queers susceptible to the instantly gratifying self-help rhetoric of commercialism. However, it is precisely because I see struggles for the right to dance in New York City that I sense that an important battle is being waged. The action has moved from the arenas of government to the arenas of popular culture. Two perspectives reinforce the position that clubbers do not mindlessly engage in trivial, inconsequential activities. First, as queer theorist and political activist Michael Warner notes in a ground-breaking introduction to a collection of essays that identify and coalesce queer theory and politics: To a much greater degree than in any comparable movement, the institutions of [queer] culture-building have been market-mediated: bars, discos , special services, newspapers, magazines, phone lines, resorts, urban commercial districts. Nonmarket forms of association that have been central to other movements—churches, kinship, traditional residence—have been less available for queers. (Warner 1993, xvi-xvii) The third space of recreation has often been the only space in which queers could express themselves in ways often not available in the home or the workplace. Second, I believe that the practice of improvised social dancing offered ways of teaching queers how to be together. It produced paradigms of sociality and kinship in excess of the market and upon which the health of the queer individual and the queer lifeworld depended . It has potential to teach us how to be together at the same time as asserting a creative autonomy—a Utopian sensibility that breaks open Dyer's schematic. The impulse to dance revealed a desire to compose a version of the self that moves out of its prescribed column and dances all over the map. Improvising movement on a dance floor, participants never moved in an empty space. Improvisation developed in complex and beautiful ways from an individual's own body-consciousness, experiences, and memories of moving in everyday life and of moving on other dance floors or on the same floor in times past. It also sprang from those incorporated ways people knew how to be together. This negotiated both the desire of how people wanted to be with another or with a group or mass, and the 94 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE physical rules they had to observe when they were. Individual movement motifs of fall and recovery, freezes, and the use of two units of movement simultaneously, for instance, gained deeper resonance when considered in this context. Some of these resonances were political. In improvised social dancing, participation broadly produced two kinespheres—of the individual and the group. The negotiation of these kinespheres in relation to music and in relation to others within the group suggested how the choreography of individuals to each other and to the group negotiated the physicality and sociality of queer lifeworlds. Dancers simultaneously worked with their fellow dancers, but could also retreat into a world of their own. Paradoxically, although dancers directed their focus inward, it seemed as if awareness of others in close proximity was maintained or even increased. Thus, the dancer had to measure the space around him or herself, and to be aware of others at the edges of the space they made for themselves on the floor through movement. Informants often expressed relief when someone got up to dance on a previously empty dance floor, as Dana, an African-American lesbian in her midthirties expressed: "I hate walking into a club and everyone's just sitting around looking at each other and trying to figure out if anyone's looking at them. It's a downer and it's so stupid. What you really need is a few people to get their butts on the floor and get over the fact everyone's gonna look at them for a while. Then more people'll get up and hopefully the party'll get kicking." Dana's words reinforced my impression that most dancers found security and developed energy when on the dance floor with others. So, while not sacrificing individuality, dancers found confidence as part of a group. Space was a physical plastic reality, which dancers shaped. Movement created the space of the dancer—their kinesphere—in the soundscape and on the dance floor. Too much space, in the case of an empty dance floor, and people seemed timid of breaking the emptiness. That is, unless they could dance with a group of friends who offered some security dancing together . I observed that people played with movement if they had the space to do so—both on the floor and in the music. On a tightly packed dance floor, less play was obvious. The variations in levels of involvement and the movement styles and the intensity a group of people produced on any dance floor I observed contributed to the gestalt effect of a mass of individualized movement. As a function of queer world-making, levels of involvement from interpretation of the beat to embellishment through to improvisation were ways in which dancers could build their confidence, evoking a sense of The Order of Play <« 95 both security and creativity in and between individuals. As an articulation of queer world-making, the improvisational movement of individuals was integral to the mass: it constituted it. For instance, a woman I observed one night at si's danced near a participant who was improvising freely with the music and the space around her. She gave her space and preserved her own. She moved more closely on the beat, bringing her feet together on the first beat of the rhythmic phrase, and pushing each arm across her torso, while twisting her shoulders to counterpoint her pelvis. She seemed less confident of experimenting with movement in comparison with the other dancer. She started moving self-consciously and remained axial, but, gradually, her confidence seemed to grow, and she invested her movements with more energy and intensity. She seemed to work more with the music, rather than hiding behind it. Although the difference in moves, style, and intensity of these women's movements produced them as individuals to my eye, their spatial awareness of each other made it seem to me as if they were not isolated from each other and indirectly worked together. Occasionally, the more reserved dancer glanced over at the more experimental one. Although neither made eye contact with the other, they gave each other enough space and appeared to appreciate each other's presence on the almost empty dance floor. In their work on dance improvisation, Blom and Chaplin suggest that the combined elements of kinesthetic awareness, phrasing, forming, and relating contribute to the experiential body of knowledge that I have defined as twofold drawing from the experience of the everyday body and from previous improvised social dancing experience. Our experience of moving in the world is a vital mode in which we learn about ourselves and about our world. This knowledge is both incorporated and embodied: it is brought into our experience through the body and is expressed through it. Such physical agency is not mindless as the body itself has its own intelligence and memory: when we lift a new object, we draw on muscle memories of lifting to anticipate our necessary physical performance . The body provides constant feedback to the brain to judge spatial parameters, distance, and size. It perceives the position of body parts, and processes and stores information about laterality, gravity, verticality , balance, tensions, and dynamics, as well as integrating and coordinating rhythm, tempo, and sequences of movements. All these activities of perceiving the self and others are integral to everyday life, but on the dance floor, dancers were more aware of using their kinesthetic awareness , not only to prevent themselves from falling or hitting someone else, but also to create movement. 96 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE Occasionally, dancers unintentionally lost their balance, or accidentally made contact with others around them. From observation and experience , there were different responses to this from other dancers. Often when I saw or experienced accidental contact, the person contacted offered reassurance that they were not irritated by smiling and it seemed that people tolerated and even expected some infringement of intimate space. However, I also observed that there was a limit to the amount of times contact was accepted. If a person was unable to follow rules of dance floor etiquette—often through being involved in their own movement to the point of ignoring others, perhaps affected by drugs and alcohol—then people around expressed irritation, moved away, or in a couple of instances I witnessed, their irritation was such that their own play state was broken and they left the dance floor altogether. Dancers also worked from their own body knowledge of movement linkage, transitions, and organization, using this knowledge to create forms that responded to the music, to the impetus of movement itself, and to others close by. Dancers were influenced by all these parameters and this was one of the reasons for the impression of order that pervaded my observation of the dance floor as a whole. However, the relationship of the dancer to all these three influences of music, their movement , and the movement of others close by did not result in uniformity of movement style. I want to focus particular attention on the effects of the last of these parameters I have mentioned—the influence of others around the individual dancer—in order to investigate how dancers choreographed themselves in relation to each other. Dancers participated in each others' movements, even when, on a dance floor, there was only limited formal partnering. Dancers picked up on each others' rhythms and seemed to follow, lead, complement, and/or counterpoint them. Blom and Chaplin suggest that this results from "kinesthetic empathy": that when dancers see each other moving, they know "on a deep level about the delight, calm, or frustration they are experiencing [...] It allows us to [...] identify with him in the shared experience of movement" (Blom and Chaplin 1988, 23). This experience seemed to be indicated in both participants' retold experiences and in my own. Tito Mesa recalled a particular dancer who would impart a certain feeling to those watching him: Oh, Michael Beck. That's a name to remember, Michael Beck. That was the first dancer—fan dancer—in New York City. Nobody fucking danced like Michael Beck. He was my inspiration. You saw this man and you have The Order of Play «< 97 to stop and salute. Besides that, he was beautiful. He could go all night all over his body, dressing his body with his fans. He was so gentle, no attitude or whatever. Watching him, I felt suchjoy, such peace. However, I contend that such kinesthetic empathy was not only based on identification as Blom and Chaplin suggest. Dancers may not always have known what another was experiencing when they watched each other dance. They interpreted others' movement through knowledge of their own movement experience. Some dancers felt alienated from others if they seemed to be experiencing what they did not. Dancers received and achieved a level of energy from each other, but they also incorporated others' moves into their own repertoire through mimesis and adaptation. These techniques produced and articulated knowledge of the shared rules of sociality. I engaged in mimesis in my ethnographic research. I would try to copy styles of movement I found intriguing or compelling when I was dancing at clubs, as I noted in my fieldnotes: Often when I see a movement, I try to duplicate it, try it in my own body. This can be very helpful, but it also presents problems, which can also be productive. I watched these muscle guys and one was doing some really interesting movement. I tried to copy it, but felt weak, like I was a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy. Gender and muscularity have a lot to do with it. His dancing body is visibly and experientially so different from mine. I became very aware of how weak my left side has become especially (Fieldnote : Sound Factory Bar, 11/29/96). The rule of this ethnography, at least, is first you do it, then you understand it; not only because you can reproduce another's movements, but because you can't ever exactly. In sensing through my body's autofeedback that I couldn't reproduce someone else's movement, I learned that my gender and muscularity not only precipitated my failure, but also produced my difference. I produced a different movement effect in my body even if I duplicated the moves themselves. As drama was produced between dancers and the musical text, so it was also produced between bodies. I want to demonstrate examples of how participants picked up on each others' movements, adapted them into their own movement style and/or complemented them. I saw a dancer move low next to someone whose movements were high and in the air. Another dancer moved on the beat, while another emphasized 98 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE the back beat. Occasionally, an informal contest or challenge began between dancers. One performed a phrase of movements, and the next picked up their dominant or last moves, or complemented it, and developed it through their own phrase. Each playfully seemed to try to outdo the other. I saw this more formally in the challenge circles that formed at certain clubs, for instance at Café Con Lèche—a mixed midtown club populated predominantly by Latinos. In these circumstances, an order was maintained. Each dancer signaled that he or she was ready to go into the circle for a virtuoso turn by pacing around inside its inner ring of participant-observers. The dancer's entrance sometimes overlapped with the previous dancer's presence in the space. In these circumstances, he or she danced with them or next to them until the other dropped out, not unlike the mixing of tracks over each other until one emerged dominant . But other less formalized partnering or interrelations occurred between dancers. People danced together apart, picking up on each other's energy and moves and using them as resources for their own movement and energy. At clubs such as Escuelita and Krash on Astoria Boulevard in Queens, I noticed different attitudes to dance compared to the relationship of the individual to the mass in clubs such as Twilo and Arena. There was more partnering, for instance. The participants I saw made more contact with each other, both eye contact and physical touching. On the floor at other spaces, I saw a mass of individuals of small clusters; at Escuelita and Krash I more often saw a mass of partners. This was not at all times, but when a salsa or merengue track started, dancers rearranged themselves on the floor through subtle and not so subtle shifts of their bodies, their attitudes, and their focuses onto each other. Dancers touched each other more, not only through physical contact, as they grabbed hold of each other's hands, shoulders, or hips, but through orienting themselves closely around another, working in and out of their kinesphere, around them and up and down them. The participants I saw did not represent sexual acts through a recognized lexicon, but produced the effect of creative sexiness through contact, playfully catching each others' eyes and/or holding an intense gaze, and moving close to each other. The rhythmic phrasing of Latin music and the style of its dance evoked stepping footwork: often participants tilted their hips at counterpoint with their torsos, initiated movement in the pelvis, and crossed their feet over each other in small flowing steps. One time at Escuelita, my friend Juan pulled me into a merengue with him. I didn't know how to dance the merengue as a formal step, but went The Order of Play «< 99 with the rhythm, picked up on what other couples were doing, incorporated it, and followed his physical cues relayed through his hands as they gently pushed mine to nudge me into a turn. I was used to dancing in a club for a while without getting tired, but after just a minute or so, the fronts of my thighs were screaming for mercy. Executing tight, intense steps rapidly, I really felt how this dance differed from the freer, individualistic improvised dance I was more used to doing. I held my center of gravity higher in my body, rather than dropped low into an open pelvis and fairly static feet. (Usually I kept my feet static or close to the floor so I could feel across my personal floor space without stamping on or kicking another dancer.) Just holding the posture of arms up and holding anothers' hands, head high, spine erect yet flexible, hips angled backward , really put strain on my body. But it was also fun; I certainly laughed a lot. While there was something secure about playing with my own body as I concentrated on my own movement, there were also new adventures and possibilities to be had in dancing with another. This may be part of the attraction of Escuelita and Krash and Latin dance styles in general when I have seen them appropriated at other non-Latino clubs. Even at different spaces, I have seen and experienced a certain joy shared between two people when they danced in relation to each other. This incorporation of moves was both functional and expressive. It was a way participants learned how to be with others and it was simultaneously expressive of the pleasure of being with others. I asked many participants to recall how they felt on entering a queer club for the first time. To a person they all responded that they were anxious. Iain's response was typical: I wasn't completely out. I remember going to my first gay club in about 1982 and being scared to death. It was fear that I would actually have to connect with another gay man, 'cos I really hadn't in that setting before. 'Cos everyone seemed to be in control there, whereas outside they weren't. 'Cos all the gay men were there as a group. I remember sitting on steps and thinking, "Please nobody talk to me." I didn't know what to do, what rules to follow, how you were supposed to go about meeting people. For Iain, having knowledge of the rules was vital to operate in the space and to have control over the possibilities he encountered for interrelationships . How could he be powerful as an individual gay man if he didn't know the rules that produced the order of gay sociality? The specialized rules of sociality in a gay club were a school in which he learned 100 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE the rules of the wider gay lifeworld. In other words, these rules were not so particular to the club at all; in fact, they informed his behavior outside the club. I want to demonstrate five instances of how participants shared knowledge of movement partly so you can see the diversity of experience , relationship, and movement this exchange created. First, one individual was taught how to play with movement by others. Second, a crowd transmitted shared knowledge through their responses to music. Third, participants used body knowledge to orient themselves in relation to the crowd. Fourth, participants used the knowledge of the rules of personal space within the crowd, before showing some of the ways being together on a dance floor produced social interaction. Fifth, I suggest how a queer space projected rules of sociality, which resulted in the rejection of outsiders who did not value an exchange of physical closeness . All of these used incorporation through mimesis and transmittal in different ways. Before participants could experiment with order, they learned it by copying. Mimesis was explicit as in consciously showing another how to dance and thus how to use their own bodies to project desire, for instance , at the same time as making oneself the object of desire. Barrel recalled dancing at a club and being instructed on how to modify his movement . His friends choreographed him: "Don't dance like this," he demonstrated with a flailing gesture jumping up and down like an excited child. "Dance like this," and he showed a more contained groove. He ground his pelvis slow and low, looking around him as if scanning others on the dance floor and making eye contact with absent others when he rocked over to the far edge of his kinesphere. Then he playfully pulled his eyes away as his gyration took him in the other direction, back into the center of his kinesphere, and out again to the other side. There he demonstrated making eye contact with others, before returning to his other side. I asked him why he thought his friends showed him to dance this way: BARREL: Because before I looked like a kid at a high school dance. Now I looked tougher, and they showed me how to cruise and dance at the same time. FB : Who were they? Other gay men? B: [laughs] No, my butch lesbian friends! FB: SO, butch lesbians taught you how to be a gay man? B: I don't know about that. I had a pretty good idea. But they certainly showed me how to be queer. The Order of Play <« 101 FB: What does that mean? B: HOW to fit in with other queers. But also how to be special. How to get people to look at me—the people I wanted to desire me. I learned how to be tough and playful, sometimes guys can't do both. And figuring out how to dance like that, I figured out how to be like that when I wasn't dancing. It's all in the body once you've got it. Participants on the dance floor used dance to socialize themselves to an environment made up of other queers through the transmittal of shared knowledge of these texts. The collective anticipation and responses of dancers to musical features and effects affected the transmittal of the rules of a queer lifeworld. It was through experience of their own bodies and others' that dancers learned how to respond to the two primary texts of the club—the space and the music, and to insert themselves into them. When Alex first went onto the dance floor of Paradise Garage, he felt the full force of the presence of bodies, their shared knowledge of the musical text, and their expectations and responses: It was the first time I'd been on the floor dancing. And the floor would dance as a whole, as a group. Everybody knew the parts of the song and a part of the song would come up, or there'd be a break in the music and "hey" and everybody's arms would go up, "hey! " There would be hundreds of people, all at the same time and the lights would flash and confetti would blow out. And everybody knew it—that this was going to happen at this time in this song and they were waiting. So it was this kind of energy in the room. People would anticipate parts of records; it would be this big explosion. The dance floor was a space and improvised social dancing an act in which people organized themselves in their own way as a collective in which the individual members became an inseparable part of the human mass, through an increased awareness of their "sensual-material bodily unity" (Connerton 1989, 50). Alex incorporated not only individual movement motifs and styles, but through raising his hands in the air at a certain point, for instance, he folded himself into this experience of collectivity. As he told me his story, Alex was surprised to make the connection that this was the first time he had danced at a club. No longer was he running from floor to floor catching different scenes, as he had done at Danceteria, his regular haunt. For the first time he felt part of a larger 102 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE movement through dancing together with people. Dancing with others offered him a new invigorating experience of his own body. He was able to create his own kinesphere at the same time as feeling part of a larger mass. When he relived this experience, he became more animated . He flexed his torso, waved his arms, and shifted his weight in his chair, as if becoming aware of his own weight again. His face lit up. His energy palpably changed as he radiated the feeling through his memory of it. I picked it up in my own body and became infused with the energy of his body memory. Not only was he performing the past in his theater of memory, but he also was interpreting it in the moment of performance. By performing the memory, he made a connection. He paused and reflected silently on this for a moment, a smile hovering on his lips. "Wow, all those years going to clubs, and I'd never danced." He carried the memory of that experience with him in his everyday life. It offered him a new model, not only of his own body, but of being with others, which he compared to other experiences of being in his body and with others. Participants used body knowledge in another way to orient themselves to the crowd. Bodies sensed and understood—read—energy, a reading we used to orient ourselves in a dark club, an environment of disorientation . We used this sense to choose where we wanted to be. At Tunnel, I moved through the club, sensing the energy of the crowd to locate the true center of the space, which was not determined by architectural design . I sensed the saturation of energy near the center of the dance floor. Colin also used his body-sense to orient himself. He preferred not to be at ground zero. He had changed over the years and so had his desires . He wanted something different from going to dance. Where he once sought out the experience of being in the densely packed center of the dance floor, more recently he desired space. He desired to be with others, but not hemmed in by them. Therefore he sought out less densely populated spaces on the dance floor: In Octagon, spatial dynamics are different than in other spaces, I've noticed . There's more interior, you know, guys bopping. Just standing to the side and moving to the music and dancing but not really investing, not really going out into the floor. There's the inner group or core that can get into it and make the most investment with their bodies. Then there's another ring watching those in the middle, and there's another ring of us at the side watching both groups. Ten years ago I was right in the middle and now I'm at the side. Out of the hot spot. I don't like to be cramped. The Order of Play <« 103 He found greater personal freedom to extend his kinesphere and his energy at the margins. But others sought out the center. Yet others moved from center to periphery and back again. A dancer chose what relationship he or she wanted to have with other bodies—whether to be closely packed in a tight kinesphere, which was almost inseparable from the group movement, or to have more individualized space. In the dancing I observed, there were cultural rules and preferences for creating a personal kinesphere and articulating it. Fluency of kinespheric awareness—being able to create and enjoy one's own space at the same time as moving with other people—was a powerful cultural pattern that shaped movement. From outside and inside the crowd at S.O.S., a women's dance party at Silverados, a straight strip club on West 20th Street and Fifth Avenue, I found it impossible to focus on individual dancers, as we were all dancing so close, but it was possible to pick up on the qualities within the mass of movements around me. It throbbed and pulsed to the rhythm, holding together tightly within the space. Within the mass, participants incorporated the energy of movement, rather than the individual moves of those around them. Emphasis tended to be on continuity of energy flow and on rhythmic impulses, rather than on the specific positioning of body parts. No one individual claimed more territory than was offered. Because of the restrictive space, floor patterns were tightly controlled: the floor space covered by an individual never extended beyond a step forward, backward, or to either side of a central position. Participants executed backward steps only to regain ground lost by stepping forward. In this way, the dancers held a tightly defined territory, with no unexpected blind lunges backward that would have resulted in the social and physical awkwardness of blocking or encroaching on another's territory—unless someone intended to get into someone's space, of course. How much space each person was allowed depended on whether they were alone: two friends dancing together got to control their spaces plus the space between them, while individuals had very little space. There was some heavy cruising and sex-play going on. I saw couples differentiate themselves from the mass of individuals as they focused on each other by moving into each other's intimate space. They generally remained face on, but some couples pressed butt into abdomen or nudged and rolled shoulders into a partner's chest. Thus, within the tightly defined public space of the dance floor, space was again subdivided into private spaces, formed partly out of necessity, partly out of social dancing etiquette or order, and partly out of a desire to get closer to someone. 104 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE Lisa, an Asian-American lesbian in her late twenties, expressed how the common ground of dancing together could overcome some of the inhibitions people may have had about approaching each other off the dance floor: I think it's really hard to meet people at clubs. I did meet someone who is a good friend of mine now. We just started talking because we were the only two people on the dance floor and we realized we had stuff in common . But generally I think that it's hard for women to meet each other. There's a lot of reasons. I think women tend to be more protective, more inhibited, I don't know if women want to put themselves out there. It takes a lot of energy to put yourself out there and meet someone unless they have some background information, unless they get the dish on this person from someone, but you can't if you just see someone who's attractive in a club. Improvised social dancing offered a realm of security by providing other ways of projecting self than through the gaze. Dancing offered more numerous , different, playful, and creative ways to make contact with another , enabling participants to overcome reservations they had, giving common ground. For economic and aesthetic reasons, queer spaces such as Crowbar and Velvet were smaller than gay clubs like Twilo and Arena. This feature not only held together a critical mass of queerness rather than diffusing it, but it demanded physical closeness, which was valued by participants, like Stephen: They'd come rolling in to Crowbar complaining, "Twilo was this, and Twilo was that," but they wanted to get out of that big space, truly anonymousanonymous in the worst sense, and truly—I can't think of the word— umm, there was no touch. There was no ... It was too big, you know? Participants had to work together. They had to dance together. They had to touch: Bars are reallyjust too talkative, and queerness is about the physical. We're talking about the physicality of the space, that's what the language is. And in other big spaces, it's not just the dancing, you have to use other senses: the ocular, how one's dressed. When you walk in these [queer] spaces, who you walk in and kiss, that establishes who you are. You walk in and say hello The Order of Play «< 105 to the bartender, and if he says hello back and gives you a hug or a kiss even, or if he maybe starts making you a drink, people see that. And something is established there, who you are in that space. Then you walk in and kiss the most fabulous dancers or even, they come to you when they see you're at the door. No conversation is had. It changes how spaces are used. In a larger space, participants could become lost and anonymous. For some this was the attraction. But in smaller queer spaces, participants valued feeling an integral part of the energy of the event through physical closeness. Not only did this physical intimacy affect participants' sense of their own bodies, but also of their relationships to others around them. The sense of being together in queer spaces was more than the coincidence of being in the same space at the same time. But this too is complicated when gay or queer spaces were also used for straight parties. One comparison is particularly interesting in terms of the use of space and physical closeness. Susan Tompkin, who was Bruce Mailman's assistant when he ran the Saint, noticed a phenomenon on the dance floor: "It could hold a lot more gay men than straight people. Gay men don't mind being so close together." (In Dunlap 1995.) Stephen noted that the particular cultural patterns of queer sociality in Crowbar manifested themselves as physical intimacy: Gay people are more touchy than most people. Not touchy, feely, but in such a very sexualized space, people felt the need to touch in a way that was sexual, in a way that was power. I'm thinking about the way I've been with perfect strangers and touch and it's to greet, "How are you doing," and they'd touch you back in a way that was cool. You're allowed to go past personal boundaries and that was OK. And sometimes they'd start dancing with you and you'd start dancing with them. In some spaces, for informants such as Stephen, gayness was based on an understanding about physicality. But not all, as Stephen indicated that there are some places in which the attitude he encountered was more expressive of "OK, you touched me once, don't do it again," a feature also noted by Tito: We called these people the Paco Rabanne people, people who never sweat. The beauties of New York, and they have the face and the body, "Look at me, but don't touch me and don't talk to me." Those people did not belong in these clubs because we were the people who love to dance. If we 106 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE bumped them, they'd say "Ugh, how disgusting, you're all sweaty." We hated them. "We're here to get sweaty, bitch. If you can't handle it, get out." People who carried such attitudes into what Stephen defined as more queer spaces, were regarded as outsiders by regulars who did not appreciate their need to distance themselves from other people. They were outside a desired-for or experienced community of dance. Participants articulated the rules of sociality in physical terms, in opening up, or protecting one's own kinesphere. The kinesphere, and the individual's awareness and attitude to it, were the agents of embodiment and transmittal . Stephen desired this kinesthetic, playful model of queer interrelations . Through these patterns of physicality, he felt empowered. To him, this physicality was the embodied performance of the kind of gayness he valued and a way of being and knowing himself as queer. Exchange was the motor that drove social organization. In many instances in clubs, such as the experience narrated by Stephen, value seemed to be determined by the exchange itself, rather than by the intrinsic value of what was exchanged. The nature of the transactions described by Alex, Stephen, and myself were social. More than this, they exhibited the value of exchanges of particular embodied forms of sociality, which, while not particular to queer social practices and spaces, were imbued with a particular force for people who felt alienated from heteronormative and capitalistic exchange economies. Stephen emphasized that Crowbar—the club in which he had these positive experiences—attracted a great many working class participants who felt marginalized by the increasing gentrification of its East Village location. The values of these exchanges were not the same and their meanings did not have the same resonances for everyone, but the need to find ways of being together was a need for queer kinship that may not have been available in other arenas of biological family, workplace, or public places. What was valued was not a product but an experience of knowing spatial and musical texts and how to respond to them, of creating a kinesphere, of composition , of being in various levels of proximity to others and physically interacting with them. The processes of incorporation and embodiment , transmittal and mimesis valorized particular forms of being with each other. What was being vigorously transmitted was not simply the desire to be part of a great mass of collective energy, but the value of individual creative difference. All informants expressed the desire and effect of being with other The Order of Play «< 107 queers: "I guess what I want is to be with others like me" (Alex) ; "There's something really powerful about being in a room full of other women" (Lisa). These expressions can be understood as prefigurative articulations of the meaning and value of community. Informants articulated community through numbers—a group or mass of people, and similarity —"others like me." Informants articulated expressions of community in terms of what they wanted from a club. Several also articulated the experience of being with a mass of people on a dance floor through numbers and similarity, but articulated numbers using terms such as "whole" and "everybody," rather than "others," and in terms of the energy a mass of people produced. They experienced similarity, not only in terms of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or race, but in terms of shared knowledge expressed through movement. To decide to go to a club was more than a way to get physically close to others, more than the function of the desire to be with others. The movement relationship between people on the dance floor was expressive of being with other queers. Dancing together to music, some participants expressed a sense of connectedness with others and of pride in that achievement. Stephen wasn't the only one who got his sense of empowerment and gayness from dancing in a club. Tito also talked about this: The Saint people were the people who loved to dance. They communicated through the spirit of dancing. Through music I'm connected to the whole world. I embrace my gayness, I embrace my happiness, I know who I am. I open a path. The Saint opened my eyes. We don't have to go in the dark anymore and masturbate and suck each others' dicks and hide. Finally we can say, come over to my party, enjoy this life. The doors are open. You already had it, but you didn't notice it before—that you had this in you, that this was always in you. But the Saint made you aware, my God, I'm very proud of what I am, and not because I've become a member of a social club, I was already a member before I was born, but now I realize I have the right to be gay and celebrate through music; an ocean of human beings all together as one. It's the most beautiful communion that I ever experienced in my life. We were all one soul, that's the feeling that you felt when you walked through those doors and into that ocean. At the same time as they developed movement in relation to music, participants developed a relationship with their own bodies, with the space around them, and with other dancers. This development performed not only an experiential body of knowledge of queerness in the single body 108 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE unit, but it performed an experiential body of knowledge that dancers shared. These third spaces of recreation offered a potentially more supportive environment than the domestic or the work space, but this could not be so without the practices within them. The physicality of these spaces embodied and transmitted values of alternative kinship, Alex remembered: Your identity comes from the family, I was on the outside of my family. I needed to go and find kids who liked what I listened to. My mom hated what I listened to. She'd come in and rip the posters off my wall. I needed to go and find family to get something that I wasn't getting at home and I found it in New York nightlife with other young kids who were searching, with the same need to be loved. That's why they were there and that's where we found it. We found each other. Families did get created and especially working at the Boy Bar—that was my family. The MC was kinda like dad. And it was like, "How do I be gay? How do I exist in this world? How do I battle between, I wanna be who I am and be a freak and dress this way, but how do I find boys who like me. How do I exist?" And here is a place where I do, and I can ask these questions and I exist. While politicians and moral majoritarians adhere to a Puritan-capitalist ethos of family values of patriarchy, hierarchy, and homogeneity, queer kinship in clubs was based on particular forms of physicality—intimacy, togetherness, a critical mass of energy, participation, and sexiness. In offering support too often lacking in the American family, these club spaces became home and peers became family. The third space of recreation thus was part of a physical and social network, which participants understood as home. These clubs were also spaces in which work was done. Thus, the spaces of home and work were incorporated into the third space, challenging the assumptions of boundaries between the three, and exposing their separation within a Puritan-capitalist ethos that aimed to control and prescribe productive activities of the body and their relative values. Queer clubs queered these assumptions. Modern intellectual and practical gay history is perhaps primarily marked by a struggle to develop an inclusive, yet profligate operation of "identity" and "community." Informants of color objected to the assumption that individuals who shared a same-sex object desire in a homophobic society shared a common experience, outlook, and set of values and interests. Rather than sharing a core gay identity around which race or class added nuance, an individual could be simultaneously gay, The Order of Play <« 109 female, Latina, a mother, and working class, for example, each identification being shaped by and shaping the others. Attention on race, class, and gender does not imply alliance or intersection, but rather "a fantasized space where all embodied identities could be visibly represented as parallel forms of identity" (Warner 1993, xix). While aspiring to a "representational politics of inclusion and a drama of authentic embodiment " this pluralism reified identity and spoke of inclusion as though it were synonymous with equality and freedom, "reducing power to a formalism of membership" (Warner 1993, xix). Politically and intellectually , "queerness" proposes a radical generalization that rejects interestpolitics in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. Appealing to one's sexual, gender, or ethnic identity as the ground of community is rejected because of its inherent instabilities and exclusions . However, when informants used the terms "identity" and "community " in interviews, they used them in two ways, one with a sense of a historical truth (as opposed to fact), the other utopie. In other words, they expressed identity and community as experience and as need. Some participants I interviewed regarded these as both self-limiting and enabling. The limits and power of identity and community were reflected in the spaces and practices described. Lisa, using both the experiential and utopie mode, described community in these spaces: Ideally, it would be more word of mouth, networks of friends. I don't know what that community would look like. It might not necessarily be queer. It would be an interesting mix of people. Nightclub community tends to feel forced. It's not really community 'cos it's advertised through newspapers, and so you might have different groups and cliques but do those communities really start to open up their borders and find community in a club? Downstairs at the Clit Club they used to have a pool table and all these women used to congregate around there. It felt weird because it felt like I couldn't go in there. I could have, but I just didn't feel comfortable. But I also felt bad because I felt that maybe they felt they couldn't come upstairs. Her engagement with the concept of community expressed her awareness of its limitations and of false consciousness. Yet, when she was on the dance floor with others, she sensed a togetherness and a common ground. By paying attention to spaces and cultural practices within them, people were working with and against, above and beyond what political agendas have mapped out on a battlefield of identity politics. 110 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE To conclude, queer theorists Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner recently asserted that the radical aspirations of a queer world-making project are to build "notjust a safe zone for queer sex but the changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture" (Berlant and Warner 1998, 548). The heterosexual couple remains a privatized unit, while in a queer lifeworld, participants felt joy and shared in the expression of a public knowledge. It was this experience that was valued. The choreography of participants in a queer dance club produced the effect of a mixed texture between individual and group kinespheres and desires and realities that was not homogenous or uncomplicated, not even open for experimentation all the time. They produced different kinds of pleasures as well as frustrations and disappointments. In choosing to go to a certain club and choosing to involve themselves to a lesser or greater degree with others there, dancers were incorporating and embodying an ethics of the self and ethics of sociality simultaneously.4 Politics attends to the making of the social world. Choreographing interrelations between the self and the other and the individual and the mass in the club devised a queer lifeworld, which informed its imagination and realization outside of the club. Both spaces were political in this sense at least. What participants could dance had the real power of gravity wherever their feet carried them. ...