Tag: dancing

I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Only when I’m dancing do I feel this free…

I love to dance.

Really, how was there ever any doubt about my sexuality?

Well, there probably wasn’t, but I still live with the illusion that people didn’t know. It makes me happy, okay? Allow me my delusions, thank you.

I think the first time I ever danced was at a school dance when I was a sophomore. I don’t remember what the dance was for, but that was it. A friend of mine asked me to dance, and I replied, “I don’t know how” (which was true), and she laughed at me, saying, “all you have to do is move” and showed me a basic back and forth step with swinging arms that was pretty simple. “Just stay on the beat,” she advised, and I found myself losing myself on the dance floor, getting into the music, and improvising…and for the first time in my life got compliments for something. This happened again when we moved to Kansas and at my first dance there–girls couldn’t believe what a good dancer I was, and they all wanted to dance with me.

Granted, most guys were not fun to dance with, usually doing some kind of weird shuffling kind of movement that was always off-beat and looked almost painful to do. But I basically figured out the trick–moving your hips and shoulders on different beats of the music instead of together. And the more I did it, the more I loved it. Guys were also not supposed to enjoy dancing, as it wasn’t ‘manly’ or something; I don’t know, there was a lot of idiotic bullshit like that for boys when I was one. My love of dancing continued on through my twenties–there weren’t any really good clubs for dancing, gay or straight, back then–and it really wasn’t until I moved to Tampa and started going to a gay bar in Ybor City called Tracks that I really found my place in the community.

Oh, not right away. I would dance when I’d go out, but not much; I was very self-conscious, and dancing made me sweat–a lot. My hair (what was left anyway) would plaster to my scalp with sweat, my socks and shirt would be soaked through, and I really really believed I was unattractive. But when I was out on the dance floor, I didn’t really care about how I looked or if anyone was looking at me or anything other than the driving beat and cutting loose on the dance floor. I never felt tired or sore the next morning either–I always felt good after dancing all night…

….and then I lost weight and discovered the gay bars in New Orleans.

I also discovered Ecstasy, but that’s probably best handled at a different time.

Oh, how I loved coming to New Orleans to dance the night away! That was the one thing I always hated, everywhere else that I lived or visited; the night always ended with last call, sometime after midnight and always no later than three. In New Orleans, the evening ended when you were too tired and sweaty and exhausted to dance any more. I used to go dancing at least three nights per week when I lived in Tampa (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), which also continued in New Orleans. I also spent a lot of evenings in gay neighborhood bars while in Tampa–didn’t really do much of that after moving here.

There’s something about being in an altered state (of whatever kind) out on the dance floor in a sea of shirtless gay men, all dancing and having a great time, while killer music plays through the speakers, the constant thumping of the bass getting into your nervous system. There would also be a light show during the dancing, and mist sprayed down into the crowd (in the older days before I lived here, I used to think they put poppers in the mist because you could smell it…although now I’m not sure that wasn’t just from how many people were using them on the dance floor), whistles and bells and there was always some older gay hippie, shirtless with long gray hair, shaking a tambourine out there. Everyone was friendly on the dance floor, smiling and grinning and flirting and grind-dancing, and the loud music just got into your soul, making it an almost out of body experience.

I always hated that the mixes you heard in clubs were so hard to find in record shops.

And the divas we sang along to–Deborah Cox and Madonna and Celine Dion and Martha Wash and Whitney Houston and Mariah Cary, among many nameless others–I was always lip syncing when I danced, really doing drag without the make-up and costumes and wigs–music I could just get lost in for hours. On the dance floor, everything was okay and everything was going to be better and this insular all-gay world was a place where I was at peace, where I was happy, and where nothing could ever bother me.

I miss dancing, but I also am older and can’t stay up late enough to go out dancing, let alone dance for even a few hours. But dancing has always been an integral part of my gay identity, even if I don’t do it anymore. I still listen to the music I can find on Spotify or Youtube, and believe me, there’s nothing like blasting gay dance music for cleaning the house. I used to have deejays make me tapes for my aerobics classes–and the attendees always loved the music.

Are gay bars still community hubs? I honestly don’t know–but all the young gay men I work with go out to clubs, so I guess so. Maybe not as integral as when going to one actually put you at risk of being arrested, but still important.

Two of Hearts

FRIDAY! Huzzah!

It’s my short day, which is always a lovely way to roll into the weekend, and then I only have one more full week before my next two-day week and six day vacation! Woo-hoo!

I managed to write three thousand words, which is all of Chapter 19, yesterday; I also had miscounted. I still have six chapters to go, alas, but that is doable before the end of the month. The manuscript is a completely sloppy mess, of course, but one that should be easy to fix, to trim, to revise and edit and rewrite. I am hoping to get it into decent shape by the end of September. Huzzah!

I also decided yesterday that “Children of the Stone Circle” isn’t the right story I want to submit to this call. I am going to revisit “The Arm,” which I think is probably more consistent of a story and more believable, would work better in a revision, and so I am going to give it a try this weekend and see what happens with it.

Right now I am hating everything I’ve written. Some things never change.

Next up in my erotic short story collection Promises in Every Star was “All the World’s A Stage.” This one was also written for an anthology, and again, I don’t remember which one or who the editor was or what publisher. I should probably keep better track of this stuff, don’t you think?

The dance floor was still crowded with shirtless boys, sweat running down smooth muscled torsos. My friends had moved on across the street to Oz, leaving me alone on the dance floor enjoying my Ecstasy high and the charms of a guy in his late twenties with the body of an underwear model and the face of an angel. His ass was round and hard in his jeans, and he kept grinding it into my crotch with the beat of the music. He had a tattoo on his lower back, a fleur-de-lis, symbol of the New Orleans Saints. Every time he would back into me that way my dick would get hard in my jean shorts. I wasn’t sure if he actually wanted me to fuck him or not. You never can be sure of anything at a circuit party. His flirting could be entirely based in whatever mind altering substance he’d imbibed. He could have a boyfriend. He might just enjoy losing himself on the dance floor and flirting, in getting attention from men he thought were hot. It was flattering, for sure, since I am now in my late forties, and I had always been brainwashed into thinking that gay life—and most assuredly gay sex and desire—ended at forty.

And if this boy fucked the way he danced, well, it would definitely be worth my while.

He backed into me again, and I slid my arms around his waist, pulling him back against me. His body was wet with sweat, his jeans damp to the touch, his short blonde hair glistening in the flickering laser lights. My cock hardened again, and I ground my crotch into the back of his jeans, rubbing it against him. He suddenly spun around so that our crotches were together. I could feel his hard on against mine. He pressed his lips against mine, forcing mine apart with his tongue. I sucked on his tongue when it entered my mouth, reaching down to cup that pretty ass with my hands.

 “Mmmmmm.” He smiled as he pulled his head back from mine. He put both of his hands on my pecs, squeezing a little bit. “Very nice.”

I smiled back at him. “I could say the same.”

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“All the World’s a Stage” is one of those bar/partying stories, and it is sort of based in reality; although it was kind of a combination of two different events. First of all, yes, once at Southern Decadence a hot younger guy was flirting with me on the dance floor and yes, he did at one point call me daddy, which was the first time that ever happened, and yes, I did get pulled up on stage to mess around with two porn stars by a drag queen. But the getting pulled up on stage and the night I was called a daddy for the first time were, in fact, different occasions; but realistically, in creating the fiction of the story, it simply made sense for the narrative to combine those two incidents.

I’m pleased with it. I think I captured the feel of being drugged out and blissful on the dance floor; that tribal sense I used to get whenever I was one of a crowd of shirtless, sweaty gay men dancing. I loved to dance; always did, and hitting the dance floor was always one of my favorite things to do for years.

I do miss dancing sometimes; I miss that feel of the loud music and the sweat and the shirts being tucked into the back of your jeans (and still losing it sometimes) and sweat rolling down your body and the flashing lights and the fog and everyone lost in joyful abandon…

And now back to the spice mines.

I Love the Nightlife

Ah, disco.

I’ve always loved to dance. In fact, many times when I’m cleaning and Paul isn’t home, I’ll put on some dance music and dance around the Lost Apartment while I’m cleaning. If it’s a song I particularly love, I’ll slip into Drag Queen mode and perform as I sing and dance along to the music. It brings me joy, and there’s nothing I love more than a dance jam. One of the things I tried to imbue in the Scotty books–especially Mardi Gras Mambo–was the joy that can be found in dancing and dance music; some of the best times of my life were on the dance floor.

When I was a kid I used to watch Soul Train and American Bandstand, and tried to copy the way the young people on the show danced. I loved going to high school dances. Of course, gay bars are often all about the dancing. I was also a child of the 1970’s, very much, and so I lived through the popularity of disco, which I loved because it was dance music. And while I sadly never went there, you also couldn’t live through that period without knowing about Studio 54.

So, you can imagine my disappointment when I saw the movie 54<; it was a glossy “boy from Jersey moves to the city gets caught up in the glitz but then walks away from it and learns from his experience” type movie. And while I may have never gone to Studio 54, I knew enough about it–and lived through that time–to know that this movie was deeply, deeply sanitized.

When I heard there was a director’s cut, that was much better because the studio had redone almost the entire film, I thought–I want to see it. Paul went to a play Friday night, so after I was finished with my daily work I got in my easy chair with Scooter and rented it from Amazon.

Seriously, it was amazing.

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The only resemblance this movie has to the studio release is the cast and it’s about Studio 54.

This movie is bleak, dark, and realistic–I would say it’s just as dark as Saturday Night Fever, which is an incredibly dark movie.

Shane, the main character, played by Ryan Phillippe in all of his stunning young beauty, lives in Jersey City with his father and two younger sisters. This is blue collar America in the 1970’s in all of it’s realistic bleakness. He works as a pump jockey at a gas station; the hostage crisis in Iran is going on; the economy is in the toilet, and he is uneducated but wants something more–like so many people did from that background (like Tony in Saturday Night Fever, for that matter). He has a crush on Julie Black, an actress on All My Children, and after one wretched night in a bar where he meets a girl, they have mutually unsatisfying sex in the backseat of his car, and when he asks her if she want to go out sometime, she dismissively says, “I’m from Montclair and you’re from Jersey City. I don’t date guys from Jersey City”–he gets the big idea to cut off his long frizzy hair into a more stylish look and convince his two buddies to go into the city with him and try to get into Studio 54, where he might have a chance to meet Julie Black.

Shane catches the eye of Steve Rubell, played by Mike Meyers, in the crowd outside and is picked to go inside–his two buddies aren’t–and Meyers tells him, “Not in that shirt”–forcing him to take it off as the price of admission. Once he is inside, though…and this is very important–he is dazzled by the inside: the people, the decor, the music, the dancing, the celebrities.

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Before long, he’s hired to be a busboy, which requires him to wear those hilarious little running shorts that were in vogue back then–the bartenders are all gorgeous and shirtless–and he befriends another barback, whose wife works in the coatroom, and he moves in with them after his father throws him out for working at ‘that freakshow.’

The director’s cut doesn’t shy away from anything–the sexuality, the hedonism, the drugs. Everyone is smoking pot, snorting coke, popping Quaaludes. And of course, gorgeous as he is, Shane is getting laid left and right and using his body as his commodity. Shane also explores his own bisexuality; the movie never really makes it clear whether he is hustling when he is with wealthy men, or if he genuinely is fluid sexually. He often sleeps with people that Steve tells him to, and even gets some modeling gigs.

But the relationship with his married friends–Anita and Greg, played by Salma Hayek and Breckin Meyer, is also at the heart of the movie. They genuinely love and care about each other, but it’s never clear whether Shane is just close to them or if he’s part of the relationship. He definitely has sex with Anita–but after his initial anger Greg forgives him because they’re family.

There is also an incredibly awkward moment when Shane misreads a cue from Greg–now supplementing his income by dealing drugs–and they kiss for a moment before Greg freaks out and runs away.

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I am not kidding when I say the director’s cut is a completely different movie from the theatrical release. There are characters in this version that don’t even show up–or if they do, it’s a small scene–in the theatrical version; there are whole stories and plots that vanish from this to the ‘original.’ This movie is very much in the tradition of Saturday Night Fever and Cruising (both of which I need to revisit now), and in its darkness and complexity, is equal to–and in some ways, superior–to both. This was the 1970’s I remember.

And the music! Oh, the music is so fantastic.

I highly recommend it.