As many of you know, every year since 2022 Helen and I have made a in/out list for the lindy hop scene. This is not because we aim to be tastemakers, but because we are jokesters and we’re opinionated and over the years, opinionated people find us. The conversations surrounding the in/out list always end up revealing some themes: frustrations, hopes, and “it is what it is” observations that everyone seems to be feeling. In thinking forward to 2026, beyond concrete projects, I’m thinking about some of those, too.

(Not) dancing for the camera

In so many conversations, not just over Lindy Focus but throughout the year, I heard how tiring it is to watch dancing that feels like its purpose is to be watched. I’m not talking about performances here, I’m talking about social dancing.

This isn’t a new complaint; it’s been going around at least for the past couple years. If you listen to Marie N’Diaye on Integrated Rhythm, you can hear a great argument against social dancing as performance from the perspective of Black social dance culture: most social dances, she says, should be hangs, should be able to be done between drinks and while chatting. (I’m paraphrasing heavily here).

I love Lindy Focus. Ever since I cried to the Jonathan Stout Orchestra playing Auld Lang Syne as we left 2018 behind, it’s been the only place I want to spend New Years. Every year, I show up with the weight of the year on my shoulders, tense and cynical and discouraged in my own dancing, and over the course of the week, Lindy Focus wraps its arms around me, warms me up and leaves me feeling inspired, valued and loved.

This is the only event I feel this way about, and of course “Lindy Focus” doesn’t make me feel that way—that’s the work of the musicians (in particular this year: Chloe Feoranzo’s Women in Jazz and Jonathan Stout’s Charlie Christian late nights, Keenan McKenzie’s Modern Classics night, and Stout’s NYE not-technically-Kitchen Sink but still very Kitchen Sink-feeling night), the organizers (Jon and Sam, and Chisomo, and Kemper and Aliceann, and Cindi, and ESPECIALLY Elizabeth and Bryan and everyone else on the kitchen staff, etc, etc, etc) and the friends. 

The rest of my warm fuzzy Focus feelings I can contribute to those wonderful side-of-the-floor, or staff meal, or hotel room, or hallway interactions that feel so unique at Lindy Focus: everyone is full of year-end reflections and feelings and so everyone is a little more willing to tell you what they’re thinking than usual. I always try to write down and cherish some of my favorite of those moments, and while I’m not going to share those here, at the very least if you’re from the Baltimore/DC area your name is probably going in there.

Lindy Focus is also where Helen and I get inspired for the following year—last year we were so bursting with ideas that it fueled our whole 2025. We did so much!! And with no better bridge, I want to toot our horns about what all we did.

As Spotify Wrapped discourse goes around this year, I want to generously address a growing trend.

While there are all kinds of ways of using Spotify that are different levels of ill-advised, I think as Lindy hoppers, many of us know two things:

1. You really shouldn’t be DJing a dance from a streaming platform. For any number of reasons: said streaming platform is evil, you don’t own music that you stream, streaming doesn’t give as much money to the living artists you may be DJing, what if you lose service while you’re playing, etc. 

2. A growing number of newer DJs know this, and are doing this anyway, largely because they don’t have a digital library of any kind.

I think as local organizers, sometimes you just gotta have someone playing music at the dance, and I think many local organizers, not being DJs themselves, don’t realize this is a taboo. But DJs do. 

Hey everyone!

My posts are few and far between these days, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking, having a lot of conversations with friends, and working hard on dancing. I’m just less Online these days, which is good mostly. But here’s some dance stuff that’s been on my mind recently, in no particular order.

• I love to visit old lindy hop websites using the Wayback Machine. Have you tried it? Whatever your town’s oldest lindy hop org is, whatever long-running event you can think of, look up its website and plug it into ol’ Wayback. This is our history, too, a lot of this stuff could be gone any second, and one day we’ll wish we had it. It’s fun to get a taste of just how big the scene was in the nineties and early aughts, see what people were talking about on fora, see who was teaching when. My most recent stint is because my non-dancer friend Bryce found an old Northern California Lindy Society shirt at an estate sale and gifted it to me (my non-dancer friends are very good at unearthing cool 10-20 year old lindy hop memorabilia). The Bay Area scene’s websites are particularly well-preserved, and it’s just fun to see how and what events people were organizing in places where I still dance over 25 years later. Yearly Frankie workshops at Lake Merritt Dance (where my local weekly, The Breakaway, is held)! Multiple nights a week at Monte Cristo Social Club! A live band night with JUNIOR MANCE! Lindy in the Park, now and forever!

• I think short-form dance videos on Instagram are fine, actually. If I want to watch a fully-developed idea, and I can’t see it in person, frankly I’d rather watch it on YouTube, preferably on my television. Three minutes of vertical dance video makes me feel like maybe you, the performer, are trapped in my phone, bound in an eternal 9:16 aspect ratio hell (no, I won’t “rotate my phone.” I don’t know how! Do NOT teach me). A swingout in that aspect ratio already feels cramped. Yeah, yeah, I know, we live in a society, Instagram is where the people are. This is just my personal preference! 30-45 seconds of dancing in that limited space feels just about right, like how you’d probably linger in one formation during a performance for a little while before moving around the stage. That being said,

• Bring back YouTube! Jerry’s Almonte’s Best Lindy Hop Video series really has made me realize how much I miss the very slight friction and intention that searching for and selecting a YouTube video provides (rather than being served just whatever), and how much more attention I give to a performance with a wider screen. It feels just a little more like I’m in an audience, or at least like I’m watching a performance. Or maybe I’m just a millennial. Whatever! 

• I want messier stuff. I’m joining a conversation already happening by saying this, as my friend Maurice Fields posted about this recently on their Facebook, posing unpolished work as the fuel to get through a plateau. I’ve been challenging myself to dance a little riskier and messier this year. As a local instructor I see a lot of dancers coming up who are learning so much so fast, and that’s GREAT, and I can see them already putting pressure on themselves to rein themselves in. But being willing to experiment and take risks is how most people eventually develop their style, and I want that for my local dancers! All this stuff comes from the top down though, of course, thus: I want messier stuff from everyone.

• I love to read a book. Reading a book is not the only way to learn something, but it sure is underutilized. I simply love to read a damn book. It’s been mostly a novels year for me, but Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been knocking around my brain in every class I’ve taught, watched or taken since I read it earlier this year, and Hating Jazz, a book I picked up expecting very little, was extremely fun. 

• I’m just another lindy hop asshole dancing house now. God, I missed struggling in class! If you know me a little, you know I grew up in dance studio styles like tap, ballet, contemporary, “jazz,” etc, so while I occasionally go to a hip hop or tap class, choreography makes me a bit too comfortable. This year I wanted to force myself to be IN my body and OUT of my comfort zone, and Terrence Paschal, who teaches the classes I go to, is really good at emphasizing the exploratory and improvisational aspects of the dance (the aspects that are like vernacular/authentic jazz dance, and some of the aspects I am weakest at in it!). And I love disco and house music, so it was bound to happen eventually. After all I just said about messier stuff, you will NOT be seeing videos of me in the cypher, because I’m too busy being present 😇

• If you build it, he/they might come. Having found myself in some conversations with friends and organizers recently about what makes an event Good For Queer People, lately I have no answer but, to quote a famous tumblr post, “man, I think it depends.” The best event for me, but one queer person, is an event my queer friends are at. And the events my queer friends are at are the ones with good music and supportive staff and an accessible gender neutral bathroom and well-ventilated venues with plentiful water. Turns out sometimes what a gay person wants is a well-organized event! But I am but one gay, so if you truly want to know The Answer, you’ll have to ask all of us I guess.

  

Speaking of a well-organized event that I, a queer person, love being at: I am so ready for Lindy Focus!

Hey, sorry I haven’t been writing a lot lately. At first it was because I was busy as hell with real life dance projects (how lucky!), and now it’s just because I’m frustrated and annoyed.

I want to give voice to this annoyance, because I think it’s more common than many of us let on. I’ve come to terms with my cycles of frustration, and one of the few things that still gets to me even when I’m handling my frustration well is just how alienating it feels.

I have, over the years, come to see my frustration as a guidepost. When I’m annoyed with something in the dance scene or with my own dancing, it usually means I feel like something is missing from my scene or my practice, or the thing that’s annoying me is in conflict with my values. Usually the peak of frustration means I take a break, and with that break, I figure out what (else) I want to do to alleviate my annoyance.

I wasn’t able to use this annoyance, to turn it into something productive, for a long time. Some of this is just experience: I needed to be around longer and know how things work to figure out what I could and couldn’t change. And some of this is because I have faced so much pushback to being annoyed. 

Hey folks! I know, two posts in two days! I just wanted to wish you all a happy Pride weekend from San Francisco.

If you don’t hear from Helen and I much about the history of queer lindy hop, it’s not because we don’t know or don’t care about it. We absolutely do—the work of people like Billy Strayhorn, Josephine Baker, Ma Rainey, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and countless other Black queer jazz and dance artists laid the groundwork for everything we have.

There are, amazingly, lots of people in our community these days whose work is visible, easily accessible, and excellent, who go into great detail about these and other artists’ work—contemporary artists, academics and archivists like Jamica Zion, Grey Armstrong, Adam Brozowski, and Hannah Lane. If you’re looking to know more about the rich queer history of our dance and music, I highly recommend starting with them.

This history is so important, and it’s in the margins of the margins that I find the things that inspire me most. Things like the Hamilton Lodge Ball and the disputed history of the Shim Sham and its relationship to the 101 Ranch and the existence of songs like Swingin’ at the Daisy Chain, and things like the radical politics of great queer artists like Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. These things complicate our relationship to our history, make us look at the possibility of a world full not just of names we remember, but communities full of names we may never know. And there’s still so much of queer history of the dance—from its origins to now—that’s messy, or an open secret, or a real secret, and while that’s frustrating I kind of love it. What’s any community without its messy gays?

Hi! It has seriously been a minute!

Things have felt a bit too dark out there for me to share my silly little lindy hop thoughts, but of course I’ve been having them. I’ve got about three posts I’ve just been sitting on, waiting for it to feel not too small to bother with them. What I have been doing, in the meantime, is throwing myself into a LOT of IRL projects. So I think I’ve earned a little victory lap!

I think this will be a little miniseries working backward, starting with Helen’s and my most recent project (which is the one we’ve been working on the longest!).

Summer Workshop with Andy Reid and Andrea Gordon

As two of the more prominent transgender dancers (as wild as that is to say), and people with this particular written platform, Helen and I have been struggling to collect our thoughts as our government escalates its assault on trans rights, with the goal of eliminating trans people from public life. In some ways it feels silly to try to put any of this in the context of Lindy Hop, but it’s the little world we live in, and in times like these some of the biggest impacts we can have are in our little spaces.

It’s just not who I am to try to justify why you should care about trans people in particular, or debunk rhetoric that’s designed to be extremist and confusing and logic-proof, or appeal to your empathy because me and my friends and people whose existence is much more tenuous than mine are being particularly subjugated at the moment. Frankly I’m sick of talking about it to people for whom it’s not their lived reality. You either care whether trans people live or die or you don’t. If you’re reading my little newsletter, you probably do, at least in some abstract way.

It’s never going to be the sexy or business savvy or popular choice to choose to prioritize the well-being of trans dancers in Lindy Hop. But trans dancers deserve to have people in their own scene care about them and invest in them just because they are community members. If you are cis and you’re reading this, and you want to do something for trans dancers in your scene, here’s my suggestion: invest in the trans dancers in your scene not just because they’re trans, or because you’re the Trans Rights Understander, but because it’s the right thing to do, and you’d do it for anyone else.

What does that look like? It could be providing opportunities to trans dancers in your scene that you’d give to anyone else with their relative skill level, whether they’re experienced instructors and community members or young, hungry dancers. You can be willing to kick bigots out of your dances and tell them to come back only when they’ve changed their behavior. You can learn who your local trans dancers are beyond their name and pronouns so that you reliably get those pronouns right. You could dance with the trans people at your dance!! For god’s sake, have a gender neutral bathroom so trans people at your dance can use the restroom!! 

Hello! I hope you had a lovely New Year. I spent mine in my favorite way: crying to the Jonathan Stout Orchestra playing Auld Lang Syne at Lindy Focus, kissing my friends at midnight, and slow dancing with Helen. 

I wrote this a few months ago, and have sat on it for no real reason while life happened to me this autumn and winter. A content warning: this blog post discusses sexual topics.

I am excited to be back, especially after a couple people at Lindy Focus approached me to tell me they read my stuff! I’m still nervously editing and realizing the one big project I made this whole blog for, and have reflections up my sleeve about Lindy Focus and the coming year. Anyway . . .

I started this newsletter because I think a lot about community, dance, and community that coalesces around dance. That line of thought has been ratcheted up for me in the past few years, as the pandemic made me take a step back from Lindy Hop, a community that was frustrating me for reasons that made sense to me and for reasons I couldn’t detangle.

Thanks to everyone who read my piece about #ImprovRespect. I would be remiss not to include this revelation from friend and Lindy Hop legendkeeper Jerry Almonte:

I thought this was really fascinating! Knowing that this was a little bet by two of the more influential American Lindy Hoppers at the time certainly brings a different lens to this than I had when I went into writing about it. 

Oaktown Hella Hoppers forever!!

Before we start: Thank you to my new subscribers!! It feels nuts to say that, I never expected people to want to hear what I’m thinking about! I’ve got a lot more substantiative content coming, including a followup to my previous newsletter, some book recommendations, and the project I’ve been working on on and off for over a year. A little call to action here: If you were coming up dancing in the 2000s and early 2010s, I want to hear from you! What were you thinking about, what are your formative memories, what sticks with you now? Email me or DM me! OK, here we go.

This summer, Helen and I coached a student team for our home venue, The Breakaway.     

The work can speak for itself:

This is intended to be a very casual, ten-year retrospective on this weird moment in our recent history. I’ve anonymized some names, but kept the important ones.

When Helen and I found out we made finals in the Amateur Lindy competition at Camp Hollywood this past weekend, we went to go refresh ourselves on our fast dancing, came up with one or two options for exits, and…not much else. When we felt like we were coming up with too much stuff, we’d jokingly toss back at each other a phrase that had burned itself into our Lindy Hop baby brains: #ImprovRespect.

I started dancing in 2012 and Helen a year later. We wouldn’t meet until 2017, but we were both obsessives from our earliest days, and as it turned out, we both remembered the Facebook conversation surrounding ILHC 2014 extremely well. 

It was the first time I remember seeing so many professional or well-known dancers having a public conversation, enough that a lot of them ended up on the newsfeed of me, a twenty-year old member of a college swing dance club with two exchanges, two local workshop weekends, and an obsessive watch of everything available from ILHCs 2011-2014 under my belt. These people who I watched on TV at the group house where all the swing dancers lived were real people? With opinions??? Well, I simply must know what they are!

Stop treating me and my partner like circus freaks: a Pride Month manifesto

It’s Pride month, and in trying to write something about it, I could only think about one thing: Being transgender in lindy hop is pretty much like being transgender anywhere.

There’s a type of lindy hop post you might be familiar with: the post-event wrap-up. The common refrain from dedicated competitors and teachers after a big event share a couple of key points: thanking organizers for their hard work, mentioning how much the dance has given them (often, a space to feel appreciated for being themselves), and often, something about what a unique community lindy hop is for its welcoming environment.   

People expressing these sentiments after events have one or more things in common: they are cisgender, they have the time and money to attend many events like these per year, they’re bought into the way the scene operates. They feel welcomed. As they should! It’s a community built around serving them.