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.