First Alternate: A Lindy Hopper's Newsletter

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.

In taking that step back, I realized what I had to do was come out to myself, and that I couldn’t do that in the Lindy Hop community (turns out, that was one of the frustrations). I found community in queer and trans people. I relished in the mushy boundaries between friend and lover, in the willingness to go above and beyond for people you barely know, in the safe space provided by trans support groups for “stupid” questions, in the knowledge and practice that you can tolerate being annoyed by someone, by lots of people, and care for the rights and fair treatment of those people anyway. Of course no community of any size is perfect, but the group of people I found who are my queer friends now want to know me front to back, and it took finding that feeling to realize that the Lindy Hop community that I’d found up to that point had not been giving that to me.

Stepping more into the San Francisco queer scene also reminded me that I love dancing. Not just jazz dancing. I grew up in a dancing-around-the-household house, I spent time with my studio dance team dancing on the side of the floor while we waited to do more dancing, and as an adult, I love going to an alleyway or a crowded bar patio or a dark club and getting sweaty as hell just moving. My favorite lindy hop dances resemble these club dances: a sweaty crowd, a band or DJ with a beat so persistent that even if you’re not dancing, you can’t not move, the feeling of the jazz ballroom of the 1930s being part of the direct line to the disco to the club.

Because I have the brain I have, I’ve spent the last year reading up on these fascinations of mine. Here’s a couple books I read in 2024 that have helped me think about what I love about and what I want from the lindy hop “community”:

American Allegory (2013), Black Hawk Hancock

I’ve written up a full review of this that maybe I’ll send out one day. My friend Xander (the smartest person I know, and not a lindy hopper) picked this up for me from a box on the street. 

Hancock is an academic, and approaches his own relationship to swing dancing through his lens as an ethnographer. At its weakest, it’s Hancock’s attempt to define what makes Lindy Hop unique as a practice. At its strongest, it’s a searing analysis of the state of the community as he experienced it in the 2000s. Hancock casts a loving eye on many parts of the dance, and the work is useful as a pretty holistic picture of what the scene was like at the time when the “revival” was in full swing, and as it began to “decline” to what we have now.

Hancock also looks directly at the racism that was already clear as day, and he is unflinchingly honest about how his prioritizing of the racial history of Lindy Hop in his own classes lost him work and popularity in his local scene. He asks questions that have finally become mainstream long before they were, like: is it possible for white people to engage with the Lindy Hop in a way that doesn’t write over and disrespect its Black origins? If so, how? And he does so by, in part, contrasting the Lindy Hop scene with the Chicago Steppin’ scene, and questioning why the two so rarely interact.

Here’s an excerpt that represents just how unpopular this topic used to be:

When discussing the pleasure of dancing the Lindy Hop, I would always ask whether the dance’s African American identity was a significant factor in dancers’ attraction to the art form . . . it was always misinterpreted as accusatory, provoking the same defensive reaction: race had nothing to do with the dance . . .

One veteran dancer and instructor who considered my question a bit more, said:

“I don’t think people ever really think about stuff like that. I don’t. And I can’t really say in the time I’ve been doing this that anyone has ever really talked about race. I mean, Norma Miller has definitely brought up issues of race. She even accused this one white woman of stealing the Lindy Hop at a panel that was hosted at one of the dance camps, where some of the old-timers were telling stories about what the dance was like back in the day. But that’s why she is so marginalized; nobody wants to hear that stuff.”

On Community (2023), Casey Plett

My friend Ollie (a new but already invaluable friend, not a lindy hopper) recommended this the first time we hung out, as we spoke about the communities each of us are part of (we’re both trans guys in the Bay Area, so there’s quite a bit of overlap).

Casey Plett is an incredible fiction author. She’s also a trans woman who comes from a Mennonite background, which gives her reflections on community two very unique perspectives. There are more similarities to be found in the communities of trans women and Mennonites than one might initially think, and to me, it was in the references to the Mennonite church where I found the most similarities to my own dance community. In her essays, she presents the scope of types of community, as well as experiences for individuals in them, from the deep rewards of the soul to the abscesses a community leaves in those who it disappoints. One of her main investigations is into what meaning the word “community” does or does not have, depending on how it’s wielded. I’ll quote one entire essay here, “An Ongoing Space of Encounter”:

An ongoing space of encounter.

Space: A place where community interactions occur. The borders of this space can be fuzzy and perhaps exasperating, but you can name it. A cafe, a small town’s main drag, a dozen employees on a retail floor that everybody hates, a bar, a union hall, the block you live on, a Facebook group, the Facebook feed.

Encounter: The interactions in such a space. Usually a mix of dynamic and static, new and repetitive—and hopefully never calcifying, perhaps, in one or the other.

Ongoing: This space of encounter is not a one-off. There is a dependable mix of other humans in this space, and within it: a past, present, and future all exist, all three.

Maybe we could define community as “an ongoing space of encounter.” It’s not perfect, but nothing will be. It might be the closest thing, for me.

Raving (2023), McKenzie Wark

I picked this one up from East Bay Booksellers (which would burn down a week later!!! It’s back now) a couple months ago, because I like McKenzie Wark’s work. McKenzie Wark is a professor, memoirist, and trans woman who writes on a ton of stuff, but largely about Marxism, media, and being a transsexual, things I’m also very interested in. 

In this work she writes about the queer and trans rave scene in New York with the critical eye only a deep love can grant you. For her and her friends, the trans rave space is a little escape. But she doesn’t overgeneralize this: the rave space itself isn’t the escape, nor is the community as a whole. It’s the people she goes with, the people she meets there, the music and the artists making it, the ambiance of a well-thrown event. But floating around her at all times is the specter of the real world, even at the rave: wealthy hobbyists, straight people, security guards, literal cops. 

This spoke to me as someone who finds my escape in a community that isn’t necessarily built for people like me to escape into (at least not as it’s currently constructed). But what I found the most evocative is the way she describes a really good night of dancing to a really good set: hovering near the DJ, sitting next to or sometimes on the stage, getting lost in the music—or as she puts it, letting the music fuck her. Here’s an excerpt:

Earplugs in, I head for the front of the stage. Like K, it’s where I like to be most.

Speaker demons, as madison moore calls them: those who try to fuck the speaker, climb into it. I’m a speaker demon, but to me speakers are switch. As a bottom by inclination, I would of course think this way. I want to be fucked by sound. Not so much a sound that you hear, more a sound you feel . . .

Here’s the theory of that moment: I want the situation, the entire situation, to fuck me. I want to be penetrated by light, fog, the floor, the walls, the anonymous swaying bodies. I want to be railed by pounding sound. Or at least, that’s one mode of raving for me.

I’d love to hear from y’all if you read any of these, or just if this makes you think about community. I spent all week at Lindy Focus with these books in the back of my mind, and would love to have more discussion about these things with more dancers!