First Alternate: A Lindy Hopper's Newsletter

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?

This matters to me, partly because I love mess, contradiction and nuance, and partly because it matters to me how I engage with queerness in lindy hop now. If you talk to Helen or I, you know our general thesis—being trans in a lindy hop space feels basically the same as being trans anywhere else, in that it’s fine, mostly, and sometimes it isn’t. If I’m feeling salty, I’ll parrot my line that lindy hoppers are about ten years behind popular queer culture, generally—which puts us now at what, the Transgender Tipping Point? The legalization of gay marriage?

It matters to me of course that I and other queer people are “visible” in the scene, but it means very little to me if that’s all people give me and other queers, and if it’s all I contribute. I don’t think visibility liberates us, I think it draws attention, which is a step that could easily go nowhere. I’m just a dancer who is transgender, and shaking my hand about it and not hate-criming me means very little to me. It’s the least most people can do. And being a teacher who’s trans may attract other trans dancers, but that falls apart if the rest of the community they experience isn’t ready for them. 

Frankly, I’m pretty safe in my lindy hop spaces because of where I live geographically, and my relative position of power in my community. The microaggressions I experience are routine, but I rarely feel “unsafe.” When I think about how being trans affects me in lindy hop, I think about how the people who take my classes, hire me, dance with me, interact with trans people (or don’t interact with them) when they leave the ballroom. I think about whether doing the lindy hop, knowing some trans people, affects their lives and viewpoints in the way it does mine—in that it sets my moral compass toward prioritizing the marginalized, be that workers, people of color, queer people, disabled people, trans people, colonized people, people who are all of these.

I want to emphasize this connection as Pride month comes to a close. To me, really engaging with lindy hop means reorienting your life in this way, because I feel that I owe it to the people who came before me, and it means making it clear to people who know you that that’s who you are and what you care about.

It’s an honor to know so many more dancers who are on this wavelength than I used to. I’m going out to the San Francisco Trans March today to be with my community, some of whom are dancers. This year everyone I know is angrier than ever, and it all feels connected—the attempted annihilation of trans people, especially trans kids, from public life, the genocide being enacted on Palestinians, the abduction of people from their homes without justification or recourse. The people in power are punching down, and it feels more important than ever to care for each other and be angry on each other’s behalf. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. I love Trans March because every year I feel connected even through that anger. It can be exhausting alone, but together it’s bearable, even beautiful.

To end on a fun note, here’s a party playlist I made last year that many of my friends say is my masterpiece. Have a great weekend, homos!