TANGO OUT UPENDS NORMS
A weekly gathering is rebelling against tango’s traditional norms, which dictate that men always lead and women always follow,
Tango Out, a weekly party in Miami Beach at which same-sex couples dance the tango together, provides an alternative to long-held traditions of the Argentine dance step.
The couple clad in black settled into a tight embrace on the dance floor, demonstrating the sultry starting point, and through line, of a well-danced Argentine tango.
The fact that both dance instructors were men —
Ray Sullivan, 49, and Luis Vivas, 46 — hardly fazed the circle of students milling around the pair, who seemed more concerned with technique.
“The embrace is the most important thing,” Sullivan told the class. “I need to keep my embrace around him the whole time. If I leave him it’s not tango anymore. It’s something else.”
What took place during the remainder of the class held at a Miami Beach sports bar, and in the night of social dancing that followed (called a milonga) was undoubtedly tango, that mix of supple strides, entwined legs and melancholic music that first emerged in the port of Buenos Aires and spread the world over.
But what transpired in that milonga, a weekly gathering called Tango
Out, was also “something else.” It was Miami’s contribution to queer tango, a growing movement rebelling against tango’s heteronormative conventions, which dictate that men always lead and women always follow. In queer tango, dancers can partner up with whomever they’d like, regardless of their gender.
Anyone can lead, and anyone can follow.
Among the dancers at the class and at the milonga was Rodrigo Romero, from Chile. He spent the night dancing mostly with male partners, which he said wasn’t an option when he first discovered Miami’s tango scene at 18.
“It’s inspiring to be able to express yourself in this way. Before, you couldn’t. Men who wanted to dance with men got weird looks, or had to hide. But now you can be exactly who you are,” Romero said. “And that’s very inspiring. I personally dance with both [genders], but I feel much more comfortable with men.”
Also on the Tango Out dance floor was Maria Herrera. Although she is originally from Colombia, she started dancing tango during the 12 years she lived in Maryland, which she says is home to a more progressive milonga community.
“Here [in Miami], tango and the milongas are mostly driven by the old-timers who still try to impose many of the machista rules of tango,” she said. “Once I was dancing with a woman at a milonga and people said, ‘Are these two lesbians or what?’ No. You don’t have to be lesbian to dance with a woman. It’s a completely different concept. It’s about enjoying this dance however you want to enjoy it. It lets you be more creative. You can lead and you can follow.”
TANGO FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
Sullivan and Vivas launched Tango Out in 2016 with the goal of creating an inclusive nook within Miami’s tango scene that would welcome both queer and straight dancers alike.
“This isn’t about just getting gay people to dance with gay people,” said Sullivan. “It’s about getting people to actually open their minds, explore different roles, and realize that they don’t have to buy into
machista, heteronormal [standards] to have a meaningful experience dancing with someone. [...] I’m really interested in art for social change.”
Though Vivas, a professional tango dancer, is from Argentina and has been exposed to the dance since he was a child, Sullivan only discovered it in his
20s, during a five-year stint as a ballet dancer in Buenos Aires.
“I would just sit [at mi
longas] and I was fascinated,” he said.
In the early 2000s, with both Vivas and Sullivan in Miami, the pair wanted to explore same-sex dancing but found tango circles mostly resistant.
“That’s what made us start to look into opening Tango Out,” said Sullivan. “We would see all this verbiage that was not inclusive. Literally, there would be websites that would say things like, ‘We only accept mixed gender couples because tango is danced between a man and a woman.’”
By the time Tango Out came into being in 2016, the queer tango movement had taken hold in Argentina, especially among younger dancers and amid an increasingly vocal wave of feminist activism. Buenos Aires has played host to a queer tango festival every year since 2007 — with similar events being routinely held in cities like
New York, Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen and San Francisco — and in the most recent iteration of the tango world championships, a same-sex couple reached the final stage of the tournament for the first time in history.
For Vivas, who travels to queer tango festivals around the country and around the world, dancing with men is an almost euphoric experience. “It feels spectacular. When I started dancing tango, my dream was to get to this place, and now I feel free and I feel like I can be completely authentic, like I can be completely me” he said. “It’s like my dream came true.”
Sullivan still remembers the first time he ever danced tango with a man, around 15 years ago. His partner was Vivas.
“For me, that was like, ‘Oh my gosh, where the hell do I put my feet?” he said. “And it sounds like such a strange word, I would never use this word normally with tango but I felt really happy. I felt my mind was opened up to the huge possibility that I could be me, the way other people can be them.”
ANYONE CAN LEAD, AND ANYONE CAN FOLLOW
In traditional milongas, men lead — dominating the dance floor by default — and women follow. But in queer tango, those roles aren’t mandatory assignments; they’re choices that dancers can slip into and out of as they see fit, regardless of their gender identity. Men learn to follow. Women get a space where they can lead.
“Here, you’ll dance with someone for a while, and then they’ll ask you, ‘Do you want to switch
[roles]?” said Romero, the Chilean dancer at Tango Out. “It’s freeing. And it helps you make a much more complete connection with the person you’re dancing with.”
For women, redefining tango as an experience that’s not just limited to following male partners can curb the sexist treatment they sometimes encounter on the dance floor.
“Not every man is like this, but there are some that force you in many different ways and make you feel uncomfortable. Sometimes their hands wander places and you just want to slap them away,” said Herrera. “That’s what I think is the most interesting part of the queer movement: that it’s not just an LGBTQ movement, but it’s also something that’s giving women more options, that’s letting women decide what they want.”
After more than a decade of following, Herrera said she is enjoying the challenge of getting to lead.
“When you learn to drive the movement of the dance with just your body and your impulse, and when you know that you can lead someone else wherever you want them to go, that’s a powerful thing,” she said.
As Sullivan explained, teaching dancers, especially experienced ones, to switch roles can be tricky — a bit like asking a striker on the soccer pitch to try playing defense.
“Some people are completely open to it conceptually but they have trouble technically making that transition,” he said. “And some people technically don’t struggle but they can’t connect because they’re closed off on a certain part of it.”
An important part of the teaching process in queer tango is to disassociate dancing roles from gender.
“There are still people who are new to teaching it so they’ll say, ‘Now everybody does the woman’s role.’ You still hear that because they just don’t know how to teach it,” said Sullivan. “I identify as male, and I’m male on both sides of that relationship whether I’m following or leading.”
The reward of learning both roles, dancers at Tango Out said, is a more comprehensive appreciation of tango.
“Now, I can’t imagine in my life not dancing both roles,” said Sullivan. “I can’t imagine going back to only knowing one half of that circle, because I would feel incomplete.”
RUFFLING FEATHERS
The rise of queer tango has sparked some backlash from traditionalists who decry an incompatibility with the heterosexual mythology of the dance — even though all-male couples are actually an intractable part of tango’s origin story starting in the late 19th century.
“Some people have a certain standard of what tango should look like, and they’re not OK with projects like this,” said Vivas.
Sullivan agrees queer tango isn’t for everyone but he takes issue with outright intolerance.
“I love and adore los
viejitos del tango because from them you get so much tradition and culture. But as soon as they turn around and they begin to talk about gender roles and this isn’t tango, men with men, my point is very simple: get used to it,” he said. “Because I’m not leaving. It’s just that clear. Why would I?”
Sullivan isn’t just “not leaving.” He’s doubling down, and is currently organizing South Florida’s first queer tango festival, scheduled for April 2020, around the time of Miami Beach Pride festivities.
FIGHTING FOR THE FUTURE OF TANGO
Oscar Caballero is a lifelong dancer and a longtime tango teacher — including at the University of Tango in Buenos Aires. He moved from Argentina to Miami in the year 2000, when there were only four
milongas in the area. “Interest in tango here in South Florida has grown tremendously, tremendously,” he said. “The tango community just really opened up. There’s almost too many milongas nowadays.”
Although he considers himself “a little bit of a traditionalist,” Caballero welcomes projects that keep tango current.
“There’s lots of new figures in the tango world trying to bring new things to the table. Now, obviously some of it can be seen as taking away some of the virtue of the dance. But I’ve always said that, if culture keeps moving and changing, then tango can’t stay stagnant. It has to evolve in some way,” he said. “Artistically, all expressions are valid.”
When it comes to rulebreaking in the name of inclusion, queer tango has company.
Earlier this year, the feminist tango movement also grabbed headlines as activists continue to push to make tango spaces less patriarchal, calling out codes of conduct they say are demeaning and sexist. (Among the group’s grievances are the lyrics of some tango classics that wax poetic about gender violence. An often cited example is the song “Tortazos,” or “Punches,” a diatribe against a disinterested former lover. It contains the line, “I don’t break you with one smack because I don’t want to hit you on the street!”).
Feminist tango and queer tango do overlap in an important way: both movements advocate for less dogmatism around traditional gender roles, and more fluidity on the dance floor. In Buenos Aires, there’s already evidence that more inclusive
milongas are drawing bigger crowds than the old-school tango halls, where women still sit on the opposite side of the dance floor from the men, and wait to be selected to dance.
“Young people are getting more involved in tango and I know that most of them do not have the same social hang ups with gender that we did before. They just don’t. And thank God, thank God,” said Sullivan. “And if we do our jobs right as the adults in the room, then the next generation won’t have to deal with it.”
“That’s the goal, right? Do we want to pass on our traumas or do we want to pass on our freedom?”