Tell me about the history of unusually same sex dancing!
November 19, 2013 11:37 AM Subscribe
I just caught a scene from the 1953 film Stalag 17. In it, some WW2 prisoners of war hold a dance, and for obvious reasons, half the male dancers are following.
Can anyone help me fill in the imaginary back story as if I were watching this film in 1953?
Would some of them have already known how to follow somehow (how?), or would they have just had to work it out together in their POW camp? I wonder how they decided who would lead and who would follow and how they would have felt about that. Are there other historical situations in which dances apparently intended for opposite sex couples would be danced by same sex couples? Or am I making way more out of this than they ever would have?
Would some of them have already known how to follow somehow (how?), or would they have just had to work it out together in their POW camp? I wonder how they decided who would lead and who would follow and how they would have felt about that. Are there other historical situations in which dances apparently intended for opposite sex couples would be danced by same sex couples? Or am I making way more out of this than they ever would have?
This blog entry (linked in this recent FPP) has a picture of men dancing about a quarter of the way down the page. The caption says, "In all male environments, such as mining camps or navy ships, it was common for men to hold dances, with half the men wearing a patch or some other marker to designate them as the “women” for the evening." So there are other situations in which it happened, and it sounds like the roles were somehow worked out/agreed upon ahead of time.
posted by amarynth at 11:56 AM on November 19, 2013
posted by amarynth at 11:56 AM on November 19, 2013
Here's an article (pdf) with more history/pictures.
posted by Jahaza at 11:59 AM on November 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
posted by Jahaza at 11:59 AM on November 19, 2013 [3 favorites]
And vice-versa with women. In all girls schools you'll see girls dancing with girls. There's a scene of this in the movie, "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." And it's all over Happy Days.
It's a trope that an especially tall or well-built girl would always Lead because she was more manish.
I mean, seriously, look at any movie featuring a dance and you'll see this. ESPECIALLY during WWII, when all the men were off to war.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 12:09 PM on November 19, 2013
It's a trope that an especially tall or well-built girl would always Lead because she was more manish.
I mean, seriously, look at any movie featuring a dance and you'll see this. ESPECIALLY during WWII, when all the men were off to war.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 12:09 PM on November 19, 2013
This is a thing that you'll still see in the contra and square dance community.
Nowadays at dances that skew younger/queerer/more progressive, people just dance whatever role they feel like dancing, regardless of the proportion of men and women who are present.
But at dances that skew older/straighter/more conservative, dancing the "wrong" part is still seen as something you only do if all else fails and you don't have enough dancers of the "right" gender.
The places I've danced that are like that, it's much more common for there to be "too many" women. Often someone will bring a handful of old neckties, and there will be a rule to the effect that women dancing the men's part have to mark themselves by wearing one.
It's rarer in my experience for men in more conservative dance commmunities to dance the women's part, even if there are more men than women present. But it does happen too. Some places there's an agreed on marker signifying the opposite of the necktie: "I'm the person in this couple who you should treat like a woman."
This is actually a thing that lot of people in the contra community are arguing about right now. There's a wide range of opinions on it — at one extreme you get "it's ridiculous and ignorant that we even call the parts 'ladies' and 'gents' in this day and age, much less expect people to dance in a role that actually corresponds to their own personal gender" and at the other you get "no, the gender roles are part of the tradition, and we shouldn't abandon that just to be politically correct."
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 12:24 PM on November 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Nowadays at dances that skew younger/queerer/more progressive, people just dance whatever role they feel like dancing, regardless of the proportion of men and women who are present.
But at dances that skew older/straighter/more conservative, dancing the "wrong" part is still seen as something you only do if all else fails and you don't have enough dancers of the "right" gender.
The places I've danced that are like that, it's much more common for there to be "too many" women. Often someone will bring a handful of old neckties, and there will be a rule to the effect that women dancing the men's part have to mark themselves by wearing one.
It's rarer in my experience for men in more conservative dance commmunities to dance the women's part, even if there are more men than women present. But it does happen too. Some places there's an agreed on marker signifying the opposite of the necktie: "I'm the person in this couple who you should treat like a woman."
This is actually a thing that lot of people in the contra community are arguing about right now. There's a wide range of opinions on it — at one extreme you get "it's ridiculous and ignorant that we even call the parts 'ladies' and 'gents' in this day and age, much less expect people to dance in a role that actually corresponds to their own personal gender" and at the other you get "no, the gender roles are part of the tradition, and we shouldn't abandon that just to be politically correct."
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 12:24 PM on November 19, 2013 [2 favorites]
Supposedly, it was once very common for men to dance the tango with other men.
Would some of them have already known how to follow somehow (how?)
If you know how to lead, you know what the person following should do in response to your lead. If you've never followed before, you might not pull it off too smoothly on the first try. Some men had probably described to someone else how to follow at other times, or had danced follow while teaching another man how to lead.
If you want to have a dance, and partner dances are what people know how to do, and your group isn't mixed-gender, you're going to end up with people of the same gender dancing with each other. This would have come up in historical situations with bored groups of people who were all of the same gender, and probably happened in a great many times and places without being recorded.
posted by yohko at 12:34 PM on November 19, 2013
Would some of them have already known how to follow somehow (how?)
If you know how to lead, you know what the person following should do in response to your lead. If you've never followed before, you might not pull it off too smoothly on the first try. Some men had probably described to someone else how to follow at other times, or had danced follow while teaching another man how to lead.
If you want to have a dance, and partner dances are what people know how to do, and your group isn't mixed-gender, you're going to end up with people of the same gender dancing with each other. This would have come up in historical situations with bored groups of people who were all of the same gender, and probably happened in a great many times and places without being recorded.
posted by yohko at 12:34 PM on November 19, 2013
Found a paper with many examples in many different contexts:
if you look back in history, there are lots of fascinating accounts of same gender coupling and bending the roles within social dance culture
posted by yohko at 12:59 PM on November 19, 2013
if you look back in history, there are lots of fascinating accounts of same gender coupling and bending the roles within social dance culture
posted by yohko at 12:59 PM on November 19, 2013
Yes, back in the days when partner dancing was the default, and when circumstances segregated sexes, this was incredibly common and accepted, and nobody thought twice about it.
It's a trope that an especially tall or well-built girl would always Lead because she was more manish.
Tell me about it! I was the tallest girl in my school, and I did get used to leading. We only did a little dancing, but my also-tall mother remembers leading her shorter girlfriends through two semesters of walltz, cha-cha, and polka in gym class.
it was once very common for men to dance the tango with other men.
In the tango classes I took, the two male teachers demonstrated all the steps with each other. There weren't enough male students in the class, so i was often partnered with a female assistant teacher. (She was shorter than me, but a really strong leader.)
I can't find a clip on youtube, but there's a scene in Follow the Fleet (1936) where Fred Astaire's giving a dance class to his fellow sailors, and he points at half of them and says, "You guys are the dames." Halfway through the class, the officers come on deck and cut in.
Following is a little tricky if you've only ever led, but you can pick it up pretty quickly if you know the steps. It's kind of like singing a different part in the choir.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:08 PM on November 19, 2013
It's a trope that an especially tall or well-built girl would always Lead because she was more manish.
Tell me about it! I was the tallest girl in my school, and I did get used to leading. We only did a little dancing, but my also-tall mother remembers leading her shorter girlfriends through two semesters of walltz, cha-cha, and polka in gym class.
it was once very common for men to dance the tango with other men.
In the tango classes I took, the two male teachers demonstrated all the steps with each other. There weren't enough male students in the class, so i was often partnered with a female assistant teacher. (She was shorter than me, but a really strong leader.)
I can't find a clip on youtube, but there's a scene in Follow the Fleet (1936) where Fred Astaire's giving a dance class to his fellow sailors, and he points at half of them and says, "You guys are the dames." Halfway through the class, the officers come on deck and cut in.
Following is a little tricky if you've only ever led, but you can pick it up pretty quickly if you know the steps. It's kind of like singing a different part in the choir.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:08 PM on November 19, 2013
I remember as a child seeing my aunt (b.1916) and her women friends dancing together at parties in the North of England. They were of a generation where the men had been away or had died at war during their youth, and once they were in their 70s they were widows or had never married and were once again without any men to dance with. Usually the taller woman would lead.
posted by essexjan at 1:24 PM on November 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by essexjan at 1:24 PM on November 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
My grandmother was 21 when WWII broke out and she spent it working with other women at the GM plant in Dayton, Ohio building gyroscopes and whatnot.
One of her favorite stories is about how she and her crew of single women would show up a dance hall into order to find some Air Force boys to dance with, and they would run into a bunch of guys all dancing with each other. Of course, when they noticed the girls they would dance with them instead.
This was war time, and just like Rumsfield said you had to go to the dance floor with the partner you had, not the partner you might want :-)
posted by sideshow at 2:22 PM on November 19, 2013
One of her favorite stories is about how she and her crew of single women would show up a dance hall into order to find some Air Force boys to dance with, and they would run into a bunch of guys all dancing with each other. Of course, when they noticed the girls they would dance with them instead.
This was war time, and just like Rumsfield said you had to go to the dance floor with the partner you had, not the partner you might want :-)
posted by sideshow at 2:22 PM on November 19, 2013
I went to an all-girls school in the UK in the 1980s, and we did occasionally do partner dancing in PE class. It was mostly up to us to choose who would follow and lead, but it did seem that typically the taller and/or more confident girls would end up leading.
posted by Joh at 2:36 PM on November 19, 2013
posted by Joh at 2:36 PM on November 19, 2013
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I remember seeing this in a movie or reading it in a book about cowboys? This may have been referencing a trope familiar to moviegoers of the time as well as / in addition to an actual practice.
posted by Jahaza at 11:54 AM on November 19, 2013