A wonderful clip - this is what Youtube exists for! It shows a long term gay
couple who aren't afraid to show the depth of their love for each other by
dancing on TV, in front of one of Britain's top shows. If this link doesn't
work, just google Youtube and Sugar Dandies - you won't regret it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2xwhT8WhZU
As a sidelight, and here I might be giving something away, but really you
should have watched the clip, their ballroom dancing routine provides an
interesting and moving answer to the question that's been asked - how do you
make something that intrinsically assumes a difference between the sexes work
when its same sex.
The issue in ballroom dancing is that the man leads the woman. Yes, of course
these roles can be reversed for effect, but the essential part of the dance is
that you have one partner (usually male and taller) who in the dance dominates
the other partner (usually female and smaller). So adapting it to a same sex
couple is a problem which is a bit odd considering that ballroom dancing is
such an intrinsically camp exercise.
This has come up in those popular dance shows on TV like Dancing With the Stars
where quite a few of the participants are gay, whether they admit it or not.
Its caused awkwardness at times, but they usually just say that the dance
requires a man and a woman and that's how it is whether the man and woman might
want to sleep with each other or not. When Caz Bono was on Dancing With the
Stars, they paired him with a woman of course, and it worked since he is so
obviously a man now, even if he was not born that.
I remember one of the professional dancers being asked how he would dance with
another man, and he sort of blushed and stuttured and finally said the way to
do it, without one dominating the other, would be for both to do the same
routine side by side. This is rather a Bollywood idea and makes me wonder -
what are the dance sequences from Bollywood where you have two men, or two
women dancing side by side, which could be considered for same sex dancing
purposes. The problem of course is that this replicated routine would get
rather boring fast - ballroom dancing is about interaction between the dancers,
not just doing the same as each other.
When the two guys here started their routine I thought they were naturally
following the one guy dominates routine because one of them is much taller than
the other, so he started by leading and he's the one who picks the shorter guy
up. But then at the end there's a twist and the shorter guy picks the taller
guy up - and partly they manage this by the taller guy wrapping himself around
the other guy in a really vulnerable way. It sounds silly when I describe it,
but it works really well - there was something truly moving about that moment.
Its also nice to see the support they get from one of the (male) judges when
the other male judge, Simon Cowell, does his usual semi-sneering routine. You
can hear the obviously loaded meaning - but it still sounds good - when he
says: "I think its important that we are just equal sometimes... don't listen
to him, I think its great that you both lift each other up."
Vikram (who actually tried learning ballroom dancing once from one of his older
gay friends, who is one of the most stylish people he knows and was one of the
best ballroom dancers in Mumbai till his health forced him to stop).
