Tropical Zen

My teachers think I should teach.

If I want to teach, I will (among other things) have to do the grunt work of dancing with all the old, not-so-pretty, bad dancers in every community I land in. Everywhere I go where my face is new, until I have a Name for myself and also land in a bigger community where they are accustomed to Names, I will have to dance with bad dancers and make them look good if I want clients. That is the work part of the business. Dancing with good dancers and cute people is the fun part, but it doesn’t pay very well.

Related to my orientation and the strongly gendered culture of tango, I’ve never once fooled myself into thinking that I will find love here. It does not matter to me if I dance with attractive women; I’m not interested in attractive women, nor am I interested in straight men, and the supermajority of tango dancers will be straight men and women (whatever their orientation). From the tiny little pool of tango dancers who are gay men, the likelihood of encountering one who’ll enjoy my freedom, annual migrations, and also my non-monogamy are even more slim. So much so that I have written it off as even a remote possibility.

There’s no need to feel bad for me. I don’t go looking for love in straight bars or government offices or hardware stores, either; when I find it, it is within my community, friends and friends of friends, people who share more with me than love of a certain music or dance style. Perhaps I have higher standards, or maybe I just have more specific needs; whichever the case may be, I’m not in any hurry to alter a reasonably functional system of low love expectations and polite but sexually neutral behaviour. I imagine that the straight men I dance with would be just as put off and weirded out if I flirted with them as I am when a woman gets too overtly sensual at me; that’ s usually the time to bring up a reasonable but blunt reference to my lover, the big hairy sailor in Victoria. (Who doesn’t dance tango, and doesn’t need to. It seems foolish to try to get all my needs met in one person and only one person; if there are needs he can’t meet, what do I do then?)

Several of the women I danced with last night assumed I was a teacher. I suppose, if the requirement for being a teacher is that I’m willing, then it’s in the process of becoming true. It still doesn’t quite fit comfortably, but it’s becoming more okay as I get used to the idea. Maybe by the time I return to Puerto Vallarta I will think of myself as a teacher, and be one.
And I will dance with all the older women, and make them smile.

I just moved in to SF proper. We’d been up in the north bay area, miles from anywhere useful in a suburb that seemed built by Crate & Barrel. I thought I’d be happy to live in a town where there were no chain stores, but these are all upscale boutiques: fashion clothes for dogs, woo-woo-yoga for a prettier soul, Art galleries, that kind of thing. It’s damn annoying and really expensive.

Anyway, now I’m in a sublet in the Mission at 22nd and Guerrero for the next 3 weeks, and it seems like a neat place. I’m very much enjoying my lessons, and also my teachers as people. I like them a lot. Michael is sort of a cross between my daddy Charlie and me: he’s a curmudgeonly computer-gadget-loving dedicated meat/beer consumer who gets nervous around health food, and also a showoff and great physical comedian who enjoys smaller groups rather than larger parties. He’s got this thing he’ll sometimes do he calls “oranguatango” where he does a very good job mimicking an orangutan, and leads an entire song dancing tango while doing it. It’s super funny, and I’ve been encouraging them to get some clips up on YouTube. Oh, he’s also a quintessential Canadian, which interacts strangely with being a curmudgeon, because that means he’s a very polite curmudgeon. I’m not quite sure how one does that, but he pulls it off wonderfully. Beatrix is extremely sweet, sometimes a little too much but then she’ll make a joke out of language or do something weird and funny. German is her first language and she has a heavy accent; she has a hard time with “th” not coming out as “ss,” and she knows it, and she plays with that sometimes. She used to be a therapist on Salt Spring Island, not too far from my lover Derek. I bought her some glove warmers recently because her hands get so cold its painful for me when she touches me. She doesn’t seem to mind her hands being cold, but *I* mind, so I’ve provided a solution.

So there.

I’m overwhelmed with tango. One lesson every day, sometimes milongas and practicas, we’ve just moved from San Anselmo in to San Francisco. I haven’t met any gay tango dancers yet but I hope to soon, and there’s a gay tango festival the first weekend of July that I want to attend.

I’m really enjoying Beatrix and Michael, as teachers, as dancers, and as people. They’re wonderful! They complement each other in so many ways, it’s like they were really meant for each other. I’ll try to write more down soon, but I have to get to sleep now, there’s another practica in the afternoon and a milonga at night, and somewhere in there we have to have another lesson. I’ve learned so much!

I’m going to start taking videos of the reviews, and post them up on Youtube. They’re trying to get a body of work up there, so we may as well start with something I can edit, instead of more work for them. I wonder how to check around Seattle to see if there’s anyone to host them when they come through toward the beginning of May next year; they’re going through too fast this year to really teach any classes.