Free My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey by Charles Rowan Beye Page B

match left us all awash in our bodily fluids. The brace that held my spine so it would grow straight could be removed from time to time with no damage. The pain of excessive articulation of my hips and pelvis was a trade-off for the joy of dancing. Years later, when I was out dancing among a group of African Americans, a friend remarked that I was the only white guy he had ever seen who knew how to throw his crotch around. From my experience of teaching white boys to dance, I would have to agree that they were all afraid to acknowledge their crotch and swing it. These things go in phases, of course; one remembers the tight jeans of the sixties worn without underwear so that their owner could put everything he had on display. Nowadays it is depressing to see that males are so alarmed at the notion of exposure that they wear baggy pants down to their knees on the court and in the pool, a costume that ludicrously mimics the billows and flairs of a woman’s skirt, effectively obscuring any hint of masculine sexuality from waist to knee.
    Dancing in the forties was mostly the foxtrot or jitterbugging. Girls favored the former if they liked their partner enough to want to be close; boys, who might well have yearned for the proximity of the foxtrot, were usually so awkward that they chose to jitterbug, to avoid unseemly stumbling. Most boys, in fact, stood at the periphery with their hands in their pockets—controlling their erections, probably—and made dumb jokes. I danced every dance, every style. This was my high school moment; I was a wonderful dancer and everyone knew it. There wasn’t a girl in that recreation center who did not yearn to dance with me; I heard it again and again through the years when my classmates reminisced at the reunions. And to make it Andy Hardy perfect I had my driver’s license and my mother’s car almost every weekend night. The difference was that after squiring the girls home I often parked in a shady grove with the other male of our double date.
    Memories of my sophomore year naturally brought up anxieties as I started back to school for my junior year, but it was all so different almost immediately. I was old news now, the shock value was gone, the jeer factor useless. Teenagers are a fickle lot. To use contemporary slang, I was “so last year.” I did not, however, disappear into the faceless mass. The school administration embarked on two radical efforts at social remodeling. One was to organize a series of girl-bid dances in the gym, an obvious attempt to minimize the notorious power to create wallflowers that males traditionally possess. The other was to establish two lunch-hour periods a week during which there would be dancing in the large open foyer of the school. The motive here, it seems, was to keep the kids from spending their lunch hour smoking and God knows what else in the parking lot. Since everyone lunched at the same time, there would be no unseemly music disrupting studies. The right to choose partners immediately flowed from the one event to the other, and I was besieged on every side. In retrospect it surprises me how many girls wanted to invite me to the girl-bid dances. Yes, I was good-looking, a wonderful dancer, had a car, and I was witty, but I was not the slightest bit a studly emotional thrill and they all knew that. As for the lunchtime dances, I was on my feet for every number. I could not get enough of dancing, ever, and it’s true even today. I particularly liked partnering girls who were not only skillful but exhibitionists as well, so that we could let ourselves get carried away. I was also happy, very happy, indeed, to note the circle of boys, the wannabe dancers with the wooden feet, who stared hungrily at the seeming seduction that dancing can imply.
    One social triumph led to another. I joined the drama club at the suggestion of some of my more demonstrative dance partners, where my major role that year was as the evil genius in a kind of made-for-kids