Tag: romance

Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight

Boca Tuya dance company presented a gay pas de deux that left me buzzzzzing tonight. It was so good.

Here’s a video of a performance from Jacob’s Pillow last year. “Like Those Playground Kids At Midnight”. That’s the choreographer in the pink shirt.

I love the slouchy outfits. I love the inclusion of gestures from various sex activities. I love the familiarity of grabbing each other’s arms and waists and necks ❤️

It’s a tiny section but I love how tight their unison is. I noticed it over and over in the whole program tonight — unison that good tricks your brain when you watch it. It makes the dancers seem physically connected

I have been going to at least 5 or 6 dance performances a year for the past 15 or so years and tonight was I think only the second gay duet I have seen?

Of course I have seen many same-gender pairings in many dance performances, but actual gay romantic dances? I think only two

And I go to gay dance shows! But often it is camp and drag. The sincere romance is pretty rare. I would attend an entire dance festival of gay romantic duets

The other actual gay romantic dance was in The Missing Generation by Sean Dorsey, an AIDS memorial piece that you can see part of in an early episode of Sense8.

My strongest memory is a section that fused contemporary dance and 80s house/club dance, set to house music and a recording of a survivor recalling pre-AIDS closeted hookup culture. Made me cry.

But it’s so important to see gay sex and romance outside of tragic AIDS stories too. Of course you know that ❤️

Romantic thought experiments

Heated Rivalry is such a good example of why I think romance is speculative fiction <3

What do haters say about romance? It’s unrealistic, it’s contrived. What is the standard response from fans? “It’s fantasy.” Undervalued form of thought experiment.

What is the other big complaint that haters have about romance? “You know what’s going to happen.” Romance stipulates a happy ending, so the speculative “what if” question is “what if this unlikely pair got a happily ever after?”. A lot of the time, that requires warping the world somewhat!

When people complain that romance is unrealistic or predictable, they are missing the point. Those deviations from our world are the experimental results of asking “what if?”. Those are the speculations.

What would Stanley Cup games look like if gay hockey players always got happily-ever-after endings? Different!

Anyway, I know there are lots of genres that mix romance and traditional speculative fiction genres, but I like to think about the speculative power of the romance elements themselves.

It’s good to do thought experiments about nice things happening to people, having the hottest possible time, and everything working out.

“Because love always causes a descent into the Death nature…”

These are quotes from Women Who Run With The Wolves that have been sitting here with no context, unpublished, since February 2009. I think I was interested in talking about love beyond infatuation, love as an action or alliance instead of a feeling. I still am.

I haven’t posted anything here, or done much writing at all, for many months. Spitting out some old drafts seems like a good re-entry. I seem to do this every now and then. Maybe I can promote it as a personal feature instead of a bug.

Anyway. Old quotes.

A part of every [person] resists knowing that in all love relationships Death must have her share. We pretend we can love without our illusions about love dying, pretend we can go on without our superficial expectations dying, pretend we can progress and that our favorite flushes and rushes will never die. But in love, psychically, everything becomes picked apart….

What dies? Illusion dies, expectations die, greed for having it all, for wanting all to be beautiful only, all this dies. Because love always causes a descent into Death nature, we can see why it takes abundant self-power and soulfulness to make that commitment.

More…

In wise stories, love is seldom a romantic tryst between two lovers. For instance, some stories from the circumpolar regions describe the union of two beings whose strength together enables one or both to enter into communication with the soul world and to participate in fate as a dance with life and death.

And more.

It is true that within a single love relationship there are many endings. Yet, somehow and somewhere in the delicate layers of the being that is created when two people love one another, there is both a heart and breath. While one side of the heart empties, the other fills. When one breath runs out, another begins.