C^{ircle-Square
by Alex Myers}

Square dancing happened on the first and third Tuesdays of every month in the old Baptist church on the fringe of Harvard square.

It had been quite a while since the church had seen any Baptists. The basement played host to a number of local activist groups including an anarchist action group, a pro-hemp organization, and a group fighting for the legalization of raw milk. We danced above them in the main sanctuary.

In some ways I was not your most likely candidate for the square-dance. By the time I was a sophomore, I was deeply immersed in Harvard's queer activist scene. My freshman and sophomore year I was busy making waves as a transgender person on campus. Sexuality and gender identity were pressing issues on campus, and I found myself caught up in the movement, lobbying the school to add gender identity to the non-discrimination clause, to provide bathrooms that were gender neutral, and to address gender identity more systematically both inside and outside the classroom. We organized protests, sit-ins, kiss-ins, die-ins. Mostly, we talked, endlessly, tediously, about who we were and what that meant.

I had come to being transgender in what could be considered the traditional manner. I was a tomboy, consistently mistaken for a boy when I was young. I delighted in this, once fooling a teacher for an entire quarter. I told her my birth name, Alice, was given to me because my parents liked Alice Cooper. I didn't get caught until my teacher sent a report card home to my mother that read "Your son is doing well with the material." My mother quickly set the record straight. By my junior year in high school, I had finally come to terms with the fact that I was not meant to live as a woman and by my senior year in high school, I had found the terminology to match what I was feeling: transgender.

I stumbled upon the dance my sophomore year at Harvard. Outside the church, which I happened to pass on the path between my dorm and my Wednesday morning queer theory class, I noticed a small poster: "Square Dancing. All invited. No partner needed. Bring soft-soled shoes." Those sounded like expectations I could meet. In the world of over-caffeinated undergraduates, life was a swirl of hyper-analysis, everyone always looking for meaning. Square-dancing seemed the perfect antidote.

On a good Tuesday, about thirty people would turn out to dance. Dress was casual, with a little dance flair (skirt with petticoat or belt with a large buckle), and the average age of group was probably 62. The pews were removed long ago and the wooden floor was perfect for the shuffling patterns of an old-fashioned New England contra dance. Where the pulpit once stood, the band assembled – an unpredictable assortment of instruments, some weeks a violin and guitar, other weeks a full woodwind section, plus a piano. The most important man in the room was the caller, Earl, who had a dusty voice, soft and covering everything. His careful intonation guided every dance.

I first learned to square dance during gym class, in middle school. The school authorities in the rural community of Paris, Maine decided that, in the winter, boys would learn wrestling and girls would learn gymnastics. I therefore approached the winter with equal parts dread and jealousy. Dread of Mary Lou Retton-esque flips (or flops in my case) and jealousy of the boys and the grappling and thrashing they would be able to undertake. But it was the late eighties and political correctness and cultural sensitivity were stirring even in the outer reaches of the country, and Paris, Maine was certainly an outer reach. Consequently, just as I arrived in junior high, the school introduced a third option: those disinterested in either wrestling or gymnastics could learn to square dance. This was a godsend although, at first, I was disappointed that they wouldn't let me wrestle with the boys. Not only did square dancing provide an option that did not require me to wear spandex, I also got to escape the horrible company of prissy girls who lived to turn cartwheels and strut across the balance beam.

The group who chose square dancing was composed of nerdy, delicate boys and brawny, awkward girls. In the first class, Mrs. Crabbe (pronounced Kray-be, not Crab, unless you wanted detention) assigned us all partners and told us to practice spinning. I was paired with Tommy, a soft-spoken boy who liked math a bit too much. I was about a foot taller than he was and neither one of us was crazy about putting our arms around each other. His face was directly level with my breasts, and my voice was a good octave lower than his. It was awkward all around. But we spun each other, Tommy's feet sometimes leaving the floor, and made it through that first hour of gym. None of us would admit to liking square dancing, but at least it was an hour of gym class when none of us would be teased or tauntedor the last picked for a team.

Sophomore year in college was long way from junior high. Square dancing was no longer just the lesser of two evils, it was a perfect sanctuary from frenetic life of my peers. Arriving at college, an only recently emerged trans-person, I came onto a scene that was at once stewing in its own juices and dividing like a zygote.

I thought that being transgender defined me. When I had come out in high school, first as a lesbian then as trans gender, I felt comfort not only in finally being able to live as a man, but also a release from the expectations of a label. Nobody in high school knew what trans gender was. Nobody could come up to me and say, as they did when I was out as a lesbian, "Oh, yeah, I have an aunt who's gay and she says…" Being trans gender meant that I made my own rules; no one else could claim my turf. Not so at Harvard. The mid-nineties meant that everyone was scrambling for a label at the same time that everyone had transcended all labels.

When I said I was trans gender at the first BGLTSA meeting, I was showered with questions. Was I pre-op, non-op, third gender, or no gender? It seemed like everyone had definitions ready to account for every aspect of gender. My existence had been theorized and jargonized so much so that I was rendered unsure of what I was anymore. It was the tendency of my peers to define, refine, and define again, an inescapable cycle where words were chosen over meaning. Any sense of self was drowned in semantics and signifiers.

But every other Tuesday, I could head to the Baptist church. When I arrived, the other regulars would say, "Our young man has come again this week!" Everyone else was well over fifty and most were closer to seventy. My sophomore year, I was not yet on testosterone; I looked, on a good day, like a fifteen year old boy. I don't doubt that some of the older folks knew that I wasn't "really" a boy, yet they never treated me with anything but acceptance and appreciation. This may have partially been due to the fact that I knew how to dance, and I wasn't constantly stepping on my partner's toes, though I did have a tendency to place my hands on my partner's shoulders, rather than on the waist, which definitely threw some of the women for a loop.

When I first started attending the square dances, I liked the idea that I was being trans-gressive, that I was bending anothergeneration's ideas of gender, even if they didn't know it. But mostly I liked the dancing. We started every session with a traditional New England style Contra dance. A line of men facing a line of women. No ambiguity. No crossing over. Once the music started, the lines would step towards each other, and each pair would swing or turn before shuffling off to a new position, lines intact, everyone facing a new partner. In the course of an evening, I would dance with a dozen different women, most of them older than my mother. Holding their hands to allemande, grasping their waists to turn them around.

"Don't spin me too fast, young man," one woman said every time I was partnered with her.

The steps and the movements took me right back to my junior high school gym class. I felt almost impossibly distant from my sullen resignation as an eighth grade girl being waltzed around by a sweaty-palmed boy. Who knew that six years later I'd be on the other side of the same dance steps? I certainly never imagined that I would voluntarily seek out square dancing, but it was now, as it was then, an escape.

As much as the twice-monthly square dance was a celebration of overcoming that childhood gender boundary, it was also a chance to flee the campus world of gender-in-a-blender that my peers found so fascinating. In the Baptist church hall, there was no liminality, no third stream, nobody analyzing the gender perfomativity. The music and the dances were timeless, essential. I often wished I could climb to the old choir loft and watch the dance from above, the rigid lines dividing into swirling couples, which reeled across the floor, then reforming under the careful cadence of the caller. To sink into the rhythm of a dance was to sink into myself in a way that the ceaseless questioning and theorizing of my contemporaries never allowed me to. Yet for all that the dance called me from the bustling world of my generation, it was not just an escape, not a chance to hide. I had no illusion about getting back to a golden age, no belief that the past generations were superior to m own. But there was an appeal in the clarity, the simple rules, the beautiful patterns, and always a partner for my self.

In junior high, Mrs. Crabbe would press PLAY on the tape deck and "Turkey in the Straw" would blast from the speakers. After a few sessions, my feet moved automatically: heel, toe, heel, toe, slide to the left. Some unfortunate boy would grab my waist and I would silently swear that someday soon I was getting out of this place. By the time I got to college, it wasn't a question of getting away anymore: I finally felt like I had arrived, if not in the world of mypeers than at least in the world of my self. The steps were the same, but I had changed for the better.

Perhaps that's the most profound thing about square dancing — if you do it right, after all those steps and spins and turns, you end up exactly where you started.