We are thrilled to announce that Eve is starting a Queer Tango class in Cambridge Tuesday evenings at 6:45 pm, starting December 2, 2008.

Classes are 90 minutes

Sliding scale ($10-$20 pay what you can afford)

Info: contact   tangoqueer@live.com

Classes will be held at 16 Bow Street, Union Square. 

Last night we attended Homo Revolution, a national tour of Queer hip hop artists. It’s interesting to reflect on the acts and meanings of queer hip hop as we think about building queer tango. Read more…

We think tango would be much more fun with gender complexity and exploration. We also feel passionately that we want gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people to have access to tango’s unique experiences of connection, healing, self-expression, and rapture. together, we join an international movement to queer tango.

The leading voices of the queer tango movement from Berlin, BA, and New York City agree that it is very hard to maintain enough teaching and milonga resources to maintain a fully queer scene. (see this interview). Taking this into account, here is our plan.

1. The first step is on a local level by creating learning spaces that are comfortable entry points for GLBT people.
2. Then, since we may not be able to build queer tango spaces, we need to build queer tango community, and go places in groups, so that we can be comfortable and supportive while using tango spaces.
3. Then we need to find teachers who will be supportive of women leading, men following, and unfamiliar gender identities (butch women, femme men, trans and genderqueer folk) in their classes. When visiting teachers come to give workshops, we will call and ask about this before promoting their classes to the local queer tango community. When attending non-queer classes and workshops, queer dancers should arrange to go in even-numbered groups, so we can at least change partners with a familiar group. (Make friends in your classes!)
4. We should organize occasional queer milongas and also women-leading milongas. these will explicitly assert space for glbt tango and for the larger community to join us in experimenting with gender roles. (For example, it would be nice to have a milonga at which straight men were comfortable following.) These should be publicized regionally.
5. There are queer tango festivals in Buenos Aires, Stockholm, and Hamburg. In Berlin is the pinktangoball. We encourage students to travel to join and expand on the concept of queer tango as a transnational culture. We put links to all these in the right hand column here.
6. Lexa is a queer leader and teacher in NYC. We plan to invite her to Boston to give workshops. You might want to read her blog. In 2007, she and her partner were the first same-sex couple invited to dance at the Mundial in Buenos Aires. Here’s the video. If you find other internet resources we should link to, please comment this article and we will add!

http://tigerstango.blogspot.com/2008/01/t-word.html