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From the introduction to my new book “TQBA: Tango Queer Buenos Aires”:
Think of these photos as part of a dance. Where you see two people, count three. Taking photographs, I was not an outsider looking in but rather an insider looking at oneself in a mirror. The joy and ecstasy and surrender you see in these faces belonged to me. Not just because I am a milonguero and I live my life through the prism of tango but also because the emotions that one person feels in the milonga cannot be kept apart. Tango is a group ritual. Everything that happens in the milonga is shared freely. What’s yours is mine and what is mine is ours.
Mariana Docampo at Tango Queer and Augusto Balizano at La Marshall opened a portal to a new way of tango. The spaces they created in Buenos Aires changed tango and changed lives, mine included. Looking back, it seems inevitable — after all, how could we live without it? But without the sustained determination and love of these two organizers, the story might have been very different.
I was fortunate to be present at the birth of this movement when Augusto organized the first gay milongas in Buenos Aires. Lalo and Roxana Gargano went table to table offering plates of cookies they’d brought from their family’s bakery. It was all very homespun. Nevertheless, we sensed that something momentous was happening that night.
And so it was. We couldn’t have known it then but queer tango would become the most important development in tango since Astor Piazzolla and would thrust the backward-looking, century-old art form into the modern world.
The great dancer and teacher Rodolfo Dinzel defined tango as the “search for freedom.” Queer tango gave us permission to explore the dual universe of leader and follower without arbitrary rules or roles to get in the way. Queer tango gave us, all of us, the freedom we sought.
Today, it is almost unnecessary to speak of queer tango as something separate from another sort of tango because the innovations it brought are everywhere to be seen.
These photos are simply my tribute to those who made tango history in the dance halls of Buenos Aires. But even more than that, they are my celebration of the beauty and love we made and shared on the dance floor.
Find out more or order TQBA here: https://www.kevincarrelfooter.com/books/tqba/
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