Their work onstage and online rejects the idea that a male dancer must store his queerness in his locker.
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In doing so, these dancers are taking some of the starch out of ballet. Come on in. Back to his late teens in South Boston when people regularly threw rocks at him and called him the F-word on his way to and from Boston Ballet. And he is. He loves ballet and wants others to fall in love with it, too, and he hopes his feed will bring more people into the theater.
Whiteside has a point. Before social media, ballet on video — think of those tame PBS broadcasts — appealed to a specialized audience. One reason is its perspective: The cameras, way up in the auditorium, show ballet from a limited point of view. But on Instagram, the close-up angles, taped ankles, the veins and arteries flooded with blood, give us ballet as the dancer experiences it. Rather than removing the magic of a darkened theater, this intimacy brings us closer to the my-God-how-does-the-human-body-do-that awe that ballet inspires.
It shows us the feat behind the art, reminding us that the foundation of dance is physical strength — a quality associated with traditional masculinity. On his website, he calls himself the Wendy Williams of ballet. In many ways, this could be a live-stream of two young gay men getting ready for a night out at the bars, but over the course of the Every step has to have intention.
This was the dominant narrative in the s, when only a few male dancers were openly gay.
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Lidberg has since become a leading choreographer around the world, developing works for companies such as City Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. Its central theme is that existential desire to connect. Possokhov declined to comment for this story. He also tries to convey something he rarely sees in ballet — not just sexuality, but companionship and tenderness between men.
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In other words, love. An essential part of queerness is fluidity — between identities, expectations, definitions and that word no one likes, labels. And what is dance if not fluid — in motion, in music, in the blend between physical and artistic? Ballet is most powerful when it is most fluid. So, too, is the dancer, when he, or she, or they, moves fluidly. The retreat doesn't come without its controversies and not everyone supports what the "People Can Change" program is trying to accomplish. Russ Baker-Gorringe is an outspoken critic of these programs, and said he had rare insight into such groups because he helped start one called "Evergreen".
I understand it as someone who came from that same belief system," he said. A faithful member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gorringe was married to a woman for 25 years and had five children. He said he felt so much turmoil from hiding his homosexuality that he tried taking his own life. You're very existence is a lie," he said. Gorringe argued that such therapy is destructive not only to the young men who go through it, but also to the women who end up married to men with such conflicts.
Once a poster boy for change therapy, Gorringe is now legally married to his husband, Joe, and uses his inside knowledge of groups like "People Can Change" to renounce them. While many of the men at the reunion retreat said "Journey Into Manhood" had a positive effect on their lives, some former clients told ABC News that the retreat left them traumatized. Twenty-three-year-old Ben Unger grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn where he said being gay was not accepted.
They just portray it as a really dark life and that scared a lot of us. He said the participants were encouraged to "cuddle" with older staff members in an exercise that bordered on the homoerotic.
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Unger also described an exercise where the men were instructed to take off all their clothing. At this point I left, I could not be part of the exercise. Unger said the weekend left him feeling depressed and even suicidal because he was convinced it was his fault he wasn't changing. He's not the only dissatisfied client. Chaim Levin, 21, a college student from Brooklyn, attended two "Journey Into Manhood" weekends in and Levin also described a degree of touching and cuddling that was not observed during the weekend ABC News was permitted to film.
They encouraged a lot of touch, they called it 'healthy touch,' but it looked very erotic in a lot of senses. Both Unger and Levin said they are now openly gay and proud, and they strongly warn young people against change therapy programs. According to Drescher, there is no scientific evidence that "healthy touch" exercises can help diminish same-sex attractions. Despite outside critics, supporters of change therapy point to happy and satisfied clients like Preston, who's now been married four years.
His wife Megan is completely supportive of his participation in "Journey Into Manhood" and all the work he has put into changing. Preston's therapy work is now more important than ever because the couple is expecting their first child. In response to claims made that "'Journey Into Manhood' didn't work for them," Wyler provided this statement: "People Can Change" has never suggested that all our participants will have percent success.
Indeed, heterosexuality is not necessarily even the end goal - peace, happiness, and brotherhood are. However, in a survey, 4 out of 5 participants say their homosexual feelings have declined, and 9 out of 10 say they feel better about themselves, and that "Journey Into Manhood" has had a long-term positive effect on their lives.
To us, that is success. In response to claims made that "some exercises, like healthy touch, were inappropriate" Wyler provided this statement: One small but powerful element of "Journey Into Manhood" is that we offer non-sexual, father-son-style holding that can touch a core unmet need from childhood. It is completely optional, fully supervised, done in a group setting, with clearly taught guidelines to keep it therapeutic. As a result, we've never seen any inappropriate touch on a "Journey Into Manhood" weekend.
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Instead, many have discovered that non-sexual brotherly touch and affirmation -- not homosexual relationships -- were what they had really longed for all along. To critics we would add: How can you mock or criticize non-sexual, therapeutic holding but then accept and even celebrate sex between men?
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