There is a widespread reluctance to talk about dance and homosexuality, surely making it the dance that does not speak its name. The reference here is to Oscar Wilde who, during his trial in 1895 for homosexual offenses, made a celebrated speech in defense of the love that dared not speak it's name in his century. Over the years since then, a homosexual culture or subcultures have developed with diverse, shifting memberships and significant inputs from artists and intellectuals. In recent years, partly as a result of the gay rights movement, theoretical work has been done on the way homosexuality has been and is represented in the arts and mass media, and research has been done into the work of gay and lesbian artists. While Melanie Weeks and Christy Adair have written about lesbianism and dance, surprisingly little attention has been given to gay men and dance. (Adair/Weeks).
One fairly recent book that has considered homosexuality and dance is Judith Lynne Hanna's Dance, Sex, and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance and Desire. Although the sections on gay men reflect the large amount of material Hanna has researched for the book it shows little sympathy or understanding of the situation in which gay people live in our society and she seems to be unaware of the underlying sexual politics. She sees homosexuality as a problem for gay people. Her concern is "why male homosexuals are disproportionally attracted to dance," and she suggests ways in which for gay people an involvement in the dance world can be an escape from their "problem."(Hanna 103) The problem, however, is not just the result of internalizing society's negative image of homosexuality but the fact that western society is, and has been for hundreds of years been, homophobic.
The source of much of Hanna's material on gay men in ballet is the essay "Toeing the Line: In Search of the Gay Male Image in Classical Ballet," written by Graham Jackson in the 1970s.
