Burton Kent

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I used to be in a small performing group, and did a solo with a girl. She drove me nuts because her face kept looking EXACTLY I was stepping on her toes. Whenever she wasn’t sure of what to do next, “oooh”. It was so frigging distracting!

Then I tried something and the next time we danced, her toes were fine. No weird facial expressions. Sweet, smooth dance.

What did I do to fix things?

I danced with boys. (Shut up. No, I’m not gay, and I’m not homophobic either.)

What happened was I was in a class with 3 guys, one girl, and the instructor. I’m not waiting around for any woman, so I told one guy, “K, I’m the girl. Lead me.”

We swapped off and got in touch with our feminine sides. (Mine is a sexy bitch, whoo-hoo!) The result was pretty cool. Before, whenever we made mistakes, we had NO clue what happened. If you don’t know how you blew it, or even WHO blew it, how can you POSSIBLY get better?

After, we knew exactly what went wrong, and exactly how to fix it. I learned more tango in that one class than two months of regular classes. ‘Course, I wanted to see if it worked with Salsa too.

It did. There’s FAR more variation in how men lead then how women follow. Experiencing everything from wimpy leads to being muscled through the moves was an eye-opener. It let me decide what kind of lead I wanted to be, and showed me how it felt when the lead was sloppy or not clear. (For awhile I made it cool to dance with guys at that studio.)

If you want to get really good at being a man, you’ve gotta dance with men. It’s too bad guys are so damn homophobic. We’d be MUCH better dancers otherwise.

And if you’re a guy, feel free to ask me to dance. Don’t worry, you won’t turn into a “homo”, and the girls love it. One told me, “Real men aren’t afraid of other men.”