Augusto Balizano is telling us that in Buenos Aires in the 90s, they didn’t talk about leader and follower yet. You did the man, or you did the woman, and occasionally a school was willing to teach a man to dance as a woman, but you couldn’t do it in a milonga.
He confirms that women dancing together was more acceptable “because there aren’t enough men,” but because they’re attracted to women wasn’t acceptable. Some milongas allowed women to dance together at the end of the night, but not during the mainstream hours.
Around 1997, Augusto was asked to start teaching a group of gay folks to dance tango on Sunday afternoons.
Eventually, they wanted to have a milonga, not just classes. In 2002, he started LaMarsháll for a queer milonga. It closed for a bit when he moved to Europe, but upon return he ran ads in local tango magazines.
Twenty people showed up! It’s a success!
Also: shoutout to Mariana Docampo.
Augusto says there was a point where he would go to mainstream and dance with his partner, without being kicked out, but as they’d dance past the table of milongueros, they’d make snide comments like “tango is for machos!”
I’ve definitely gotten some LOOKS 
Now Astrid Weiske is talking about tango in Berlin. She wasn’t comfortable going to a straight space, but then a “tango for women” class started. Role-switching wasn’t a thing yet, so as a butch, knowing the image of the typical follower, she chose to lead.
She says cabeceoing women in straight milongas was tough, but some women went along with it, and the men always left her alone, no comments.
A queer tango festival started in Germany in the early 2000s, and they caravanned from Berlin. She says it was mostly women because men’s queer tango was just getting started in Germany, and it wasn’t yet advertising to and pulling from other countries in Europe.
In 2005, she started teaching queer tango in Berlin. In 2010 she decided to start a festival in Berlin.
Astrid says growing a queer tango community takes a while, but Berlin’s queer tango community is now somewhere around 150 people. 
In @dcqueertango, I think we’re currently about 15.
Now Rodrigo is talking about the queer tango festival in Mexico. He had lived in Italy for a while and then moved back to Mexico when Mexico got marriage equality in 2010.
He ran a festival there for 10 years where instead of organizing special events, the local milongas to *became* queer milongas for the nights of the festival, resulting in all Mexican tangueros being familiar with queer tango.
Fabian Kipp says when he started dancing tango in Germany, tango felt backwards because ballroom dance already accepted same gender dancing.
Around 2007, Augusto decided to create an open role tango championship, in contrast to the preexisting World Cup of Tango. He got judges from the big tango schools to give it some prestige.
It stopped after 5 years when the original changed to allow same gender couples.
I just raised my hand as one who, as Karen noted, nowadays we have people who are starting in queer tango, not starting in mainstream tango then finding or forming queer tango communities.
Two years ago a TikTok friend mentioned that queer tango existed, and I went looking for it in my city. The first time I ever saw people dancing tango, it was a queer tango performance: Diana Suárez & Phi Lee Pham.
#tango #tangoArgentino #ArgentineTango #tangoQueer #queerTango #queerHistory #queerDance #queer
José talked about the magic of discovering *queer* tango after years of dancing and trying to build community through @dcqueertango — which is where I came in.
Queer tango has restarted in Portland, OR. Sandy isn’t advertising to the existing tango community at all.
I told her last night that I’m taking flyers to queer bars bc converting queer people to tango is easier than converting tango people to queerness.
Barbara from Buffalo didn’t know that you couldn’t learn to lead and follow at the same time, so she just did. The workshop needs another leader? Ok, she’s leading tonight.
She says she remembers being at a milonga and seeing a man who danced beautifully who she wanted to dance with. He said that he wouldn’t dance with her because he had seen her leading.
(Personally, as soon as I started leading in milongas, not just classes, it got harder to get men to dance with me. I had to individually explain to some that I do both roles. I’ve heard plenty of skepticism about learning both simultaneously.)
Alex Pacheco is talking about as a teenager being told that they and their girlfriend needed to dance together less because they’re in public, and there are children present! (And if you want to hold hands or kiss, do it in the bathroom.)
Same person organized a queer tango festival a year later. “It’s not about you; I have queer friends!” (Our gasts are collectively flabbered.)
Alex is also noting how the younger generation experienced a brief window of being able to just *be* out without necessarily even needing to *come* out because acceptance was so great.
They note that generation’s absence.
And that things are moving backwards to a world those kids never grew up having to protect themselves against.
Alex mentioned an anonymous FB group where people often say “why does queer tango even still exist? They’re welcome in normal milongas now.”
Ray Sullivan says tomorrow’s chat will start with discussing those people and how to respond to them.
Karen is talking about the tendency for more privileged queer folks to throw less privileged ones under the bus, rationalizing it as saving some of us at the cost of others, and the importance of resisting that and maintaining solidarity within the community.
Karen calls out Durham as a great community.
Ray doubles down on supporting the trans & genderqueer members of our community.
José says we need to make sure the kids know that sure, the rights the government is attacking are attached to the government, but we got them because we, the community, united and fought for them, and we will do that again.
At dinner I’m getting details from Emily from Durham about what she said about scholarships and handling costs to make it more accessible.
She says they do sliding scale, sometimes providing info on how much the event is costing the group, with a suggested donation, but nobody is turned away for not paying.
@maco You've got me thinking about the tension between acceptance and assimilation real hard right now.
@maco
> the younger generation experienced a brief window of being able to just *be* out without necessarily even needing to *come* out because acceptance was so great
This makes me so sad. Like so many of us in the 90s, I was actively involved in creating libertine subculture spaces where people were people, regardless of identity markers. So vindicating when this became mainstream, but gutting that it's under attack. I can't help thinking of that disturbingly prescient V for Vendetta film 