Re: [Callers] Suggestions for particularly flirty contra dances?

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Dave Casserly <david.j.casserly(a)gmail.com> wrote: The social implications matter much more than the actions. Consider the difference between a gypsy and a swing. In a swing you hold onto each other, look at each others eyes, and move in a circle. In a gypsy you do mostly the same thing without touching. Yet the gypsy is more charged, more flirty, and a bit more intimate. [1] Or consider going the other way, from a swing to an aleman, where you still have the touching and the eye contact, but the intimacy is much more reduced than you might expect from just the change in hand positions. At a contra dance in DC or Boston, two men dancing together indicates little about their sexual orientations. Sure, men who often dance with men are on average more likely to be attracted to men, but there are enough straight men who dance with other men that it's not a very reliable signal. If you go to a place where men don't usually dance together and everyone thinks of that as something that only gay men do, then men choosing to dance with each other sends a different signal. I think a lot of the resistance men give to swinging or gypsying with each other is that they don't want the caller to make them signal something they're not. Mainstream dance communities where men are ok dancing with each other differ from those where they're not in two main ways: being gay is acceptable and not very important, and men dance together for reasons other than sexual orientation often enough that it doesn't say much about them. These are related: the worse it is for me socially if people start thinking I'm gay, the less willing I will be to dance with my male friends. Jeff [1] Some of this is that the focus of a gypsy is the eye contact in a way that the eye contact is only secondary in a swing. But there's a different interpretation of gypsies.