I like to dance, a lot. Often friends and family will make fun of me because I will use any excuse to dance. Playing Rock Band? I want to be the singer so I can dance. I catch you tapping your foot in time to that Mini-Wheats jingle? I will go one step further and dance to it. Whenever you start dancing as a joke, I will dance in earnest. We’re washing the dishes, listening to Classical 96.3 and a waltz comes on, I am obviously going to grab you and we’re going to waltz around the kitchen, sudsy hands and all. My mother is the same way, so it must be somehow hereditary.

Anyway, the other day, we were waltzing around the kitchen, and somehow got to thinking about dances in grade school. I remembered the girls standing on one side of the darkened gym, the boys on the other, in a situation that was undoubtedly played out in grade schools all over the country. During fast songs at the beginning of the dance, girls would dance in a circle with each other and the boys would look at the girls while standing against the wall. Some of the braver ones would bully their way into the centre of the girl circles and do a stupid dance move, which garnered hoots of laughter from his friends, and looks of disgust from the girls. But then a Boyz II Men song would come on, and it would take about 2 full minutes for anyone to be brave enough to cross the great divide of the scuffed gym floor and pick a dance partner. But then the floodgate would open, and I didn’t go to a Catholic school so there were no rules of ruler-lengths at our dances. The too-similar bodies of 12-year-old boys and girls were pressed so close together that you wouldn’t be able to get a piece of paper slid between them, never mind a ruler.

And this leads me to my point. Have you ever tried to recreate the dance style of your 12-year-old self, now? It’s ridiculous. It’s as if you were hugging, too close, for too long and moving in a circle, a lame circle. The man’s penis is pressed right into your crotch. No doubt you felt that greasy, pimply, 12-year-old boy’s penis jump and move against you. How was this allowed?! What were teacher’s thinking, allowing this crotch-touching to go on?

But regardless, I remember dancing with Ryan McInnis for every single slow dance in that darkened gym. He lived right across the street from the school and I knew absolutely nothing about him except he’d been in the same class as me since kindergarten and had adorable freckles, shiny brown hair, and smelled musty sort of, like I figured a man must smell. We never went out, as kids did in my day, and he soon moved away, but I always had those darkened gyms, and the crotch-to-crotch dancing to remember him by. How romantic.

Phonogram tells me that in some song they say dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire (though googling it finds it attributed to Robert Frost and George Bernard Shaw), and I think that’s partly true. I mean that was what we were doing as 12-year-olds starting to realize we maybe liked boys and that’s what we’re doing on Friday nights in dark clubs, sweaty and excited by strange men. But isn’t it fascinating that all cultures throughout all time have danced? Isn’t it exciting to know that no matter what age you are, you can enjoy dancing? That little babies like to jump around to their mama’s singing and old people like to float elegantly across dance floors?

I like thinking about how I’m a part of this legacy, whether waltzing around the kitchen with soapy hands, or having my own personal dance party in the middle of the street. There ain’t so shame in that. It’s historical, it’s sexual, it’s expression, it’s HUMAN. God. Stop standing against the wall and move already.