It is a humid evening inside a town hall in Sydney’s inner west and my inadequacies are on full display. Signing up for a queer line dancing class was an act of impulsive pluck; actually, being at a queer line dancing class feels like an exercise in public humiliation. On floorboards scuffed by footfall, I am wobbling and staggering to the sinister warble of Sabrina Carpenter. Luckily, there are 99 other queers in this chamber of ignominy. It is depraved and it is beautiful.
This is Saddle Club: a weekly social where gays and allies (but mostly gays) commune to fulfil their country western fantasies. Saddle Club is barely six months old, but already it has taught its routines to thousands of willing acolytes: seasoned regulars, giddy festival goers, even breakfast television presenters hamming it up in suits and stilettos. And they’re not alone: across the world, queer line dancing parties have sprung up in a procession of toe taps and heel stomps.
Tonight’s event advertises itself as beginner-friendly. I say a prayer that the claim is trustworthy. “Dear Dolly Parton,” my mantra goes. “May I inhabit your gainly gait for just one night. Amen.”
Marzy, one of Saddle Club’s co-founders, reassures me before the class. “You don’t need to know how to dance,” she says. She grew up line dancing with her mum and her “staunch, ciggy-pumping nan named Dawn” – and the best part, she winks, “is that it’s very repetitive and very approachable”.
Saddle Club, she says, “stands on the shoulders of the queer line dancers who’ve come before us”. And there is certainly a long – and libidinous – association between gay and western iconography. All that leather and denim, all the chaps and bandanas; endless stretches on rolling fields punctuated only by the caress of a fellow man (or whatever Brokeback Mountain was about).
There were murmurs of a lavender cowboy resurgence in the US as early as the 70s – including a 1976 “gay rodeo” in Reno that was little more than one shetland pony and a dream. By the 80s, gay country dancing had taken flight across the country: from California to Connecticut, the form became a spectacular declaration of unity in the thick of the Aids crisis. “Here was an opportunity to actually touch somebody and dance with them,” pioneer Anthony Ivancich once said, in a documentary about Stud Country – a queer line dancing event that has become a mega-hit in Los Angeles and created the template for Saddle Club.
The sensation landed in Australia soon after its American boom. Canberra’s Bushdance arrived in 1984; that same decade, all manner of freaks and queens began congregating at gay bars in Sydney and Melbourne to twirl and two-step. The events weren’t always so beginner-friendly. “[Line dancing] virgins were not permitted on the dancefloor until they’d either received some instruction or were accompanied by an experienced [member],” writes one self-proclaimed bootscooter who started line dancing at Sydney’s famous Imperial hotel in 1988.
I find myself longing for a experienced mentor at tonight’s Saddle Club. Instead, everyone I encounter is a novice – all impeccably adorned in western regalia and star-studded accoutrements, all excited and nervous in equal measure. Lauren and Laura tell me they’re “ex-horse girls”. Ro just loves cowboys – an inherently queer figure, they say: “Lots of very masculine but performative energy. It’s sexy.”
Clementine is the first line dancing veteran I meet; she learned it from her girlfriend’s mum and she’s been coming to Saddle Club since week one. “[When] you do it with your friends … and you all spin in unison, it feels like being in your own pop group,” she gushes – but she does issue a warning. Whatever you do, don’t stand on the edges, because “in line dancing, you turn in a circle and so the edge becomes the front”.
Unfortunately, the edge is exactly where I end up. I have been line dancing for a lifetime total of under 10 minutes when the routine suddenly swerves. With a scuff and a stomp, the entire hall swivels 90 degrees – and I find myself at the front of the pack, jerking like a wild bronco. With a hot flash, I realise that what I considered “committing each step to memory” might be better described as “blacking out and forgetting how to move like a human being”.
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In the course of an hour, we learn four sets of traditional choreography soundtracked to pop anthems. We grapevine to Chappell Roan. We shuffle to M People’s Moving On Up. We gyrate to Better Off Alone, the Eurodance staple that would instantly kill a frontiersman. There is a surprising amount of gyrating involved. It is a country saloon and it is 2am at a Pride afterparty.
“You’ve got this!” Marzy calls from the stage. I definitely do not have it. What I have is a lack of coordination that probably deserves medical attention. I make a number of disastrous and unforced errors – or what Marzy graciously terms “cute variations” – as I thrust and waddle my way through terrifyingly rapid footwork.
At one point, I realise that the O in OK Corral stands for “Oh, my God, are you alright?” This is what a person besides me says when I slide – incorrectly and with alarming velocity – into their shoulder halfway through a routine which involves exactly zero sliding.
It is deeply humbling – but difficult to resist the utter rapture in this room. All of us succumbing to gay abandon: flailing and floundering in unison, unbridled steeds gambolling towards glory. When the last song ends, everybody is beaming and hollering and glistening with sweat. The applause is thunderous. Then a million cowboy hats disperse into the night.