Dancing ‘Til Sunrise: Men Dancing with Men and the Audience Gaze in Interview with the Vampire
Dr Sarah Wingrove
10/13/20267 min read
This expectation and lens through which audiences look at and observe men who dance with men can lead to off-screen dancers feeling like they are viewed a particular way, precisely because they are dancing with someone of the same gender, though our findings indicated some nuance to this feeling.
During our data collection period last summer, interviewing forty heterosexual men who dance with men in the UK Swing scene, Dr Matt Hall and I enquired as to how our participants felt about dancing with other men in front of other social dancers or spectators. Several said that they did not feel like they were watched any differently than if they were dancing with a woman, though specified that this was because it is considered unremarkable within their dance community. Terry, one of the men we interviewed, told me that ‘…it's kind of normal now that people just kind of accept it. Like, accept that two women dance together. Two men dance together and it's almost like no one really bats an eyelid.’ Comparatively, Charles appreciated the extra attention that he received when dancing with other men but that ‘[w]hether they're watching because they find it weird or whether they're watching 'cause, they're enjoying it - there's a mixed bag sometimes, I think’. Martin remarked that responses were location-dependent and if he was dancing at an event where it was less common for men to dance with men, he felt that assumptions were being made about his sexuality but that ‘I don't give a rat's arse whether you think I'm gay or not.’
In IwTV, the lack of initial response to Louise and Lestat dancing together may be contextualised both within the narrative world of the series, but also by the historical context in which the characters exist. The ball could be argued as imitating a Ball of the Two Well-Known Gentlemen, the name given to a series of Mardi Gras balls in the early 20th century which were known for having ‘sold sexuality and good times’, albeit primarily heterosexuality (Leathem, 1994, p.188). The expectation of shocking performances, those which disrupted gender and sexual norms, paired with the diegetic situation of the couple being associated with supernatural agelessness and secretive behaviours, may have led to the lack of surprise at the two men dancing together at the ball.
Considering this interaction in relation to our wider project on the experiences of MDM in the UK Swing community, the racial politics of this dance sequence also comes into play. The power dynamics associated with leads (active) and followers (passive) as well as the white supremacist context of the early Jim Crow era in which the flashbacks in Season 1 of IwTV are set, also inform the response of the Ball attendees. It is likely that it would have been far more shocking for Louis and Lestat’s audience to see Louis, a Black Creole man, leading and Lestat, a white Frenchman following. This tension has built in their personal lives throughout the season, with Louis repeatedly being assumed to be an employee of Lestat’s by the white townspeople. For Swing dancers in the largely segregated USA of the early to mid-20th Century, dancing or playing music with someone of a different race was also incredibly taboo. This was often only possible if white musicians and dancers visited Black bands and ballrooms (Stevens and Stevens, 2011, p.83), though underground jazz bars during the Prohibition era, called ‘black and tan clubs’, also encouraged integration of their attendees and performers (The Mob Museum, 2016). In IwTV, Lestat is seen as the initiator and the active partner in the dance, naturalising a greater response to a pair whose existence is already being called into question.
In this period of American history, however, any two men dancing together would solely be perceived as an act precluding sexual intimacy. In the early 20th century, dance halls were considered significant locations by the police for catching ‘male degenerates’ and ‘sexual inverts’ (Eskridge, 1997, p.1025), and even drawing into the new Millenium, men dancing with men during Mardi Gras was associated with inebriation and a loss of inhibitions (Sexton, 2001, p.33). After Lestat departs the dance floor, Claudia takes over but Louis switches role, going from taking the following role in his dance with Lestat, to leading his adopted sister. The audience continues to watch, though with less intense interest as the familial partner configuration removes the desirous element featured moments previously. In this instance, the more common configuration of man as lead/woman as follow is reframed as Claudia instigates her own ‘debut’ with Louis, and their dance facilitates a telepathic conversation about their plans for Lestat. Diegetically, it reinforces the notion of dance as a romantic vehicle (Garfinkel, 2018, p.5), with Louis dancing with his sister, to present her to eligible suitors. Non-diegetically, however, it is instead same-sex desire that is channelled through the dance scene and the man as lead/woman as follow dichotomy is a vehicle for murder!
A key theme that has arisen during preliminary data analysis is the significance of both the degendering of Swing dances – the conscious shift of thinking of dancers as ‘follows’ and ‘leads’ rather than presuming that ‘ladies and gentlemen’ communicates the same sentiment – and the desexualising of the dances. This relates to, as Martin and other participants experienced (and which I had myself presumed, as discussed in another blog post) the assumption that men who dance with men must be sexually compatible with either their dance partner or other men. Our participant, Quentin discussed how switching has become more common in West Coast Swing for men and women, and Michael elaborated that specific events are increasing in frequency wherein practicing switching roles (in general but also during a dance) is the focus. Current media such as IwTV may provide instances where the gendering of dance roles is questioned through depictions of switching roles and same-sex dance partnerships. The sexualisation of dance and its association with romantic courtship, however, continues to be a popular narrative mechanism and the dominant framing, aware of its audience but not moving away. Much like the Mardi Gras of the fin de siècle, the dance between Louis and Lestat may seem to push boundaries skyward with powdered wigs and public kissing, but ultimately the racial status quo is sustained, and only upended when Louis decides to change his role off the dance floor…
A common motif in Anglo-American film and television is for a dance sequence, largely a form of ballroom dancing, to include a moment in which the central couple appear to be completely alone either on the dance floor or indeed the entire space which they inhabit. Used to signify their connection and the notion that nothing else matters beyond the other person, this visual metaphor appears in countless features including period dramas such as Pride and Prejudice (Wright, 2005), Anna Karenina (Wright, 2012) and Bridgerton (Van Dusen, 2020), but also more recently in queer teen drama, Heartstopper (Lyn, Newbery and Westmoreland, 2022-Present) and the made-for-streaming film, Red, White and Royal Blue (López, 2023). In these instances, any diegetic audience to the couple disappear from view, their presence in the scene and to the characters marked as inconsequential.
This motif reinforces the Western cultural tradition of partner dancing as a signifier of romantic courtship (Richardson, 2018). In each of these instances, the dancers are always in a romantic relationship, whether that is known to the diegetic audience yet or not. When non-romantic or sexual desire is expressed through partner dance, generally as a familial activity, it is predominantly still acting as a reproduction of courtship, such as the Bridgerton brothers, Anthony and Benedict, dancing with their younger sisters, Hyacinth and Eloise, either because of age (Hyacinth – too young to be courting) or lack of partner (Eloise). This was part of what Kristen Richardson describes as part of the ‘debutante ritual’, a practice starting in the late eighteenth century, wherein the head of the family would introduce the young women coming of age to society, ‘allowing parents to broker their daughters’ marriages in the way that benefited them most’ (Richardson, 2020, p.1). Consequently, it is also, like other opposite-sex partner dance couples, viewed with an approving gaze.
In the seventh and final episode of the first season of Interview with the Vampire (hereafter IwTV, AMC, 2022-Present), vampires Louis de Pointe du Lac and Lestat de Lioncourt take to the dance floor during a Mardi Gras ball they are hosting at their home. For Lestat, it is ‘a last dance before the feast’, having planned to feed on the humans in attendance; for Louis, it is a way to distract his lover as part of a murder plot schemed alongside the couple’s adoptive sister/daughter, Claudia. As they take to the floor, the only attendees not wearing animal masks, conversation in the room hushes and below the music, only whispers can be heard as the other guests watch on, clearing the floor for the two men. Lestat leads the dance, and the pair barely break eye contact as they circle around the room. As Louis is the one to become distracted by Lestat’s gaze, the ballroom empties and they dance alone, and it is only when they lean in to kiss one another that loud gasps are heard, and the audience returns. Notably, the act of two men dancing together is tolerated, observed with seemingly piqued interest up until the moment that there is legible confirmation of same-sex desire, revealed by the shared kiss. Even then, only one couple leave the room in disgust, though another man laughs openly at the spectacle, perceiving the kiss as a performance or joke. However, such confirmation of same-sex desire, for obvious reasons, is often left open or ambiguous. It is also actively contested in the case of heterosexual men dancing with one another, such as those who took part in our recent project, where Dr Hall and I interviewed forty heterosexual men in the UK Swing scene about their experiences dancing together.
Shifting from the diegetic to the non-diegetic audience, whilst an increase in queer representation is something to be celebrated across media forms, a problem that arises when it comes to same-sex partner dancing, particularly for men who dance with men, is that queer desire is currently the only framework for depictions of MDM. If two men dance together, who are not related, they will largely be read as queer. Indeed, the earliest film recording of two men dancing together comes from 1894 and was nicknamed ‘The Gay Brothers’ by film historian, Vito Russo, though Justin DeFreitas describes it as having been ‘erroneously identified’ (2006).
