The Brooklyn Rail

Argentine tango is often portrayed as a dance of rigid gender roles, where women in stilettos and tight dresses follow the lead of men in tailored trousers. But in the late nineteenth century, when tango dancing was becoming popular in poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, it was common for same-sex pairs to dance together. That history was largely buried as tango spread to Europe and ascended to ballroom respectability—until a growing international movement known as queer tango, or tango disidente, began recovering those roots in the past two decades.

Maikel Dobarro is an Argentine dancer, teacher, and self-described queer tango “agitator.” He organizes La Fuga, a weekly tango class and monthly milonga, or social dance, that takes place at a queer cultural center in Buenos Aires. He prefers the term tango disidente to the borrowed English “queer tango,” in part because it carries a more explicitly political charge. Queer tango posits that dancers can dance whichever role they want regardless of their gender. Dobarro says that changing who leads and who follows in tango is “no small thing”—it opens up new possibilities for how different bodies relate to one another. Dobarro’s own evolution as a tango dancer is inseparable from his growing understanding of himself as a trans person. Since transitioning, he says he has largely stopped receiving invitations to straight milongas. Being more and more visible as a gender non-conforming tango dancer can be scary, he says, and his response is to turn to, and to stoke, imagination about a different world.

A recent iteration of La Fuga took place on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the military coup d’etat that began Argentina’s last dictatorship on March 24, 1976. The milonga paused for a performance of a piece by the Argentine tango champion Hugo Mastrolorenzo entitled “24M, Nunca Más.” At one point in the performance, a dozen dancers, including Dobarro, laid still under a massive white sheet, evoking corpses, perhaps those of some of the estimated thirty thousand people who were disappeared, many dropped off of military planes into the La Plata River.

I recently spoke with Dobarro in his home in Boedo, a Buenos Aires neighborhood known for its historic tango cafés, about the somatic power of the tango embrace, the anti-capitalist values of the milonga, and how honing his tango practice helped him come to terms with his gender identity.

Vera Carothers (Rail): Do you remember the first time you danced tango?

Maikel Dobarro: I was fourteen years old, and I found out about a tango class at my high school and decided to try it. I have a very strong memory of that first time. They put something over my eyes so that I could let myself be led. I still vividly remember that sensation of being able to go with another person wherever they invited me to move.

Rail: Was being led what hooked you?

Dobarro: Finding that sensation of not having to think, just having to feel—that’s what captivated me. That was the magic. But I always liked to dance. One of my favorite childhood games was to hole up with the radio, switching songs and dancing for hours, imagining scenes, acting them out, creating my own musicals. I spent many hours that way. So, I think there was a big moment of connection there—from what had been a game throughout my childhood to a moment in my teens when I was like, “Wow, I’m dancing with others.”

Rail: How did you decide to become a tango dancer?

Dobarro: At first, I decided to study textile engineering, because a sister of one of my mother’s friends told her that she traveled a lot in that profession, and I said, “That’s what I want.” And then just as I was starting university, my mother began dancing tango at La Viruta¹ and I started going, too. Later, I began trying to go to other milongas, but even from a very young age, I was overwhelmed by this whole situation where if I didn’t wear a miniskirt, I wouldn’t dance. I’d confirm it, too—I’d tell myself, “Okay, today I’m going to wear a miniskirt,” and then, “There, I danced today.” I felt very uncomfortable with that performance of hyperfemininity. I kept it up because that was the way to dance, but, obviously, I didn’t find full enjoyment in doing all that. So, I’d go and then stop going, go and then stop going.

At one point, I was really struggling in university and I said to myself, “Okay, I’m going to take a break,” and that’s when I found out about the National University of the Arts (UNA). I enrolled at UNA, and it changed my life. It was really hard for me because I was already approaching thirty, with a body that wasn’t prepared for that type of intensive dance study. And unfortunately, at that time, they talked about dancing the “boy part” and the “girl part.” It was awful, but, well, before 2018, there were a lot of things nobody knew about.²

Rail: Is that what the roles were called?

Dobarro: Yes, they’d ask, “Who’s going to be the boy?” or “What are you doing—boy or girl?” It was crazy. Thank goodness feminism hadn’t taken hold of me yet, because I wouldn’t have lasted two minutes.

Anyway, it was exciting to enter UNA and find that I could comfortably play both roles. But then came the challenge of moving on to the second year of the program, where we started with another level of complexity—it was more stage-oriented, with choreographic interpretation and all that. That was incredibly difficult, and I cried a lot during that time. The teachers insisted that, from that point on, you could only dance one role or the other, and you should choose the one you know best. So I put on a dress and heels.

Rail: Tell me more about that—what was happening to you physically, emotionally, or mentally?

Dobarro: I always felt very ridiculous—which is what I now recognize as what you might call dysphoria. Like, what am I doing? I was already beginning to read feminist texts, though. Around that time, I bought The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and started to see things differently. I realized, “Wait a minute, hold on—I’m being lied to.” And at the same time, as always, every time I went on stage to dance, I loved it. Even if I couldn’t manage three steps, I gave it my all. In the final years of my degree program, I started dancing Stage Tango.³

Rail: And you continued to wear dresses and heels?

Dobarro: Dress, heels—I was flying through the air, doing whatever I could.

Rail: But reading de Beauvoir at home.

Dobarro: Yes, it was a parallel process. There was a part of me that hadn’t been able to talk about my sexual desire until I was twenty-seven. Back in 2010, when the same-sex marriage law was passed in Argentina, I started campaigning hard and bringing it up at every family dinner, to the point where my mom would say, “Why do you keep bringing this up? Do you have something to tell us?” And I’d be like, “No, not really. I don’t know if I’m straight, because I think I could totally fall in love with a woman, and if I ever do fall in love with a woman, I’d like to be able to get married.” And that was pretty much all I said, and then never again, because I was also moving in super cis, straight, engineering circles—I mean, talk about a conservative, closed-off world.

When I moved into the artistic scene—the folkloric dance scene⁴—things were still conservative, but then I entered the world of gay male dancers. And that started making me question things: maybe I liked gay guys, or maybe I wanted to be a gay guy—I didn’t really understand it. It was around that time that tango, university, and starting to break away from the norm—from the norm of pursuing a traditional degree, from the norm of so many things—were allowing me to listen to myself.

I think it was crucial that there was a political process like the one that took place so that I could recognize and name myself, and trust that everything was going to be okay. Because there was this idea that if you’re queer/trans you’re going to suffer, you’re going to be excluded from the world, you’ll never amount to anything—and there was also a lot of fear back then.

Rail: How did you evolve from wearing a dress and heels to the way you present now?

Dobarro: In 2018, I started getting involved in feminist activism. The feminist tango movement emerged, and I started going to the assemblies, and there I met a bunch of lesbian tango dancers like Soledad Nani, Liliana Furió, and Natalia Teran. I started surrounding myself with activist tango dancers. And that’s when it started to click for me. I started to understand a lot of things, to realize that many years of my suffering and my anguish had to do with all those things I had experienced.

I broke up with my boyfriend, and one early November morning, I bought a ticket to Paris. While I was traveling there, I met Manu Sanz, who was my first lesbian love. Manu really shook things up for me. They are non-binary, very androgynous, and I was so attracted that my underwear was practically falling off. Everything was so intense, so lesbian—we hit it off big time; in fact, we got married. And as I listened to their stories, I began to realize that I’d kept a lot of secrets about similar situations, but I’d never been able to express them.

I was still holding onto a lot of femininity until I returned to Buenos Aires and met the whole mostri community⁵; that’s when a very intense, very pivotal process began. I started wearing less and less makeup, and liking myself more and more. I had already cut my hair; I came back with it really short, and that’s how I started to feel less like I was making a fool of myself.

Rail: How did your dance style change?

Dobarro: When I returned to Buenos Aires, I was leading well, dancing both roles well, but there were certain aspects that were really difficult for me. And through training, I began to realize that I didn’t want to dance like a man. So I started exploring this on my own.

During the pandemic, every Sunday there was a virtual discussion with people from all over the world talking about queer tango. And that’s where we started asking each other questions. How does gender shape technique and how does technique shape gender? And during that conversation, Luna Beller-Tadiar brought up the idea of queer tango as a “gender laboratory.” I’ll never forget that phrase.

In one talk, I was asking about why I had to masculinize myself to be respected while dancing in the leader’s role. Why couldn’t I be feminine and still be respected? And I think my process had to do with dismantling my question and finding another kind of masculinity, which is a much more feminized masculinity—one that is in a constant process of construction. I started dancing tango one way at age fourteen, and I danced that way for almost fifteen years. In the last seven years I began to study and understand new ways of dancing. Through reading and theoretical supports I was able to confirm how the practice of performance allows you to inhabit other possibilities of who you can be, to gain abundance, and to keep becoming, to keep discovering yourself.

Rail: As the organizer of a dissident tango space and as a dancer, what political power do you think tango has?

Dobarro: Even though in certain ways it has been institutionalized, tango remains a folk dance, and its most essential way of spreading is del boca en boca, by word of mouth, or rather, del tacto en tacto, from touch to touch. I can guide you, but you have to feel it, and you can always feel more. It’s not quite translatable into words, and artificial intelligence will never be able to make you feel it. By experiencing it, it brings you into the present in a way that’s countercultural today. You’re at the milonga and you forget about your cell phone, you forget about everything, and you’re feeling, finding yourself, wasting time. Today, wasting time is anti-capitalist—wasting it, or rather, living it.

That’s why it’s not the same to go to a space just to have a good time—which is already valuable, especially for a community that’s constantly fighting for its rights. Being able to have a place where you can relax, but where you also feel the presence of big questions and struggles makes all the difference. What we need is more of that kind of use of time, where we encounter one another.

Rail: And what about the tango embrace? I find it powerful just to hug someone you don’t know.

Dobarro: The somatic power of touch is huge. There’s something there that eludes us, that can’t be controlled rationally, and yet it happens anyway—and that helps explain the fanaticism, why tango keeps spreading; wherever it goes, it grows. Especially since the pandemic. During that time, many of us tango dancers were depressed because we couldn’t dance. It came back little by little, but it came back with a vengeance, because, yes, hugging is a big deal.

Collective dance has a very particular ritual quality. I think it’s significant—if anything in the process of acculturation allowed what was there to survive and remain, and to continue to transform and mutate, well, that’s tradition at its best. If tradition is what mutates and what transforms, then call me a traditionalist.

Rail: Do you have any desires for the future of La Fuga or for dissident tango in general?

Dobarro: I hope that it fuels revolutionary imagination, because in the end, that’s what it comes down to. Otherwise, we convince ourselves that it’s already over, and that’s how they beat us. Going through a continuing identity transition is not easy, and sometimes just wanting to be alive is hard. That’s why I think it’s necessary to create, imagine, and say yes.

And as for La Fuga,⁶ I hope it keeps eluding the norm, because the force of normalization is very strong; it’s always there, trying to exert its influence on us—so let La Fuga keep breaking free.