Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Sonja Furiya and Ann Taylor are champions of a sport with which you might not be familiar: same-sex ballroom dancing. The Alton, Ill., couple won the 2010 North American Same-Sex Partner Dance Association Championships (nasspda.org) in women’s international Latin dance, and they’re gearing up to compete in the 2012 contest, to be held in Sacramento, Calif., this month.
So just who leads? “The whole issues of gender and how we represent ourselves are very inert in the straight world—if you’re male, you lead,” says Taylor. “In the same-sex world, you express who you want to be. Some women choose to wear a tuxedo when they lead. At another point, those same two women may both wear gowns. Some dancers choose to switch their roles in the middle of the dance; in a very elegant moment, they will both drop their holds and pick up again, and the person who is leading will become the follower, and the follower becomes the leader. You often hear the audience applaud when that happens. We have added a completely new dimension to the sport.”
And the sport’s caught on here in the St. Louis area, too. The St. Louis Equality Dance team (stlequalitydance.org) recently won a national championship in team dance, and Furiya sits on the North American Same-Sex Partner Dance Association’s board of directors. Speaking of herself and Furiya, Taylor says, “We’re known in national circles as ‘the St. Louis couple.’”
