First off I watched it and to me I don’t think there was anything about it that I would make me label the kid as gay. I’ve taught dance to lots of boys this age. Some turned out gay, most not, but really too young to tell and I would never judge based on dancing ability. One of my best students turned out to be a womanizing jerk.

But mostly I think these comments come because he is emulating a woman. Boys should be ashamed of thinking there is anything worthy to be emulated in women. I mean they are nothing but sex objects right? Virgins or whores. It’s completely degrading to pretend to be one if you are male. Do you think that if this was a little girl emulating the way Shaq dunked there would be this spewing of scripture and rush to decide that she was a lesbian? Hell no. We would all laugh because it was cute. I mean men are worth emulating. Male actions are worthy of admiration. I mean some may cluck that she should be perusing more feminine hobbies like Barbies or the easy bake oven but I don’t think we would see this kind of open hostility.

This turned into a full length blog post…seems a rant came out of me about gay marriage and feminism and I didn’t want to be all off topic here. If interested please read at my blog.

Protecting these little flamers (who may not be gay when they get older but have that spring in their step that indicates true vivacity and joi de vivre) is why so many people are fighting homophobic bullying and education about sexual identity in schools from an early age.

The truth is that bigots WANT kids like this beaten into submission, beaten and taunted until they hang their little heads and the spring drains out of their step. They see violence as a necessary mechanism of social control: killing off the sissies and tomboys and forcing them to conform to meaningless, joyless stereotypes.

Singing and dancing or beating and mocking?

I think any decent person cam see what the right thing to do is. This little guy is against God? Not my God.

But those comments reveal how a lot of homophobia is really about gender normativity rather than sex. Take a kid who is probably too young to have any sort of well-developed sexuality, film him dancing in an ‘unmanly’ way, and people call it gay and sinful. I think the ‘root’ of homophobia is good ol machismo and misogyny.

One day, as I was dancing, my mother passed by the door to the living room, and decided to stay there and watch me dance, surreptitiously she thought. I saw her though. And I was mortified, since I knew this wasn’t something my parents would be particularly proud or supportive of. But I didn’t stop dancing. And when they dancers on TV were finished, I turned and bowed just as they did, only in the direction of my mother, so she could see I knew she had been there watching. I wasn’t going to show the shame I felt. But it took me years to allow myself the pleasure of dancing again.

There’s a book by Laura Huxley (the wife of Aldous Huxley) called “You Are Not the Target,” in which she has an essay on the positive effects of dancing naked in front of a mirror for an hour a day.

I celebrate the little boy in this video. May he grow up surrounded by people who make him feel so natural that simply being himself doesn’t take an act of courage, but is merely the natural response to love and freedom.