In the back ballroom of an old Ukrainian restaurant in New York’s East Village, down a long fluorescent-lit hallway, through a dining room of confused patrons eating piroshki and borscht, Tenaya Kelleher, 36, holds a microphone and faces the crowd. She’s wearing a pair of cut-off denim shorts so short they’re invisible under an oversized T-shirt and, importantly, a pair of well-used brown cowboy boots. Her hair is tucked under a Napa Racing hat; her smile infectious. “Welcome to Wednesday niiiiiiight!” she yells in the manner of an exuberant camp counsellor. The room, full of young queer dancers, explodes into whoops and applause. Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road” begins to play on large speakers, and the shuffle, stomp and scuff of hundreds of cowboy boots shake the floor.
Kelleher’s class at the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant — called UEVRline, or simply UEVR, and sometimes just line — is one of the many queer line-dancing events that have popped up in New York City since the pandemic, turning legions of queer folks into country-music loving, boot scoot-boogying, George Strait-listening urban cowboys.
The renaissance comes at a time when the contours of who “country” music — and country culture — is meant for are in flux. Beyoncé’s multi-platinum 2024 album Cowboy Carter redefined not just the genre but Americana itself. Country music by the likes of Jelly Roll and Shaboozey is expanding it into more inclusive territory even while revanchist reactionaries like Morgan Wallen, whose new album I’m the Problem has topped the Billboard 100 since its release a month ago, double down on the God, guns and country boosterism of traditional country music. Everyone from the pope’s brother to musician Lola Kirke line dances, often performing the same steps but in vastly different spaces.
“Country music can feel inherently exclusionary,” says Kenya Jacob, a 26-year-old native Brooklynite who began line dancing shortly after Cowboy Carter had come out. “This idea of people who had been excluded from these country spaces wanting to take up their space in it resonated with me.” In other words, lines are being drawn and in queer line dancing, at least, the lines are anything but straight.
Though queer line dancing is trending, it is not new. The current resurgence is in large part due to the birth of Stud Country, a Los Angeles-based queer line-dancing party started by Sean Monaghan and Bailey Salisbury in 2021. But, says Monaghan, the movement has its roots in the leather-bar and country-and-western-bar gay subcultures of the 1970s. Urban Cowboy, the 1980 film starring John Travolta, was a watershed moment. “The first of the queer line-dancing troupes like the Longhorns was founded in 1981,” Monaghan explains, “but you can expect it was bubbling up long before that.” In New York City, organisations like Big Apple Ranch have been offering line dance and two-step since 1997.
Monaghan, a former punk rock drummer who danced Irish step growing up in the Bay Area, discovered line dance at Oil Can Harry’s, a historic gay bar in Los Angeles. When the bar closed during the pandemic, Monaghan and Salisbury began throwing line-dance parties of their own in parking lots and abandoned electronic stores throughout Los Angeles. “We were doing all sorts of punk shit,” says Monaghan, a slight, handsome, mustachioed 37-year-old.
Stud Country threw its first party in New York in 2021 at the Georgia Room, a bar inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe. Since Stud Country first appeared in New York, line dancing has spread like wild fire. “That’s kind of the punk rock ideal,” says Monaghan. “It’s like everyone that went out and saw The Damned or the Sex Pistols then in turn started their own bands. It’s empowering people to take it on and do their version of it. That’s really cool.”
Now it is possible to line dance in the city nearly every night. At a new Western-themed bar called Desert 5 Spot, actor-musician Rivkah Reyes and writer-producer Manon Carrié, better known as Spitfire and Sugarfoot, host a weekly line party called Buck Wild, where they specialise in song swaps, that is dancing traditional line dances to songs like “Vroom Vroom” by Charli XCX and “Father Figure” by George Michael. “These ridiculous song swaps are what made me want to do line dancing more,” explains Reyes, “because I used to associate country music with racism and homophobia, transphobia and white supremacy. But when I realised [Jon Pardi’s] ‘Dirt on My Boots’ works to ‘Rock the Boat’ by Aaliyah, I then am more likely to learn that dance.”
At Hill Country, a sprawling two-floor BBQ restaurant in Midtown, line dancers take over the basement on Tuesdays, often accompanied by live music. Gabriela Fratangelo and Carolina Delgado, two dancers who met at UEVR, now host their own class of boots-off beginners’ line at a dance studio called Sky Tings. Stud Country has a lock on Thursdays and Saturdays are informal practices in the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park.
Wednesdays, of course, are UEVR and, for a certain subsect of line dancers, the night is as holy as the sabbath. “Everyone in my life is, like, ‘Do not ask me about Wednesday because I’m not available’,” says Genevieve Schuster, a writer and UEVR regular. Christina Michels, a nurse, agrees: “I’ve made it a priority. Wednesday is off limits.” What UEVR — and the other classes — offers is not just movement but community. “It’s not that common in this stage of life to have friends you connect with every single week,” says Michels, 38. “I cherish having a third space that is diverse, affordable and there’s collective joy.”
Reid Bartelme, a former professional dancer (and now costume designer) fell in love with line because, he says, “I was looking for something that combined exercise with community.” Even for me, whose social anxiety and general humbuggery precludes most friendships, the warmth of line is found not just in the heat of moving bodies but of bodies moving together.
After the “Copperhead Road” warm-up, Kelleher runs through the rules. There are only three; each important. No drinks on the dance floor (slippage). Don’t take the centre if you don’t know the dance (collision). And be nice to yourself (shame). “The last one is serious,” she says. “Repeat after me.” “Be nice to yourself,” the dancers dutifully repeat, as if a catechism. Line dancing isn’t physically as demanding as, say, ballet — one reason that many here are first-time dancers — but it is mentally taxing. Each dance consists of usually a 16- to 64-count pattern, repeated on two to four walls (a reference to the number of different directions dancers must face). By the last step of the pattern, the dancer has rotated to a new wall and can begin again, thus forming an interlocking grid.
As Kelleher teaches, her words ring out like an incantation over the hushed crowd. (When it is not sufficiently hushed Kelleher, the daughter of a pre-school teacher, does the old “If you can hear me, clap once. If you can hear me, clap twice” call for silence.) Sailor step, sailor step. Stomp. Slide. Shuffle. Half turn. Pivot. She walks the class through the movements. As the sequence ends, and the new wall revealed, an exultant sigh of awe ripples through the crowd, as if they are seeing a sunrise for the first time.
“Let’s try it at half speed,” says Kelleher, running to her iPhone, sitting on a table in the corner connected to the PA. (It’s actually three-quarter speed.) Songs like “Texas Time” by Keith Urban and Terri Clark’s “You’re Easy on the Eyes” flow through the speakers in syrupy slo-mo. Their voices are deeper, the vibe heavier but for first-time dancers, the slowness is much appreciated. Line does not call for virtuosic movement but it does require a prodigal memory and lots of practice. After a practice round, it’s time to dance.
The first time I came to UEVR, in 2023, I spent most of the night not dancing, which is normal. Kelleher teaches two dances a night. The rest of the evening is previously taught repertoire, which at this point consists of hundreds of dances. In one corner — downstage left — the regular crew knows all the moves.
Dancers throw in extra pirouettes, extravagant back bends, extend their legs at astonishing angles, all the while singing along. They’re hot and cool and know all the steps, and suddenly something that might be cheesy is, instead, ineluctably alluring. I was hooked, a common experience for many novices, Kelleher included.
UEVRline began almost accidentally. Kelleher, a conservatory-trained dancer, first encountered line dancing at Oil Can Harry’s, as Monaghan had. “It was one of the most brutal experiences of my life,” she says, recalling watching dances she didn’t yet know. “I was champing at the bit to dance.” Soon she was studying dances on YouTube. “Growing up as a dancer, there was this structural kind of puzzle aspect to it that I found captivating,” she says. “Being able to find freedom within tight structure was something that just unlocked a lot of past dance trauma.” Then the pandemic hit and she was remanded to practising alone in her bedroom.
In the winter of 2022, Kelleher and a small group of friends rented the back room of the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant to practise. “I was the only one who knew the dances,” remembers Kelleher, “so I became the teacher by default.” Since then, classes have grown in popularity, though Kelleher is careful to keep it both inclusive and underground. Payment is what you wish, though $20 is the standard. There is no phone number. Announcements are made via Instagram stories, either you see them or you don’t.
As the night gets later, the dancers grow hotter, the dances faster, and the scene feels like a Dionysian bacchanal. The mirrors are fogged and sweat runs in rivulets down tank tops and jean shorts and into cowboy boots. At some point, a birthday cake emerges from somewhere and we all sing “Happy Birthday”. Then it’s back to dancing. As the class ends, the lines dissolve but the mania doesn’t. We change out of our cowboy boots, filter into the East Village night, each of us vowing to learn more, dance more and return in a week’s time.
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