In the back ballroom of an old Ukrainian restaurant in New York\u2019s 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\u2019s wearing a pair of cut-off denim shorts so short they\u2019re 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. \u201cWelcome to Wednesday niiiiiiight!\u201d she yells in the manner of an exuberant camp counsellor. The room, full of young queer dancers, explodes into whoops and applause. Steve Earle\u2019s \u201cCopperhead Road\u201d begins to play on large speakers, and the shuffle, stomp and scuff of hundreds of cowboy boots shake the floor. <\/p>\n
Kelleher\u2019s class at the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant \u2014 called UEVRline, or simply UEVR, and sometimes just line \u2014 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. <\/p>\n
The renaissance comes at a time when the contours of who \u201ccountry\u201d music \u2014 and country culture \u2014 is meant for are in flux. Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s multi-platinum 2024 album Cowboy Carter<\/em> 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\u2019m the Problem<\/em> 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\u2019s brother to musician Lola Kirke line dances, often performing the same steps but in vastly different spaces. <\/p>\n \u201cCountry music can feel inherently exclusionary,\u201d says Kenya Jacob, a 26-year-old native Brooklynite who began line dancing shortly after Cowboy Carter<\/em> had come out. \u201cThis idea of people who had been excluded from these country spaces wanting to take up their space in it resonated with me.\u201d In other words, lines are being drawn and in queer line dancing, at least, the lines are anything but straight.<\/p>\n Though queer line dancing is trending<\/strong>, 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<\/em>, the 1980 film starring John Travolta, was a watershed moment. \u201cThe first of the queer line-dancing troupes like the Longhorns was founded in 1981,\u201d Monaghan explains, \u201cbut you can expect it was bubbling up long before that.\u201d In New York City, organisations like Big Apple Ranch have been offering line dance and two-step since 1997.<\/p>\n Monaghan, a former punk rock drummer who danced Irish step growing up in the Bay Area, discovered line dance at Oil Can Harry\u2019s, 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. \u201cWe were doing all sorts of punk shit,\u201d says Monaghan, a slight, handsome, mustachioed 37-year-old. <\/p>\n Stud Country threw its first party in New York in 2021 at the Georgia Room, a bar inspired by Georgia O\u2019Keeffe. Since Stud Country first appeared in New York, line dancing has spread like wild fire. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of the punk rock ideal,\u201d says Monaghan. \u201cIt\u2019s like everyone that went out and saw The Damned or the Sex Pistols then in turn started their own bands. It\u2019s empowering people to take it on and do their version of it. That\u2019s really cool.\u201d <\/p>\n