Alone, at seventeen, I boarded a commercial plane that seated ten and flew to my new home: Lynchburg, Virginia. That any town in the South continues to be called Lynchburg boggles my mind. The headmaster of the school was a former Royal Ballet principal dancer named Petrus Bosman. He was a cheeky old British homosexual who wore an incredible toupee, thick, clear-framed glasses, and a white button-down tucked into high-waisted light-denim jeans. He loved musicals and made us watch dance scenes from them during class. One of my first performances at the school was a recreation of Bob Fosse’s “Steam Heat” from The Pajama Game.
My main teacher was named David Keener, another older homosexual who proudly flew a pride flag in front of his Southern colonial house. Every single day, he worked tirelessly with me on my ballet technique. One day during ballet class, we were all balancing on demi-pointe on one leg at the barre when my ankle gave out and I fell. Mr. Keener rushed over to me and began stomping at the floor, shouting, “Damn those fairies! Did they trip you? I’ll get them! Goddamn those fairies!!!” I erupted into laughter, as did the rest of the class, and then we got back to work.
That was how much of the year went. I knew I had catching up to do, but the staff believed in me and saw I had the will of a warrior. I worked my fucking ass off to improve that year.
When I went home to Connecticut for Christmas, I discovered a letter (a real paper letter with a stamp on it!) from American Ballet Theatre. I voraciously tore it open and read:
Dear Mr. James Whiteside,
We regret to inform you that we will not be offering you another full scholarship to the ABT Summer Intensive. We hope you understand. If you wish to attend, you must reaudition. If accepted, you will be required to pay full tuition.
Sincerely,
The ABT Education Department
The letter might as well have said:
Dear Fuckface,
You squandered two years of opportunity. You’ll be lucky if you get into Dolly Dinkle Dance Company. We can’t believe you broke Kirk Peterson’s bed. You little garbage diaper. At least you got some sloppy D though! I bet that’s what you’re thinking, you little shit person. You’re welcome to audition again, but you won’t get in, and you know it. BWAH-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!!!!
Eat a dick,
Bowser
I crumpled up the letter and vowed to get revenge. It was essentially like vowing to get revenge on myself, as I was the dumbass who had squandered my own chances.
When I returned to Lynchburg, I worked even harder than when I had first arrived. I showed up early to class and stayed late afterward. I still wasn’t the best dancer there, but at least I was trying to be.
With the ABT Summer Intensive out of the question, I was forced to audition elsewhere. Audition season is a marathon of harshly judged ballet classes. Each audition comes with a fee, naturally. Unfortunately, I was on my own this time. I didn’t have my teachers pulling any strings for me. I auditioned for Houston Ballet’s Summer Intensive, and they said that when I finished school, they would offer me a corps de ballet contract. This was the first sign that I was on the right track and that my ballet technique was improving. The second sign was that when I auditioned for Boston Ballet’s Summer Dance Program, I was accepted with a full scholarship. Things were looking up.
I chose Boston over Houston because I was scared of homophobic Texans. (Little did I know that there were plenty of homophobic Bostonians as well.) That summer I packed up and moved into a Boston University dorm, where the Summer Dance Program attendees were housed, for six weeks. In stark contrast with my summers at ABT, I don’t recall making any real friends in the program, and instead retreated into my training. I was placed in the highest of two men’s levels. It was the first time I’d been placed in the highest level. Even though there were only two, I considered it an accomplishment. For the end-of-program performance, I was cast as one of the side couples in the pas d’action from La Bayadère. This also marked the first time I was cast to do classical ballet in a final performance.
Immediately after the performance, Boston Ballet’s director, Mikko Nissinen, offered the lead dancer of La Bayadère a contract in Boston Ballet II, the apprentice company. He declined, so Mikko offered it to another dancer. He also declined. Finally, at the behest of BBII director Raymond Lukens, one of my career’s guardian angels, the final contract was awarded to me. Stunned, I called my mother and told her, “I don’t think I’m ready. I need more training.”
“If not now . . . when?” she asked.
* * *
—
I joined BBII in September of 2002, at eighteen years old. I loved being a professional. I was finally in charge of my own fate. I worked hard, studied those who were better dancers than me, and improved. I went from last kid picked in gym class to new kid on the block.
At the end of the year, three things can happen: you can get fired, you can get rehired as an apprentice, or you can get promoted to corps de ballet in the main company. I was offered another year of apprenticeship in BBII, which was exactly what I had expected. But a week before the new season started, I received a message on my answering machine from Mikko’s assistant, Liz. I called her back and she said, “How would you like to be in the corps de ballet?”
I was gobsmacked. Apparently, a French guy Mikko had hired had failed to get his work visa, so there was an extra contract available. I shouted, “YES! A THOUSAND TIMES YES!!!” as if I were being proposed to by the crown prince of Genovia.
* * *
—
In December 2011, Raymond Lukens called me on my iPhone 3G. I had been at Boston Ballet for ten years by then, moving all the way through the ranks from apprentice to principal dancer. He left me a message that said, “It’s time for you to audition for ABT. They need men.”
Audition materials consist of a headshot, a résumé, and a video of one’s dancing. I sent them to the email address Raymond had given me and received a prompt reply requesting that I come take company ballet class, which happens daily. As I was in the middle of an arduous run of Nutcracker performances, I had only Mondays off. I’d have to zip down to New York City to audition and zoop back up to Boston the next day to do more performances.
I took the now-defunct Fung Wah Bus service from Boston’s Chinatown to NYC’s Chinatown after a Sunday matinee performance of The Nutcracker, dozing off in the narrow, prickly-yet-fuzzy bus seat. I got in well after two a.m. and crashed on my brother Robbie’s couch on the Lower East Side. After a few hours of sleep, I got up, primped, and made my way over to Union Square for an audition that would drastically change my life.
Feeling like the prodigal son, I reentered the stomping grounds of my youth: 890 Broadway, ABT Studios. A wave of youthful nostalgia washed over me. The old New Yorkiness of the architecture. The scent of sweat. The piano sounds pervading every crevice. It was a strange sensation, and I was nervous.
At twenty-eight, I had ten years of professional dancing under my belt. I knew what it was like when auditioners came to take class with a company. I felt like an inconvenience, so I stayed off to the side of the room. One by one, dancers filed in. I recognized many of them as the stars of ABT: Julie Kent, Gillian Murphy, Paloma Herrera, Marcelo Gomes, Roberto Bolle, and more. I also had some old friends in the class, like Blaine and Simone!
The class was much easier than the classes in Boston Ballet and I felt excellent, executing the simple combinations with confidence. ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie watched about five to ten minutes of the class. I was sure he wasn’t interested, because he’d watched so little of my audition, but his associate artistic director, Victor Barbee, had watched nearly the whole thing. He must’ve put in a good word, because when the class ended, Kevin’s assistant asked me to come upstairs for a meeting.
I was sent into the associate director’s office, where Kevin and Victor were seated, waiting for me. They told me to sit down oppo
site them. I was sweating and visibly anxious. My fate rested in these space-time-dilated moments.
“We think you’d fit in nicely here at ABT and we’d like to offer you a soloist contract,” Kevin said.
I nearly had a heart attack, and my butthole practically imploded. “Th-that’s incredible,” I managed to stutter. “Th-th-thank you!”
“Welcome to ABT,” Kevin and Victor said with genial smiles, as I shook their hands and shuffled out of the office in stunned silence.
I walked to a nearby deli and sat at the grimy bar in the window, looking out at the frenetic New York City streets, thinking, “This will be my home. This was always supposed to be my home.”
But two weeks later, a few hours before another Nut performance, Kevin called me. “Listen, James. I’ve got to be honest with you,” he said. “You coming in as a soloist is really going to hurt morale, and I can’t have that. I’m very sorry but I’d like to offer you a corps de ballet contract. Just come in and do some group dances and sword fights and then I’ll promote you.”
To clarify, principal dancer is the highest rank, then soloist, then corps de ballet. I was all right with taking a step down from principal at Boston Ballet to soloist at ABT because it was my dream company and the largest and most prestigious in the country. But to step down two ranks to corps? I was speechless. I wasn’t affronted so much as disappointed. “I should’ve known it was too good to be true,” I thought to myself. I understood his rationale. There were a lot of young up-and-comers already in ABT vying for the rank of soloist. Why the hell should this sassy cat from Boston get it? What people didn’t know was that I’d been striving for this position since I was twelve years old, and that I’d never given up on it. I had been a principal dancer in Boston for three years before auditioning for ABT. To go from being a happy principal dancer all the way back to the corps de ballet sounded agonizing. All that work! Just to start all over again! I said, “I’ll think about it overnight and I’ll call you back tomorrow.”
I barely slept that night. So many questions careened about in my head. Would he actually promote me? Would I ever be a principal again? Would my boyfriend come with me? Would I like it there? Would I make any friends as good as the friends I had in Boston?
The next morning, I called him back. “I’m sorry, Kevin, but I can’t do it,” I told him. “I can’t go backwards. I hope you understand. Thank you, though.”
“I understand,” he said. “Thank you and good luck,” and then he hung up. I sat there numb, wondering if I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life.
A few minutes later, my phone buzzed. It was Kevin again.
“OK,” he said, when I answered the phone. “Soloist it is.”
My skin tingled. My hair stood on end, like in a Japanese anime. My eyes watered and I was practically vibrating with effusive joy. Has joy ever affected you so much that you can sense your biological humanness? I felt my skin flush, my heart swell and shudder, each hair follicle prickle. I thanked him profusely, not masking the emotion in my voice, and said I would not disappoint him.
* * *
—
Entering the Metropolitan Opera House backstage area in September of 2012, the first time in sixteen years, was a definitive moment for me—a moment I had waited a long time for. I arrived early in the morning, with a small suitcase filled with my theater things. I had my headphones in and was listening to my Glee playlist on shuffle. As I entered the stage door, a beautiful Andrew Lloyd Webber song came on: “As If We Never Said Goodbye.” I was walking into the house of my dreams, the house I had vowed to live in when I was only twelve years old.
As I made my way down the hallway to the dressing rooms with silent tears springing to my eyes, I dragged my free hand along the walls and envisioned myself as the delusional Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, desperately returning to the glittering scenes of her youth. The difference was that my future was still ahead of me, mine to mold. I realized I was being insane and quickly reeled it in lest anyone see me weeping and twirling along the linoleum hallways, dragging a cheap suitcase behind me.
I turned a corner and was confronted by the scene of my twelve-year-old youth: the Principal Hallway. It looked smaller, duller, and more accessible than I had remembered it, but still it wasn’t at all disappointing, with the morning light streaming in sideways from Amsterdam Avenue through thin black blinds. As a soloist, I didn’t yet have access to that prestigious Principal Hallway—but seeing it again, I knew that, at last, I was home, and that I would stop at nothing to get my very own principal dressing room.
JBDUBS & ÜHU BETCH
You need to butch it up.” “You’re running like a girl.” “Don’t wear that headband. You’re not a ballerina.” “That color is too bright.” “Don’t open your eyes so much. You look like a woman.” “Don’t move so quickly. Only ladies move that quickly.”
The gulf between man and woman is deep in the world of classical ballet. The stories simply don’t allow for much variation, unless you’re some sort of mincing villain. I thought that by becoming a ballet dancer, I was doing something super gay, but it turns out my life’s work is just another heteronormative endeavor. Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake : straight. Prince Albrecht in Giselle : straight. Prince Désiré in The Sleeping Beauty: straight. How can one be heterosexual with a name like Prince Désiré?! It sounds like it’s straight off the plot synopsis of a 1995 Falcon Studios VHS porno tape:
Jeff the Big-Dick Trucker fell asleep for one hundred years at the Sunoco off I-95. His boner grew and grew until Prince Désiré discovered and awakened him by kissing his sleeping cock. Jeff the Big-Dick Trucker had been asleep for one hundred years! His truck was completely full and it was way past due to deliver his load. Thank goodness for Prince Désiré!
One of my former bosses once told me that I didn’t get the part of Romeo because I was wearing a headband for technique class. I thought I’d tear my hair out. How can such an elegant, exquisite art form be so blatantly homophobic?
I think that so many queer people become luminary creatives because during our youths, we were forced to be imaginative in how we existed. Upon realizing that I didn’t fit into the societal norm and therefore couldn’t fall back on the easiest and most obvious definitions of success, I found ways to make myself seen and heard. I believe normalcy to be an insidious evil, one that leaves you slowly shuffling down the path millions have taken before you. While being queer itself is already like taking a road less traveled, it’s what you do on that road that defines you—not the queerness.
I wasn’t able to express my true self in my art, for which I have worked my entire life. Who am I and what do I want to say? Every single role I play is heterosexual. Every single one. How could someone as gay as me be forced into heterosexual submission so often? Think of my gayness like Jeff the Big-Dick Trucker’s load. It had been neglected for far too long.
If I didn’t make some gay roles for myself, who would?
Thus, my alter egos were born: JbDubs, the pop musician, and Ühu Betch, the drag queen with a flair for nonsense. Both gay. Both proud. Both camp as Christmas.
THE BIRTH OF JBDUBS: OUT-AND-PROUD POP MUSICIAN
Music has always been the reason I dance. I have willingly let it manipulate my soul and body. I have encouraged its machinations and worshipped at its omnipotent altar.
The first CD I ever owned was Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette, followed by Toni Braxton’s Secrets and then George Michael’s Older. As you can imagine, I quickly discovered that I deeply identified as a vengeful white woman; a sexy, Black, androgynous chanteuse; and a Grammy Award–winning homosexual connoisseur of cruising.
A few years later, during my train commutes from Connecticut to my first ABT summer program in New York City, I listened obsessively to two albums that curated or perhaps birthed my emo poet mystique: Tidal and When the Pawn . . . , both by Fiona Apple.
I’d blast Miss Apple on my Discman and write poetry that almost always centered around unrequited love or my failed attempts at turning straight boys into homosexuals.
Missy Elliott’s staccato rap inspired me to inspect more closely the relationship between music and lyrics, and her longtime production collaborator, Timbaland, blew my mind. I’d take the train into the city and make a beeline to Virgin Megastore in Times Square, where I’d rotate through the listening stations in hopes of finding “the sound.” Production became as important as the artist herself. (I listened almost exclusively to women, with the exception of *NSYNC, who were basically primped pageant queens anyway.)
In 2005, when I turned twenty-one, I used my hard-earned wages to purchase what would become my most prized possession: an Apple iMac G5. I had been working professionally since 2002, and this was the first truly expensive thing I had ever bought. The computer came equipped with GarageBand, a rudimentary music production program and my gateway drug to becoming a self-taught digital musician.
I set myself to my task. I would create a sonic masterpiece, one for the ages. It would be my legacy. It would be sent forth on extraterrestrial messaging missions. It would show that the human race is prodigious, just, and luminous. My work would be installed as a preloaded MP3 on all iPods henceforth!
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