Why London’s queers are flocking to line dance

Under a dis­co ball on a rainy Mon­day evening in Waltham­stow, an emp­ty, wood­en dance floor is wait­ing. Around its edges, clumps of friends chat­ter and chug down water, wip­ing sweat from their fore­heads and recov­er­ing from their last dance. ​“I so near­ly had that one!” one of them says. ​“Oh god, I didn’t,” says some­one else walk­ing past. 

Then, ​‘I’m a Slave 4 U’ by Brit­ney Spears comes on the speak­ers, and six or sev­en peo­ple run into the mid­dle of the room and spread out. Some are in cow­boy boots and bolo ties, oth­ers in jeans and train­ers. They sway a lit­tle or bounce on their heels as they wait for the lyrics to kick in. Then, they stomp in uni­son, slap their boots and sud­den­ly have the full atten­tion of everyone.

“There’s always a bit of a gasp at that moment,” says Nessie Nankiv­ell, founder and teacher of Queer Line Dance Lon­don. ​“That first move… it’s just so confident.”

It’s halfway through Lon­don’s new queer line danc­ing night, and we’re into the open sec­tion, where every­one who already knows the chore­og­ra­phy can let loose. This is the first time since I start­ed line danc­ing in August that I’ve stepped out onto the floor with the moves drilled into my mus­cles. I’ve been prac­tic­ing, or at least as much as I can prac­tice in my box bed­room rehearsal space, and it’s paid off. I can see peo­ple at the side look­ing at my feet as they fig­ure it out and grad­u­al­ly join in. It’s a far cry from six months ago when I, and the vast major­i­ty of the oth­er peo­ple there, had nev­er done this kind of danc­ing before.

Inter­est has only grown since the first night at Waltham­stow Trades Hall in late sum­mer. The announce­ment of the next date goes up on Insta­gram and sells out with­in a few days. There’s no reg­u­lar­i­ty as to when the nights run just yet, but it’s clear that this is what return­ing enthu­si­asts are gag­ging for. Like many oth­er line danc­ing nights, there’s no drink­ing on the dance floor and a sense of com­plete ded­i­ca­tion to get­ting the moves down. There’s a pal­pa­ble elec­tric­i­ty every time, as you dis­cov­er that even the sim­plest moves can bring huge satisfaction.

“I had imag­ined that it would only be a one off, but it was so pop­u­lar,” says Nessie, who lives in Toron­to and runs these nights when she vis­its fam­i­ly in Lon­don. ​“There’s some­thing so mag­i­cal about social danc­ing. At that first event, I got to see so many peo­ple at once expe­ri­enc­ing that feel­ing that I can recog­nise – you get to share in some­thing with people.”

This recent boom in line danc­ing among queers can be traced to the post-lock­down era in the US with the intro­duc­tion of Stud Coun­try. Set up by Sean Mon­aghan and Bai­ley Sal­is­bury in 2021 after the clo­sure of long­stand­ing LA bar Oil Can Harry’s, they quick­ly brought along their friends and built on the com­mu­ni­ty that the icon­ic LGBTQ+ venue had giv­en them before. Their dance floors were soon filled with peo­ple in their 20s to their 90s, coun­try danc­ing to Char­li xcx and Bey­on­cé together.

“Some­times, peo­ple are like: ​‘It’s so cool that you are reclaim­ing coun­try for the queers,’” says Sean. ​“And we have to tell them, we’re not doing that! It’s not new! But it was at risk of dying off, so we thought, how would we do it our way? I think we brought this new ener­gy to it.

“We have a real con­nec­tion with the his­to­ry and we’re con­cerned about pre­serv­ing it. We are chang­ing and inno­vat­ing, but we’re also dig­ging into the archives and try­ing to find parts of this cul­ture that have been strug­gling, or dances that are at risk of being for­got­ten, and try­ing to bring them back into the present day.”

Social danc­ing such as this is a lan­guage, an oral tra­di­tion, sus­tained as it pass­es from per­son to per­son. That is one of the things that excites me most about what I’m learn­ing: this knowl­edge that I could walk into a line danc­ing night any­where in the world and be able to slot in. There might be slight ver­nac­u­lar dif­fer­ences in cer­tain move­ments, but the idea of hav­ing a com­mu­ni­ty some­where you’ve nev­er been, wait­ing for you, in itself feels very queer.

It’s kind of beau­ti­ful, then, the way that this Lon­don line danc­ing night has come about: Nessie also teach­es at a coun­try night in Toron­to, Spurs Night, which was set up because its founders loved Stud Coun­try and want­ed their own local ver­sion. This chain links every­one back to Oil Can Harry’s, a reminder of the ori­gins, the spaces and the peo­ple that came before to allow us the free­dom to do it.

The cur­rent spread is thanks in part to social media, but that obscures the fact that, even in the UK, queer peo­ple have been con­sis­tent­ly line danc­ing for almost as long. ​“We acci­den­tal­ly start­ed the biggest par­ty just on Insta­gram, and these peo­ple have been organ­is­ing for decades,” says Sean. ​“So it’s real­ly impor­tant to me that they get wrapped into this new inter­est in the dance.”

The Cac­tus Club, which takes place every Tues­day at the Two Brew­ers in Clapham, has been run­ning in a few dif­fer­ent guis­es since 1993. 

“I went to Oil Can Harry’s in the ​’90s,” says Peter Flock­hart, a qual­i­fied line dance teacher and founder of the Cac­tus Club. ​“We’ve got peo­ple who have been to Stud Coun­try from the Cac­tus Club and peo­ple from the Cac­tus Club have been to Stud Coun­try.” He’s pleased that they’ve main­tained the con­nec­tion to the his­to­ry of line dance. ​“It hon­ours where it comes from.”

Peter has seen waves of inter­est come and go in the UK, through peaks in the ​’90s when he taught class­es over 100-strong, five nights a week, and troughs, when it all col­lapsed in the ear­ly ​’00s. ​“I think that it’s very much like a lot of things on the LGBTQ+ scene,” he says. ​“It’s cycli­cal. But even though we had that drop, we still kept going. And we’re still here today.” And now, since the pan­dem­ic, it’s been on the up again. ​“Our demo­graph­ic has com­plete­ly changed. It’s shift­ed from peo­ple who were over 50 to a lot of 20, 30-year-olds. We don’t real­ly know why there’s such an uptick!”

The answer may lie some­what in the coun­try music renais­sance. Accord­ing to the UK’s Offi­cial Charts Com­pa­ny, 2024 saw coun­try music gain a 67% increase in pop­u­lar­i­ty in the UK on the pre­vi­ous year, with Beyoncé’s COW­BOY CARTER respon­si­ble in no small part. Inter­est­ing­ly, they report, it’s not just hit viral sin­gles that have bro­ken through and that this rise in pop­u­lar­i­ty of coun­try albums could indi­cate a last­ing ded­i­ca­tion to the genre on the east­ern side of the Atlantic.

It’s cer­tain­ly made an impact on the queer com­mu­ni­ty in a broad­er sense than line danc­ing – Bonan­za and Queer Cxn­try are two nights that have expe­ri­enced a rapid ascent since Covid. Punk band pink suits, who are respon­si­ble for the Mar­gate-based Queer Cxn­try, which has now reached Lon­don and soon beyond, say that the queer­ness of the genre itself draws us to it.

“At its heart, coun­try music is about the expe­ri­ences of life, love, loss, fam­i­ly and friends and con­tem­plat­ing how we spend this time togeth­er,” they say. ​“It is about heart­break and beau­ty and strug­gles and pain. There is so much in coun­try music that speaks to the queer expe­ri­ence and, despite this idea that we have about coun­try music not being a place for queer peo­ple, a lot of the cham­pi­ons of coun­try music have always been cham­pi­ons of queer peo­ple and have spo­ken out about peo­ple’s right to live and love freely.

“Queer peo­ple have always been here, in every part of soci­ety. That includes coun­try. It includes cow­boys and ranch­ers and farm­ers and wranglers.”

Then, of course, there are plen­ty of queer coun­try artists at our fin­ger­tips too: Lil Nas X, Orville Peck, Ali­son Rus­sell, Bran­di Carlile, Katie Pruitt, Trix­ie Mat­tell, Joy Oladokun…I could keep on list­ing my whole playlist.

“The cow­boy icon exists for every­one around the world,” says Sean. ​“It does­n’t belong to one cul­ture. It comes from here [the US], but then it becomes a tool for con­nect­ing and social­is­ing and coun­try music becomes some­thing that binds peo­ple togeth­er in a cer­tain kind of activity.”

There’s no doubt that cow­boy cul­ture has end­less appeal for queers – but more specif­i­cal­ly, why does line danc­ing itself appeal so much?

“It’s incred­i­bly addic­tive, learn­ing danc­ing,” says Elli, a reg­u­lar who has been going since the first ses­sion. ​“I think that enthu­si­asm is very infec­tious in the community.”

“I have a the­o­ry,” says Nessie, with a smile. ​“There’s some­thing quite vul­ner­a­ble about learn­ing chore­og­ra­phy and doing it all togeth­er, know­ing that peo­ple are there and you’re try­ing to keep up. I think queer peo­ple have a bit of an upper hand when it comes to embrac­ing and find­ing the excite­ment in that vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. I think queer peo­ple, due to a kind of com­fort with not fit­ting in and know­ing that peo­ple around us don’t need us to do that, have more room to explore how we want to dance, to explore mess­ing up and mak­ing mistakes.”

It doesn’t mat­ter how many mis­takes you make; that even­tu­al feel­ing of being in lock­step with the whole room is inde­scrib­able. I like to think you can hear the sound of boots stomp­ing in cho­rus from out in the street, but I’m so involved in danc­ing I’m not going to drag myself out­side to check. Dis­tract­ed for a sec­ond, I lose focus and find myself turn­ing to face the wrong wall, nose-to-nose with some­one in the row behind me. We laugh, reset, and car­ry on.

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