Dance Floor Confessions
by Sarah Weinman
I wasn’t someone who “went out” in my youth. In the literal sense, sure: movies, theater (when I could afford it), book events, music gigs, drinks and dinners with friends. I still do all of those things, in fact. But “going out” in the sense I mean refers to the clubs. Starting my evening after midnight did not compute. Waiting in line, getting carded, getting sweaty on the dance floor with strangers, taking whatever slang we’re using these days for MDMA—it will always be E, for me—and maybe doing, shall we say, other things, didn’t appeal. I was square and I knew that, and accepted it.
Something changed in the last few years, though. Maybe I was recovering from the pandemic hangover. Maybe it was perimenopause. Maybe it was spending more time in queer circles, which has always seemed to me to be a young person’s culture. But there I was, two summers ago, on a dance floor in Amsterdam, the pulsating EDM rhythm permeating my skin as I moved my body with effortless pleasure. Or an earlier post-pandemic summer, in a gay club in New York, the sounds of Patrick Cowley’s remix of “I Feel Love” piercing me with arrow-like precision as I walked through the door. Or, more than once, the dance club smash-cutting and there I was, doing other things. I’m square enough not to kiss and tell.
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