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which became his ticket out of his native San Juan, Puerto Rico. “I was the black sheep of the family,” he says.Īround the time he came out, he also started taking dance lessons. It didn’t come to that, but he says it was tense in his house afterward and he faced constant questions about who he was spending time with.
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“I was prepared for them to kick me out of the house,” he says. He was just 15 years old and didn’t expect his parents, who are Roman Catholic, to take it well. “I was afraid they’d make a scene, so I took them to Starbucks when it was crowded,” he says, laughing.
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But that’s where Alonso Guzman felt most comfortable, and safe, telling his parents he was gay. Starbucks may seem like an odd place to choose to come out. “Ballet is not there on that issue yet.”Īlonso Guzman: “I’m a gay man. “I give them a disclaimer that there’s a lot more to go in ballet,” she says. She likes dancing traditional ballets, such as Giselle, where she can be “dainty and pretty.” But she also enjoys contemporary work where gender lines are blurred, such as Ohad Naharin’s Minus One.įelder says that when she invites her queer women friends to the ballet, she warns them that the aesthetic is still based on traditional gender roles. She says that when people in the ballet world learn she’s gay, they’re always surprised, because she doesn’t present as a “butch tomboy.” But she says queer women can look-or dance-any way they want. “I was used to being the only black person in the studio,” she says. Throughout her career, she’s always been the only queer women in the studio. She credits A Camp, a retreat for queer women, with helping her embrace her identity and build community in a way ballet could not.įelder danced with Atlanta Ballet for five years and just wrapped her second season with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. The inclusive spirit of the event encouraged her to come out to her colleagues, who were very supportive.īut while the company had gay men she could connect with, she had to look elsewhere for a community of queer women. Shortly after joining the company, another dancer threw a party to celebrate Pride, and many company dancers attended. It wasn’t until she landed a job with Atlanta Ballet that things started to change. “It seems extreme when I look back on it now, but I was afraid.” “I thought, ‘They’re going to think I’m a deviant, they won’t let me perform,’ ” she says. Like many young queer people, she internalized homophobic ideas. She worried that she’d lose her scholarship at PNB if the administration found out she was gay.
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She stayed in the closet through her training at UNCSA and later at Pacific Northwest Ballet School’s Professional Division. “Could I be a ballet dancer and be lesbian?” “Without representation, I started to feel this pressure and fear,” she says. She wasn’t sure if queer women were welcome. She trained at University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where she had male friends who were gay, but didn’t know any ballerinas who identified as lesbian or queer-there or anywhere else. “The understanding was that being gay was wrong,” Felder says. Her family is now supportive, but at the time, they didn’t talk about LGBTQ people. , 27, grew up in North Carolina, in a household she describes as “not too crazy,” but conservative Christian. Kiara Felder: “Could I be a ballet dancer and be lesbian?” Kiara Felder in The Nutcracker with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens