Kevin Carrel Footer, Melissa Fitch, Gavin Preston, Ray Batchelor and Edgardo Fernández Sesma. Photo courtesy of Edgardo Fernández Sesma.

New Queer Tango Photography Book

TBQA: Tango Queer Buenos Aires
By Kevin Carrel Footer
Published by kevincarrelfooter.com
2024

Ray Batchelor, [temporarily in] Buenos Aires.

It was an accident that I met Kevin Carrel Footer. It is December 2024. I am back in Buenos Aires – a rare privilege for me made possible by my husband, Jerome Farrell, through his imaginative 70th birthday gift to me: a trip to the city so that I can enjoy the famous Tango Queer Festival, other tango, the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of the place, and whatever accidentally comes my way. I am with queer tango dancer, Gawaine Preston (also from Queer Tango London) and we had arrived for a long-scheduled book promotion event during the Festival. I knew and admired Ray Sullivan from the international queer tango circuit. He has taught us in London, and I knew of his thought-provoking book, Changing the World One Tango at a Time – or Cambiando el mundo un tango a la vez. Ray bridges tango’s notorious language divide with editions in both languages. We were there for an event promoting Ray’s book.

Carelessly, I had not noticed that this event was, in fact, promoting two books: Ray’s, and a collection of photographs of queer tango by Kevin Carrel Footer: TQBA: Tango Queer Buenos Aires. Mariana Docampo, queer tango doyenne, who with Augusto Balizano and others, organises the Festival Internacional de Tango Queer Buenos Aires, was on hand to co-ordinate the discussions with both authors.

As people assembled, academic and tango author, Melissa Fitch and I spotted one another. Joy! It had been years since we had seen each other at an event in Paris in 2016, and we immediately settled down to some wide-ranging discussions of what was changing in tango since last we met. Melissa first identified and then kindly introduced us to Kevin, a friend and neighbour of hers in the Avenida de Mayo. Details of his remarkable life emerged. Kevin is a writer, photographer and harmonica player (!), and as his website confirms, he was originally…

…from California, [and] moved to Buenos Aires in 1992 to begin the spiritual practice of tango. For many years he was a columnist for the Buenos Aires Herald… Kevin’s photographs have appeared in international magazines and graced the covers of award-winning CDs. His photo-blog project People of Tango celebrates the people and stories of the worldwide tango revolution.

The key point is this: Kevin was already at home in Buenos Aires before queer tango appeared in the city.

The event began. Mariana apologised for her English but need not have done so. She amiably and animatedly questioned both authors on behalf of the bi-lingual audience in Spanish [I’m getting better at following the Spanish] and in English, teasing out their ideas. It was a thoroughly engaging event. Ray’s book admirably addresses some of the “truths” of tango, the famous “connection” and physical intimacy for example, and considers their value to a wider society much in need of such qualities.

Kevin set out his approach towards photographing and documenting queer tango, an approach which is also described in the opening pages of TQBA with an easy warmth and affection by Mariana:

Many times he comes with his camera [to “La Queer”] and asks my permission to take photos. And so begins his free and dynamic photo session. He moves without my seeing him, throughout the room, among the people, away from the people, together with the people. He records what he sees. What is Kevin’s eye looking at? The intimate moment in which two people hug each other, preparing – eagerly – for everything that is going to happen while the tango lasts; the concentration of the dancers; the discomfort of a posture. He caught the one who was thinking about something else when he danced, those who started chatting, the illuminated couple in the middle of the room. He caught the dance, the floor, the sound of the crowd between sets. And the conversations… Kevin is the eye that saw from within, the one that felt first in his body and knew what he wanted to reveal.

In the book, following Mariana’s introduction in Spanish and English, Kevin briefly and modestly introduces himself and his work in English and Spanish. What is the purpose of this book? Following Mariana’s characterisation of his practice, he is quick to dispel the idea that he is an outsider looking in. No. He dances. He lives his life “through the prism of tango” and these photographs were taken from within it. “Tango is a group ritual. Everything that happens in the milonga is shared freely. What’s yours is mine. What’s mine is ours.” He has, he writes, been party to queer tango in Buenos Aires since its inception and – rightly – pays tribute to the persistence over time of two of its originators and organisers: Mariana Docampo herself, and Augusto Balizano. Queer tango he asserts obliged an often backward-looking dance to orientate itself towards the future. He calls it “the most important development in tango since Astor Piazolla”. In making a casual reference to the work of Rodolfo Dinzel, he introduces one of the few great dancers and teachers of the past who, with his wife Gloria (Tango: An Anxious Quest for Freedom (2000)), and in the language of their times, wrote credibly about the near equality of the leader and follower roles, a quality which queer tango often celebrates. Kevin’s book is, he writes “my celebration of the beauty and love we made and shared on the dance floor”.

These are grand claims. Like any such anthology of images, this collection is a sample taken from an archive of thousands. Might another selection of photographs tell a different story? It might, but that would be a churlish observation. If it is Kevin’s conviction that queer tango embodies a distinctive love and beauty worthy of celebration and has chosen accordingly, we should probably just respect that impulse.

In fact the photographs which follow can be enjoyed in several different and complementary ways. Just leafing through them for example, there is the simple pleasure of recognising this or that member of the queer tango community, captured in more or less characteristic poses and circumstances on and off the Buenos Aires dance floor. As these are photographs taken over time, they also have value as historical record, documenting particular events, people and locations – not least the series showing Los Laureles where, physically at least, he often is the outsider looking in through the old plate glass windows of this legendary venue. But Kevin is only accidentally a historian. He is a photographer. He is an artist. Frankly, these photographs are beautiful. Very beautiful. Anyone, whether they dance queer tango or not, can see that, and will enjoy them.

Even so, from a queer tango perspective, it is reasonable to ask what the value of this beauty is to the queer tango cause? The things which are important to know in tango are only completely understood in the bodies of those who dance it, as they dance it, and then imperfectly made available for others to consider in recollection, in language, with words like “connection”, “intimacy”, and from time to time “the erotic” or even “the transcendent”. I know from my own dancing, from my conversations with others who dance or have danced with me, and from my writing about them, that these qualities may escape easy verbal delineation. They are nonetheless real for that. And let’s not forget, they are the very qualities queer tango has fought for, for decades, and often secured, for queer people on the dance floor, in queer combinations of coupling.

This is massive.

We need to know and to be able to refer to what we have. If words will never completely capture those qualities, what about imagery? What about photographs? On the evidence of this handsome selection from Kevin Carrel Footer addressing decades of queer tango in Buenos Aires, I think I would go so far as to say that imagery has a greater chance than language alone. I say that as a writer wedded to the craft. Here, qualities, those qualities, are I believe credibly, differently, and possibly more accurately represented, not least because, like the dance itself, they have escaped the constraints of mere language. Obviously, these qualities are not fully represented. Nothing can fully stand in for the dancing. But wherever queer tango is practised, to approach them through these beautiful and atmospheric images is as direct and powerful as any representation in any medium is likely to get.