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 they visit 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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