Back to blog

My old lover was once a dancer – a beautiful white man who danced in an all black troupe.
He once asked his legendary mentor Alvin Ailey, why him? Ailey just laughed.

He stopped dancing after a decade and spent a year deeply depressed in New York City where he only ventured out for coffee and a newspaper. And he became a lawyer, commuting to the city from the big house in New Rochelle, with kids in private school and a wife he skirted around on.

He always wears a white cotton buttoned-down long-sleeved shirt. In photos of him swimming with his kids in the ocean, hanging out with his poker buddies, biking near his second home on Martha’s Vineyard, he is always in a long-sleeve white shirt.

I think of him as a dancer so beautiful that he transcended race and a lover who – had he the courage – would be dancing with me through the time left to us. It breaks my heart to think of him, enscarped in white cotton with the wife, the kids, poker buddies and a second home.