Tango is cemented into the pavements of Buenos Aires, the city where it was born at the end of the 19th century and where its soul still resides. Paving stones around the city commemorate long-lost singers and composers, much-loved lyrics and major milestones in the evolution of a dance and music that have spread around the world.
But living, breathing tango reflects what is happening politically and culturally in Argentina today, in the form of milongas, or dances, held daily in salons, community centers and plazas. And at events like the International Queer Tango Festival (IQTF) in Buenos Aires.
Held from Dec. 5-9, 2024, it was a celebration of dance, music and queer literature, and featured workshops and discussions. But it was also a coming together of anyone enchanted by the dance who doesn’t want to conform — or isn’t comfortable conforming — to the traditional or “heteronormative” roles in tango: men with slicked-back hair and dapper suits leading while women in sequined dresses and razor-sharp stilettos follow.
Not anymore. These norms are being shattered, as the festival amply and openly demonstrated.
Mariana Docampo is a pioneer of queer tango and one of the organizers of the IQTF in Buenos Aires. In 2005 she opened one of Argentina’s first gay tango salons. Called Tango Queer, it was created primarily for lesbians and feminists but also for anyone who, as she put it, wanted to be “liberated” from tango’s binary roles. She has also written extensively on the subject.
“Queerness,” said Docampo, “is the true subversive element in tango, because it shatters the pillars that hold up the traditional tango.” She explained that, by following traditional gender-specific roles, dancers might not have been expressing who they really were, that they were being imposters in their own bodies. Queer tango, she said, allowed them to adopt what she calls “a subversive body.” “And by subversion, I don’t mean destroying the dance, but engaging with it, transforming it, updating it,” she said.
She has written that queer tango can be thought of as a political weapon because it makes non-normative identities visible, allowing them to be observed.
And this in a country where the right-wing libertarian government of President Javier Milei has, since he took office in December 2023, wreaked havoc on recent advances to promote equality for and end discrimination against sexual and gender minorities.
Argentina was, in 2010, the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage and, shortly afterward, to recognize the right of citizens to choose their own gender identity, as expressed on official documents. In 2021, the left-of-center Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez, which preceded Milei’s, implemented an employment quota law, requiring 1% of all state jobs to be reserved for transgender or nonbinary people. Milei’s government laid off nearly 100 employees who had been given jobs under that law.
Among his first acts in office were to close the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, ban the government’s use of gender-inclusive language and abolish the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism. Earlier this year he told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “The only thing this radical feminist agenda has achieved is greater state intervention to hinder the economic process.”
And on International Women’s Day in March, he renamed the Women’s Hall in the presidential palace the Hall of Heroes, replacing portraits of famous women with soldiers and male politicians. Meanwhile, his allies have called on him to repeal the country’s 2020 law legalizing abortion.
Human Rights Watch has pointed out the link between such inflammatory language and actions by politicians as well as a rise in verbal abuse and physical attacks against Argentina’s queer community on the streets. The organization highlighted a firebomb attack on a house in Buenos Aires in May, which killed three lesbians and seriously injured one more. A man who had threatened them using homophobic language was arrested.
This is the backdrop against which the festival took place. Despite this climate, the dancing goes on, celebrated daily at the milongas and at the IQTF. There are more tango salons catering to members of the LGBTQ+ community than ever before. However, they are not exclusive. The salons welcome anyone who wants to dance, but in a way they’re comfortable with.
Lucia Rinaldi teaches tango to dancers of all abilities in classes at a community center in Buenos Aires. But she teaches it differently, concentrating on breaking down barriers, encouraging her students to express themselves outside of the constraints set by an often conservative tango establishment.
“When I studied,” she said, “I couldn’t express myself within those constraints.”
Rinaldi concentrates firstly on teaching how to move the body. “The feet will follow,” she said. “The hug is fundamental. But it doesn’t have to be binary — men leading and women following.” She reproached her students when they automatically separated into male-female partnerships to engage in dance exercises.
“Tango,” Rinaldi said, “is part of our social fabric, danced in public spaces like plazas and community centers. It breaks down social barriers.”
Rinaldi sees queer tango as an important element in the push for social change.
One of her students, writer Fabian Martinez Siccardi, said: “I recently returned to the queer tango scene after exploring traditional tango for a while. Here, I finally feel free to express myself — dancing how and with whom I choose. The freedom is intoxicating.”
This is not the high-heeled, sequined ballroom tango now popular on cruise liners and TV shows around the world, although that format also exists in Buenos Aires — at grand shows geared toward tourists, since it’s what they expect and can generally afford.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard tango dancers say queer tango is not for them. When I told a friend — an elderly woman — I was writing this piece, she said: “I dance tango because I’m comfortable in the female role, being led. I wouldn’t feel happy dancing it any other way.”
Either way, tango is not under threat. It continues to evolve, to find fresh ways of expressing itself and to embrace dancers who might previously have been excluded.

Tango has come a long way since its birth in the bars and brothels of Buenos Aires and Montevideo at the end of the 19th century. It was developed by working-class European immigrants, and Argentinians and Uruguayans of African descent. Men danced with men, displaying their agility and fight moves, because there were so many more male immigrants than female ones. Women who dared to dance were often considered indecent.
It also cut across social divides — lawyers dancing with taxi drivers, cleaners with politicians.
Tango became internationally popular and moved from the bars to salons. It was also perceived by some as an expression of women’s subordination to men in what was — many would say, still is — a macho society. In his 1913 poem “Tango,” the writer and poet Ricardo Guiraldes described the dance as the “all-absorbing love of a tyrant, jealously guarding his dominion, over women who have surrendered submissively, like obedient beasts.”
Just 20 years ago, milongas for gay dancers, both men and women, were held in secret. Now they are out in the open. But when Anahi Carballo opened her all-women tango dance company in 2015, its members received threats telling them that women dancing with each other would be the death of tango.
The opposite appears to be the case. Queer tango is growing while tango in general is enjoying a revival, with more youngsters taking up something many of their parents and grandparents had rejected when rock music arrived in Argentina in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Cecilia Navarro, 22, danced with Victoria Esquer, 35, on the opening night of last month’s festival. She’s from a tango-dancing family but only started dancing herself three years ago, after getting involved with the Argentinian feminist movement Ni Una Menos (Not One More Woman Killed). “Who have been the women in tango?” she asked. At the end of her first clumsy class, her teacher suggested she “bring a man next time.”
Angered, Cecilia searched on social media and found what she was looking for. “I realized I belonged to the queer tango world,” she said. She practices every day and dances at milongas two or three times a week. “Dancing a milonga can change your day. It activates your creativity. You’re always learning something new — new steps, new roles. And queer tango has given me ambition, made me realize there are no limits.”
Ray Sullivan was a professional ballet dancer in the United States who came to Buenos Aires in 1992 and fell in love with tango. He said it gave him a freedom he couldn’t find within the rigid disciplines of ballet, something he celebrated at the festival while launching his book “Changing the World One Tango at a Time.” In it, he wrote: “The eight billion people in the world need tango.”
He accepted that most of Argentina’s 46 million people don’t dance — never mind the rest of the world — but insists we all have something to gain from this dance. “We are more likely to take care of someone once we have embraced them, danced with them,” he said. “Queer tango is emblematic — if something so Argentine, so rigid, can change, with all that implies, that can demonstrate that other elements in society can also change.”
His book, he was proud to point out, has been placed in the philosophy section in bookstores.
Kevin Carrel Footer, from California, also arrived in Buenos Aires in 1992. A writer, musician and photographer, he has just produced a book, “Tango Queer Buenos Aires,” celebrating the movement in photographs. It’s a study of the intimacy of dancers and the growth of queer tango spaces. “What they started has now, like a precocious child, spread far beyond them, been taken up by so many others, and has changed the world we live and dance in,” he wrote. “Everything is shared,” he said. “The creation of beauty in a milonga is incredible. That comes from every embrace, every couple.”
Queer tango alone has not changed Argentinian society. But it reflects change and provides a voice to those seeking change, who want to do things differently, who feel they are not able to express themselves within the constraints that tradition and politics impose on them.
Tango is the soundtrack to life in Buenos Aires. Its lyrics speak of nostalgia for a past long gone, and of hopes for an uncertain future, while providing a haven in an often difficult social, political and economic present.
No one expects tango alone to solve those problems. But the men who dance with women, the men with men, the women with women — straight, gay, trans and whoever just wants to dance — are all locked in an embrace they say demonstrates that barriers can be torn down, and they can express themselves and do things differently.
One way or another, Argentina dances on to the beat of the tango.
(Additional reporting by Biole Weber)
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