Billy Elliot was the first movie to make me cry from an emotion other than fear, but that was because, if I recall correctly, of dead mother content and not ballet content. I saw it in theatres; I would have been nine or ten.
On Modern Family, the straight actor who plays Cam, the flamboyant gay husband, does quite an amusing impression of Billy Elliot in a bad northern accent (“I just want to dance at the ballet”) that later became somewhat of a meme.
The character of Billy is straight and the actor who plays him is straight too. But when men dance ballet, they’re seen as gay, hence the film’s central tension, other than the miners’ strike.
I learned the term “scab” from Billy Elliot, that I remember very clearly.
I do think I always wanted to dance at the ballet. The memory of the desire is vague, foggy.
Once, I asked my friend Erin to confirm that she was there when I told the assistant principal of our high school that someone had scratched “FAG” into my locker. She was, she remembered. The scene felt like something I had seen in a movie, so I was worried I had made it up.
I have recurrent pain in my feet. I went to see a podiatrist, Dr. Bluma Girzon. She took X-rays and I was flattered when she told me I should have been a ballet dancer because of my very high arches, which also put added pressure on my heels and the balls of my feet when I wear thin-soled shoes.
I went to a few ballet classes with Rosalie, my fiancé’s cousin. They were actually ballet-barre workout classes. I think one of the teachers told me I was a natural, but I could really just be making that up. Anyway, I found the barre elements a bit too strenuous
I find male ballet dancers to be attractive, generally, by which I mean I like the body type imposed upon them by the rigours of the form and also by troubling aesthetic expectations and codes. But there’s something deeply unerotic about seeing them on stage, possibly because of the false, Ken-like modesty of their dance belts.
When my great-aunt Cynthia told me that her father danced ballet before fleeing Romania, I made some immediate assumptions about him, assumptions that were somewhat bolstered by other knowledge I had, like that he was less successful in business than some of his peers.
Cynthia, whom I call Yaya, probably said that she thought her father danced ballet before leaving Romania.
In CEGEP, we had to write and perform a short two-person play. I insisted that Tiffany and I wear matching black tights, which I bought using our mutual friend Lauren’s employee discount at American Apparel, even though tights weren’t remotely essential to our characters.
My parents put me on a soccer team when I was a child, then took me off it when I did nothing but wander around the field snapping my fingers. They put me in karate, chess, piano. They never forced me to continue any of the activities I didn’t like, which was all of them. But they never put me in ballet. I never asked.
My legs look good in tights. My mother always says I have better legs than either she or my father has. Maybe they’re my great-grandfather’s legs. Maybe, just like me, he never even danced.
Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has twice appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and in journals across Canada. He is a student in Concordia's Interdisciplinary PhD program. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, is coming out with Brick Books in March 2026, and his third chapbook, Misha Solomon's Biodôme: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster, follows with above/ground press in April 2026.
