Photo

­Claudio Marcelo Vidal, left, and Sidney Grant perform for a class during a Rainbow Tango open house at Pearl Studios in Manhattan. Credit Willie Davis for The New York Times

For many people, including me, the word tango conjures the image of a pantherlike milonguero, hair slicked back, in a breathless embrace with a lithe, rapt partner, skirt slit to her thigh, trembling at his every touch. It is the image promoted by big tango shows; the dance becomes a metaphor for Passion with a capital P, rigorously heterosexual and male-dominated, wrapped up in a dynamic of tormented female desire and irresistible male seduction. (Forget that in the early days, men often danced with other men.)

For me, as the American-born daughter of Argentine parents, the situation becomes even more complicated. The first thing many people ask when they hear about my background is, “Do you tango?” The answer is no. No one in my family dances or listens to tango — when my parents were growing up, in the 1940s and ’50s, their parents associated it with the government of Juan Domingo Perón, who had befriended several tango luminaries, most notably the lyricist and composer Enrique Santos Discépolo. Tango was the dominant musical style of the Peronist period, in movies, on the radio. So to me, the Buenos Aires depicted in the songs and dances feels alien, clichéd, hopelessly machista. If you asked me what I thought of the dance, I might point you to the passage in Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s “Radiografía de la Pampa,” from 1933: It is a “dance of pessimism, of sadness expressed through all the limbs of the body.”

But, no surprise, this image has very little to do with the reality of the tango as it is experienced by those who dance it. What it completely misses is the social function of the milonga — or tango gathering — in Argentina and, since the tango boom of the 1980s, around the world. Like contradance meetups and swing-dance parties, these are places that attract people seeking human contact, creative expression and something as uncomplicated as a bit of fun. Nor does the hackneyed image of the pacing milonguero capture the subtlety and complexity of the dance itself, a kind of conversation expressed through touch, posture and interweaving footwork.

More recently, tango has also moved away from its focus on men leading women around the dance floor. There are other options. Men are dancing with men, women with women; women are leading and men are learning to follow. Often, these roles shift mid-dance.

This liberating and democratizing evolution is largely the product of the Queer Tango movement, conceived by three German dancers — Ute Walter, Marga Nagel and Felix Volker Feyerabend — organizers of the first Queer Tango Festival in Hamburg in 2001. The movement has spread to Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, San Francisco, Seattle and Rome — and, even in the face of antigay legislation in Russia, to St. Petersburg and Moscow. The Festival Internacional de Tango Queer has been, since 2007, a yearly feature of the dance calendar in Buenos Aires, a city that still has a few hyper-traditional milongas at which men and women sit on opposite sides of the dance floor and women wait patiently to be invited to dance. “I thought they might come after us with torches,” the festival’s co-founder Augusto Balizano said via Skype, “but to my surprise there was a great acceptance among the tango community here.”

New York has not been a leader in the movement, but now, Walter Perez and Leonardo Sardella, partners in life and dance who perform as Malevaje Tango, have taken up the cause. For four days, Oct. 1 to 4, they will preside over their first New York Queer Tango Weekend, which will include workshops by eminent teachers like Graciela Gonzalez (a pioneer in the advancement of women’s technique), dance parties and events like a gala inspired by Rudolph Valentino (black tie required). There was a Queer Tango Festival in New York in 2010, organized by the producer and performer Sergio Segura, but it hasn’t been repeated. “It was too soon,” he said recently. (Mr. Segura hosts Rainbow Tango, a series of open-role tango classes and events at Strictly Tango, the Midtown school he directs. An open house last week included a demonstration by Claudio Marcelo Vidal, the first man to compete at the World Tango Championships in high heels, with his partner, Sidney Grant.)

Mr. Perez and Mr. Sardella hope the weekend will raise awareness about queer tango – also known as open-role tango — and encourage people of all sexual orientations to give it a try. “The tango queer movement was born of a need for people of the same sex to be able to dance together, and we achieved that,” Mr. Perez said recently in his apartment, filled with Peruvian Madonnas, Buddhas, and tango memorabilia, “but it’s one thing to be a minority, one of one or two couples at a milonga; at the festival, we’ll be a majority.”

New York has no L.G.B.T. milonga, even though the city has a lively tango scene, with an average of three dance parties a night. “The fact that you would never be thrown out for dancing with someone of the same sex,” at a conventional milonga, Mr. Perez said, “makes it difficult to create and maintain a gay milonga here.”

At a beginners’ class I attended to learn more about open-role tango, taught by Mr. Perez and Mr. Sardella on a recent Tuesday at the SAGE center for L.G.B.T. seniors in Chelsea, our group learned to walk together to the music, gliding forward, backward, to the side and in a circle without stepping on one another’s toes. I danced with both men and women. As a complete novice, I discovered a slight preference for leading, particularly if I was with a woman of my own size, relishing the chance to choose which direction to take, whether to move in large steps or small, and which moments in the music to accentuate. But following also had its charms: I could close my eyes and simply feel what my partner was asking me to do.

I quickly lost my nerve during a more advanced open-role class at Dardo Galletto Studios, sensing that my rigid fumbling was frustrating my partners’ efforts to get into the zone. In a class of about 10 people, men danced with women, women with other women, but the only same-sex male couple was Mr. Perez and Mr. Sardella, who demonstrated the steps with enviable fluidity and a complete absence of macho posturing.

Many of the women wore high heels and skirts, but Phi Lee Lam, a filmmaker and freelancer from Singapore (“I’ve done everything from gardening to working as a personal assistant”), looked perfectly in her element gliding in blue-and-white saddle shoes and khaki pants, gently maneuvering her partners around the floor. After class, Ms. Lam said she had discovered tango a few years ago on a trip to Buenos Aires when, almost by chance, she had attended a queer tango milonga led by Mariana Docampo. “I just realized this was what I wanted to do,” she told me after class. Back in New York, she started to attend a free community class led by Mr. Perez on Monday evenings at the Brooklyn Library. This, in turn, led her to the class at Dardo Galletto. Ms. Lam prefers dancing with women because, as she put it, “men like to show you what they can do rather than really let go and feel the connection.” For her, the simpler and closer the dancing is, the better.

For a Spanish speaker like me, it’s odd to consider that many of the people who take part in this liberated style of tango cannot understand the melancholy, sometimes downright gloomy lyrics of the songs they are dancing to. (“Let’s drink, for today I need to kill my memories,” Carlos Gardel sings in the classic “Tomo y Obligo.” “I’m not crying for the woman who betrays me, for I know a man mustn’t cry.”) And yet, in a way, they are getting at something more essential. Birthe Havmoeller, a Danish writer and activist who edited a collection of essays on the subject of queer tango (available online), told me via Skype: “There is a sadness in the songs; you dance to get past this sadness into bliss.”

Care to Tango?

NEW YORK QUEER TANGO WEEKEND Oct. 1 to 4; information: nyqueertango.com.

A sampling of classes:

DARDO GALLETTO STUDIOS Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. (intermediate) and 8:30 (advanced), open-role tango taught by Walter Perez and Leonardo Sardella; 151 West 46th Street, near Avenue of the Americas; dardogallettostudios.com.

SAGE-NYC Tuesdays at 3:30 p.m., open-role tango for beginners taught by Mr. Perez and Mr. Sardella at this L.G.B.T. senior center; 305 Seventh Avenue, near 27th Street, 15th floor, Chelsea; sageusa.org.

BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY Mondays at 6:30 p.m., free tango for beginners taught by Mr. Perez; 10 Grand Army Plaza, Prospect Heights; bklynlibrary.org.

A sampling of dance parties and milongas:

RAINBOW TANGO Organized by Sergio Segura of Strictly Tango, learnargentinetango.com.

ARGENTINE TANGO A general guide to tango events, newyorktango.com.