The shouts of the caller are heard continuously over the country and western music on the sound system. His words, like magic, control the movements of the dancers on the floor. The dancers are arranged in groups of four couples -- leads and their partners, just as in all square-dancing groups. But in this group, all the leads and partners are the same sex. Those playing the women's roles wear colorful sashes, rather than skirts and petticoats, to distinguish them. When a song is over, some dancers hand their sashes to their partners so they can both dance each role.
"Because I'm quite feminine in my daily life, I prefer to take the lead when I square-dance," says 54-year-old Takashi Otsuka, who in 1998 founded the Tokyo group, the first gay and lesbian square-dance club in Japan. "But it's even better to take the lady's role after I've been leading for a while and have built up a desire to switch."
Square-dancing, which traces its history back to 18th-century colonial New England and incorporates elements of various European folk dances, became popular among gays and lesbians in Florida and the American West Coast in the late 1970s. Around the same time, Callerlab, a group of square-dance callers, standardized calls and eventually set up eight universal dance programs to enable people everywhere to dance together regardless of differences such as nationality (all calls worldwide are in English).